Natural Law, Constitutionalism, Reason of State, and War: Counter-Reformation Spanish Political Thought (Volumes I and II) aims at understanding how Spanish thinkers in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries approached the emerging institution of the state. The volumes are divided evenly into four distinct but related parts that cover the Spaniards' central concerns. In the first, a fundamental question is asked: Is the state a natural institution? In the second, the theme is the best form of government. The third part is concerned with the imperative need to define the ethical boundaries beyond which the state must not trespass. Finally, the fourth part examines the question of war as an instrument of policy.

In Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition, Justin Buckley Dyer provides a succinct account of the development of American antislavery constitutionalism in the years preceding the Civil War. Within the context of recent revisionist scholarship, Dyer argues that the theoretical foundations of American constitutionalism - which he identifies with principles of natural law - were antagonistic to slavery. Still, the continued existence of slavery in the nineteenth century created a tension between practice and principle. In a series of case studies, Dyer reconstructs the constitutional arguments of prominent antislavery thinkers such as John Quincy Adams, John McLean, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, who collectively sought to overcome the legacy of slavery by emphasizing the natural law foundations of American constitutionalism. What emerges is a convoluted understanding of American constitutional development that challenges traditional narratives of linear progress while highlighting the centrality of natural law to America's greatest constitutional crisis.

The law of nature -- The common law -- The adoption of written constitutions -- The separation of law and religion -- The explosion in law publishing -- The two-sidedness of natural law -- The decline of natural law and custom --Substitutes for natural law -- Echoes of natural law.

A critical history of European sovereignty and property rights as the foundation of the international order in 1300-1870.

Arguing against historians of Spanish political thought that have neglected recent developments in our understanding of Machiavelli's contribution to the European tradition, the thesis of this book is that Machiavellian discourse had a profound impact on Spanish prose treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After reviewing in chapter 1 Machiavelli's ideological restructuring of the language of European political thought, in chapter 2 Dr. Howard shows how, before his works were prohibited in Spain in 1583, Spaniards such as Fadrique Furi Ceriol and Balthazar Ayala used Machiavelli's new vocabulary and theoretical framework to develop an imperial discourse that would be compatible with a militant understanding of Catholic Christianity. In chapters 3, 4 and 5 he demonstrates in detail how Giovanni Botero, Pedro de Ribadeneyra, and their imitators in the anti-Machiavellian reason-of-state tradition in Spain, attack a straw figure of Machiavelli that they have invented for their own rhetorical and ideological purposes, while they simultaneously incorporate key Machiavellian concepts into their own advice. Keith David Howard is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Florida State University.

The School of Salamanca in the Affairs of the Indies explores the significance of Salamancans, such as Vitoria and Soto, and related thinkers, such as Las Casas and Sepúlveda, in the formation of the early modern political order. It also analyses early modern understandings of political order, with a focus both on the decline of the medieval universal world through the independence and secularization of political community and the establishment of continuous and imbalanced relations between various European and non-European political communities. Through its investigation, this book highlights how Salamancans and related thinkers clearly distinguished their understandings of political order from medieval thought, and did so in a different way to contemporary and later thinkers, such as Machiavelli, Luther, Bodin, and Grotius, particularly with regards to the Indies, “barbarian” worlds. It also reveals the strong contribution of the School of Salamanca in early modern political thought, both internally and externally. Salamancans imposed moral restrictions against “interior barbarism,” that is, power beyond law, and included “exterior barbarism,” that is, “barbarian” societies, in the common political order. Situating the School of Salamanca in the mainstream history of European political thought, The School of Salamanca in the Affairs of the Indies is ideal for academics and postgraduate students of intellectual history and of Spanish colonial expansion.

As the first translator of Plato's complete works into Latin, the Florentine writer Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) and his blend of Neoplatonic and Hermetic philosophy were fundamental to the intellectual atmosphere of the Renaissance. In Spain, his works were regularly read, quoted, and referenced, at least until the nineteenth century, when literary critics and philosophers wrote him out of the history of early modern Spain. In Ficino in Spain, Susan Byrne uses textual and bibliographic evidence to show the pervasive impact of Ficino's writings and translations on the Spanish Renaissance. Cataloguing everything from specific mentions of his name in major texts to glossed volumes of his works in Spanish libraries, Byrne shows that Spanish writers such as Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Garcilaso de la Vega all responded to Ficino and adapted his imagery for their own works. An important contribution to the study of Spanish literature and culture from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Ficino in Spain recovers the role that Hermetic and Neoplatonic thought played in the world of Spanish literature.