Author : Paul Anthony Rahe
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 396 pages
File Size : 13,28 MB
Release : 2009-09-22
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0300156111
This fresh examination of the world of Montesquieu seeks to understand the short-comings of modern democracy in light of the French philosopher's insightful critique of commercial republicanism.
Author : Paul Anthony Rahe
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 399 pages
File Size : 21,83 MB
Release : 2009-01-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 030014492X
In 1989, the Cold War abruptly ended and it seemed as if the world was at last safe for democracy. But a spirit of uneasiness, discontent, and world-weariness soon arose and has persisted in Europe, in America, and elsewhere for two decades. To discern the meaning of this malaise we must investigate the nature of liberal democracy, says the author of this provocative book, and he undertakes to do so through a detailed investigation of the thinking of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. Paul A. Rahe argues that these political thinkers anticipated the modern liberal republic's propensity to drift in the direction of “soft despotism”—a condition that arises within a democracy when paternalistic state power expands and gradually undermines the spirit of self-government. Such an eventuality, feared by Tocqueville in the nineteenth century, has now become a reality throughout the European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. So Rahe asserts, and he explains what must be done to reverse this unfortunate trend.
Author : Vickie B. Sullivan
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 28,58 MB
Release : 2017-09-05
Category : History
ISBN : 022648291X
Montesquieu is famous as a tireless critic of despotism, which he associates overtly with Asia and the Middle East and not with the apparently more moderate Western models of governance found throughout Europe. However, Vickie B. Sullivan argues that a creaful reading of Montesquieu's enormously influential The Spirit of the Law reveals the surprising result that he recognizes that Europe itself is susceptible to despotic practices - and that the threat emanates not from the East but rather from certain despotic ideas that inform Western institutions and practices. Sullivan guides readers through Montesquieu's sometimes veiled yet sharply critical accounts of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Plato, as well as various Christian thinkers have brough forth despotic ideas in the form, for example, of brutal Machiavellianism, of Hobbes's justifications for the rule of one, of Plato's reasoning that denied slaves the right of natural defense, and of the Christian teachings that equated heresy with treason. Such ideas, Montesquieu shows, inform such revered European institutions as the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. In this new reading of Montesquieu's masterwork, Sullivan corrects the misconception that it offers simple, objective observations, showing it to be instead a powerful critique of European politics that would become remarkably and regrettably prescient after Montesquieu's death, when despotism repeatedly emerged in Europe with virulent intensity. -- from dust jacket.
Author : Charles de Secondat baron de Montesquieu
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 474 pages
File Size : 38,98 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780742511811
In what constitutes the only English-language collection of essays ever dedicated to the analysis of Montesquieu's contributions to political science, the contributors review some of the most vexing controversies that have arisen in the interpretation of Montesquieu's thought. By paying careful attention to the historical, political, and philosophical contexts of Montesquieu's ideas, the contributors provide fresh readings of The Spirit of Laws, clarify the goals and ambitions of its author, and point out the pertinence of his thinking to the problems of our world today.
Author : Charles de Secondat baron de Montesquieu
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 33,79 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780865978256
My Thoughts provides a unique window into the mind of one of the undisputed pioneers of modern thought, the author of the 1748 classic, The Spirit of the Laws. From the publication in 1721 of his first masterpiece, Persian Letters, until his death in 1755, Montesquieu maintained notebooks in which he wrote and dictated ideas on a wide variety of topics. Some of the contents are early drafts of passages that Montesquieu eventually placed in his published works; others are outlines or early versions of projected works that were ultimately lost, unfinished, or abandoned. These notebooks provide important insights into his views on a broad range of topics, including morality, religion, history, law, economics, finance, science, art, and constitutional liberty. Montesquieu called these notebooks Mes Pensées (My Thoughts), and they appear in their entirety in English for the first time in this Liberty Fund edition. Editor and translator Henry C. Clark provides readers with translations of most of the footnotes contained in the 1991 French edition by Louis Desgraves, while adding new notes, a bibliography, and other aids to understanding the text and translation. These features provide the frame for a revealing portrait of one of the most influential figures of the eighteenth century. Henry C. Clark is a Visiting Professor in the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth College. He has written two books and numerous articles, mainly on the French and Scottish Enlightenments.
