A complete translation and detailed edition of an influential treatise.

This Palgrave Pivot examines how prominent thinkers throughout history, from ancient Greece to sixteenth-century France, have perceived tyrants and tyranny. Ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were the first to build a vocabulary for tyrants and the forms of government they corrupted. Thirteenth century analyses of tyranny by Thomas Aquinas and John of Salisbury, revived from Antiquity, were recast as short observations about what tyrants do. They claimed that tyrants govern for their own advantage, not for the people. Tyrants could be usurpers, increase taxes, and live in luxury. The list of tyrannical actions grew over time, especially in periods of turmoil and civil war, often raising the question: When can a tyrant be legitimately deposed or killed? In offering a brief biography of these political philosophers, including Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Bodin, and others, along with their views on tyrannical behavior, Orest Ranum reveals how the concept of tyranny has been shaped over time, and how it still persists in political thought to this day.

A reference tool that provides an overview of the history of Christian political thought with selections from second century to the seventeenth century. From the second century to the seventeenth, from Irenaeus to Grotius, this unique reader provides a coherent overview of the development of Christian political thought. The editors have collected readings from the works of over sixty-five authors, together with introductory essays that give historical details about each thinker and discuss how each has contributed to the tradition of Christian political thought. Complete with important Greek and Latin texts available here in English for the first time, this volume will be a primary resource for readers from a wide range of interests.

Reverend Samuel Rutherford wrote Lex, Rex to defend and advance the Presbytarian ideals in government and political life, and oppose the notion of a monarch's Divine Right to rule. Writing in the 1640s, Rutherford lived in a time of political tumult and upheaval. The notion of Divine Right - whether a monarch ruled with the authority of God - was under increasing question. The steadily waning power of the monarch, increasing rates of literacy and education, and enfranchisement of classes that followed the Renaissance bore fruit in demands for governmental reform. No greater were these trends felt than in England, whose Parliament had over centuries gained power. Shaken to its foundations by the aftermath of religious Reformation in the 1500s, the authority of the monarch was under great scrutiny. The follies of absolute power, whereby one ruler had capacity to take decisions affecting the lives of millions, were now an active source of agitation and discontentment in both the halls of power and amid the wider populace. The luxuries and excesses of King Charles I, and the resultant taxes, were likewise cause for agitation. Lex, Rex would prove a forerunner to the Enlightenment era theories of democratic government and the notion of a government for the people. It demolishes the notion of divine right by referring to the actual tenets of the Biblical Old Testament. Most poignantly of all, Rutherford proposes a series of radical reforms such as the establishment of a Constitution, and the delegation of rights to the population to rule themselves; a measure foretelling 'small government' philosophies that followed. The book is organized into forty-four questions, each of whom considers and answers common arguments of the author's fractious era. Rutherford's ideas were in direct contravention to the monarchic societies in Europe at the time. They undoubtedly gave the Parliamentarian movement, and educated Republicans in general, a sound scholarly ground with which to begin the English Civil War and enact long-lasting reforms. The questions answered in Lex, Rex - persuasively, convincingly and explosively as they were - would lead England on the road to enshrining its own Parliamentary democracy.

Offering a fresh interpretation of Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy, Robert E. Stillman's intellectually ambitious study challenges traditional scholarship by identifying the impact of his education by the followers of Philip Melanchthon-the so-called Philippists-on his poetics, piety, and politics. Sidney created the first Renaissance text to argue for poetry's pre-eminence as an autonomous form of knowledge in the public domain, and its consequent power to promote cultural reform.