The first of three volumes of essays by Quentin Skinner, one of the world's leading intellectual historians. This collection includes some of his most important philosophical and methodological statements written over the past four decades, each carefully revised for publication in this form. In a series of seminal essays Professor Skinner sets forth the intellectual principles that inform his work. Writing as a practising historian, he considers the theoretical difficulties inherent in the pursuit of knowledge and interpretation, and elucidates the methodology which finds its expression in his two successive volumes. All of Professor Skinner's work is characterised by philosophical power, limpid clarity, and elegance of exposition; these essays, many of which are now recognised classics, provide a fascinating and convenient digest of the development of his thought. Professor Skinner has been awarded the Balzan Prize Life Time Achievement Award for Political Thought, History and Theory. Full details of this award can be found at http://www.balzan.it/News_eng.aspx?ID=2474

Provides one of the most substantial statements about the importance, relevance, and potential excitement of this form of historical enquiry.

Selected essays of arguably the greatest and most influential historian of ideas of modern times.

The essays in this volume are all inspired by the historical scholarship of J.C. Davis. During a prolific career, Davis has transformed our understanding of early modern utopian literature and its contexts, and compelled students of seventeenth-century English to re-evaluate the significance of movements and individuals who have had a prominent place in the historiography of the English Revolution. Davis's analyses of groups like the Levellers and individuals like Gerrard Winstanley and Oliver Cromwell has reoriented the inquiry around the contemporary moral themes of liberty, authority and formality-around which concepts this volume engages.

This book addresses the idea of radical democracy and, in particular, its poststructuralist articulation. It analyses the approach to radical democracy taken by a number of contemporary theorists and political commentators:, including Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, William Connolly, Jacques Ranciere, Claude Lefort, Sheldon Wolin, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, and Giorgio Agamben. By examining critically the critiques accounts of democracy advanced by these theorists, this volume explores how a more radically conceived theory of democracy might be extended in a more egalitarian and inclusive direction.developed.The strand of radical democracy examined in this book is defined by a number of characteristics:*Democracy is conceptualised understood as a fugitive condition, being open to perpetual disruption and reinvention*The relationship between the state and civil society is regarded as the site where the open-ended 'promise' of democracy is fought out*There is an emphasis on questions of political renewal*There is a deep suspicion of identity-based political claims*Politics is conceived as either the site of or as one of the mechanisms for identity construction* Democratic politics is understood as a politics of contestation and disagreement* Democracy is regarded as always at least partially conflictual and not a means through which violence and conflict can be permanently eradicated*There is a deep suspicion of identity-based political claims*The political is assumed to be ontologically conflictual, with such conflict being understood as ultimately ineradicable from politics, though the form it takes necessarily varies from time to time and context to contextThe book clarifies the concept of radical democracy by mapping the field, and elaborates it further through a critical engagement with the works of its key proponents. In addition, it draws on the insights of radical democratic theory to explore a range of concre

The first of three volumes, this definitive study explores the politics of social institutions, from the time of the ancient Greeks to the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Tony Burns focuses on those civil-society institutions occupying the intermediate social space which exists between the family or household, on the one hand, and what Hegel refers to as ‘the strictly political state’, on the other. Arguing that the internal affairs of social institutions are a legitimate concern for students of politics, he focuses on the notion of authority, together with that of an individual’s station and its duties. Burns discusses the work of such key thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Marsilius of Padua, Nicholas of Cusa, Jean Bodin, Charles Loyseau, John Calvin, Martin Luther and Gerrard Winstanley. He considers what they have said about the relationship that exists between superiors in positions of authority and their subordinates within hierarchical social institutions.

In times in which global governance in its various forms, such as human rights, international trade law, and development projects, is increasingly promoted by transnational economic actors and international institutions that seem to be detached from democratic processes of legitimation, the question of the relationship between international law and empire is as topical as ever. By examining this relationship in historical contexts from early modernity to the present, this volume aims to deepen current understandings of the way international legal institutions, practices, and narratives have shaped specifically imperial ideas about and structures of world governance. As it explores fundamental ways in which international legal discourses have operated in colonial as well as European contexts, the book enters a heated debate on the involvement of the modern law of nations in imperial projects. Each of the chapters contributes to this emerging body of scholarship by drawing out the complexity and ambivalence of the relationship between international law and empire. They expand on the critique of western imperialism while acknowledging the nuances and ambiguities of international legal discourse and, in some cases, the possibility of counter-hegemonic claims being articulated through the language of international law. Importantly, as the book suggests that international legal argument may sometimes be used to counter imperial enterprises, it maintains that international law can barely escape the Eurocentric framework within which the progressive aspirations of internationalism were conceived