Author : David William Bates
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 41,15 MB
Release : 2011-11-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0231528663
We fear that the growing threat of violent attack has upset the balance between existential concepts of political power, which emphasize security, and traditional notions of constitutional limits meant to protect civil liberties. We worry that constitutional states cannot, during a time of war, terror, and extreme crisis, maintain legality and preserve civil rights and freedoms. David Williams Bates allays these concerns by revisiting the theoretical origins of the modern constitutional state, which, he argues, recognized and made room for tensions among law, war, and the social order. We traditionally associate the Enlightenment with the taming of absolutist sovereign power through the establishment of a legal state based on the rights of individuals. In his critical rereading, Bates shows instead that Enlightenment thinkers conceived of political autonomy in a systematic, theoretical way. Focusing on the nature of foundational violence, war, and existential crises, eighteenth-century thinkers understood law and constitutional order not as constraints on political power but as the logical implication of that primordial force. Returning to the origin stories that informed the beginnings of political community, Bates reclaims the idea of law, warfare, and the social order as intertwining elements subject to complex historical development. Following an analysis of seminal works by seventeenth-century natural-law theorists, Bates reviews the major canonical thinkers of constitutional theory (Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau) from the perspective of existential security and sovereign power. Countering Carl Schmitt's influential notion of the autonomy of the political, Bates demonstrates that Enlightenment thinkers understood the autonomous political sphere as a space of law protecting individuals according to their political status, not as mere members of a historically contingent social order.
Author : Emer de Vattel
Publisher :
Page : 668 pages
File Size : 15,72 MB
Release : 1856
Category : International law
ISBN :
Author : C. Bradley Thompson
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 45,58 MB
Release : 1998-11-16
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0700611819
America's finest eighteenth-century student of political science, John Adams is also the least studied of the Revolution's key figures. By the time he became our second president, no American had written more about our government and not even Jefferson or Madison had read as widely about questions of human nature, natural right, political organization, and constitutional construction. Yet this staunch constitutionalist is perceived by many as having become reactionary in his later years and his ideas have been largely disregarded. In the first major work on Adams's political thought in over thirty years, C. Bradley Thompson takes issue with the notion that Adams's thought is irrelevant to the development of American ideas. Focusing on Adams's major writings, Thompson elucidates and reevaluates his political and constitutional thought by interpreting it within the tradition of political philosophy stretching from Plato to Montesquieu. This major revisionist study shows that the distinction Adams drew between "principles of liberty" and "principles of political architecture" is central to his entire political philosophy. Thompson first chronicles Adams's conceptualization of moral and political liberty during his confrontation with American Loyalists and British imperial officers over the true nature of justice and the British Constitution, illuminating Adams's two most important pre-Revolutionary essays, "A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law" and "The Letters of Novanglus." He then presents Adams's debate with French philosophers over the best form of government and provides an extended analysis of his Defence of the Constitutions of Government and Discourses on Davila to demonstrate his theory of political architecture. From these pages emerges a new John Adams. In reexamining his political thought, Thompson reconstructs the contours and influences of Adams's mental universe, the ideas he challenged, the problems he considered central to constitution-making, and the methods of his reasoning. Skillfully blending history and political science, Thompson's work shows how the spirit of liberty animated Adams's life and reestablishes this forgotten Revolutionary as an independent and important thinker.
Author : Sankar Muthu
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 419 pages
File Size : 44,76 MB
Release : 2012-09-17
Category : History
ISBN : 0521839424
This collection of original essays by leading historians of political thought examines modern European thinkers' writings about conquest, colonization, and empire. The creation of vast transcontinental empires and imperial trading networks played a key role in the development of modern European political thought. The rise of modern empires raised fundamental questions about virtually the entire contested set of concepts that lay at the heart of modern political philosophy, such as property, sovereignty, international justice, war, trade, rights, transnational duties, civilization, and progress. From Renaissance republican writings about conquest and liberty to sixteenth-century writings about the Spanish conquest of the Americas through Enlightenment perspectives about conquest and global commerce and nineteenth-century writings about imperial activities both within and outside of Europe, these essays survey the central moral and political questions occasioned by the development of overseas empires and European encounters with the non-European world among theologians, historians, philosophers, diplomats, and merchants.
Author : Diana Schaub
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
Page : 118 pages
File Size : 45,6 MB
Release : 2021-11-23
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 1250763460
An expert analysis of Abraham Lincoln's three most powerful speeches reveals his rhetorical genius and his thoughts on our national character. Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, believed that our national character was defined by three key moments: the writing of the Constitution, our declaration of independence from England, and the beginning of slavery on the North American continent. His thoughts on these landmarks can be traced through three speeches: the Lyceum Address, the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural. The latter two are well-known, enshrined forever on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial. The former is much less familiar to most, written a quarter century before his presidency, when he was a 28 year-old Illinois state legislator. In His Greatest Speeches, Professor Diana Schaub offers a brilliant line-by-line analysis of these timeless works, placing them in historical context and explaining the brilliance behind their rhetoric. The result is a complete vision of Lincoln’s worldview that is sure to fascinate and inspire general readers and history buffs alike. This book is a wholly original resource for considering the difficult questions of American purpose and identity, questions that are no less contentious or essential today than they were over two hundred years ago.
