This volume contains more than twenty essays in the history of modern philosophy and history of religion by R.H. Popkin. Several of the essays have not been published before. Thinkers discussed include Hobbes, Henry More, Pascal, Spinoza, Cudworth, Newton, Hume, Condorcet, and Moritz Schlick.

Kirstie McClure offers a major reinterpretation of John Locke's thought that is important not only for the light it sheds on Locke, but also for the questions it raises about liberalism and rights-based theories of politics. Sensitive to the range of interpretative and political issues that Locke's work raises, McClure's analysis is impressive for its balance and subtlety, and for her command of the enormous literature on Locke. Between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, between Two Tracts on Government of 1660 and Two Treatises on Government of 1690, Locke subjected the idea of civil power to increasing scrutiny. In one generation, he moved from supporting order for its own sake to defending resistance, and ended with a profoundly modern epistemology. McClure suggests that Locke's concepts of government by consent, equality, rights, and the rule of law were embedded in his theistic cosmology. While Locke may well have been a constitutionalist, his theoretical concerns were far broader than any legal or constitutional interpretation of his work might suggest. To make this claim, she explains, is to deny neither the significance of "rights" nor the importance of institutions and consent in Locke's theoretical production. Rather, it is to insist that such themes are merely parts of a more comprehensive theoretical project, the focus of which, bluntly stated in the Second Treatise, was "to understand Political Power right."

Inspired by the work of intellectual historian J. G. A. Pocock, this 1993 collection explores the political ideologies of early modern Britain.

I. Reason and Religion "Si on soumet tout a la raison, notre religion n'aura rien de mysterieux et de surnaturel; si on choque les principes de la raison, notre religion sera absurde et ridicule",l In this passage from his Pensees Pascal summarizes what is perhaps the most basic problem for the defender of the reasonableness of Christianity: the necessity of upholding beliefs which Reason is incapable of judging, while at the same time claiming that those beliefs are reasonable. Pascal does not state the problem in precisely these terms regarding the limits of Reason, yet it seems clear that the dilemma he is indicating involves the question of the relation of religious beliefs to the compass of Reason. He does not, however-at least in the passage cited-indicate that the problem is a question of either/or: either Reason and no Religion, or Religion and Irrationality. Rather, he seems to be simply stating what he perceives to be a simple matter of fact. If Reason is allowed to be the judge of all Religion, then all Religion must abandon any elements that are either contrary to reason or cannot be shown to be in accord with Reason. On the other hand, if Reason is not allowed to judge Religion at all, then Religion will be absurd and ridiculous.