It has recently been argued that the 18th century can no longer be 1 seen as gripped in the strait-jacket of Augustanism and Neoclassicism. Such labels are seen as doing less than justice to the rich variety of individual talents and intellectual trends which collectively constitute 18th century culture. While welcoming the interment of the long standing myth of the peace of the Augustans, there seems little point in placing an interdict on labels which, willy-nilly, have stuck. In economic, social and ecclesiastical terms there is an age between 1689 and 1789 whose homogeneity is reflected in its cultural products. There is a mainstream which the strength and variety of counter currents and cross-currents corroborate rather than disintegrate. It is the purpose of this study to reveal some aspects of this mainstream by examining certain cross-currents which overlap its edges. Hence the choice of Thomas Ken (1637-1711), John Byrom (1692-1763) and William Law (1686-1761)."

National and transnational debates in Britain and Germany surrounding the meaning of the word "conservative" continue to have far-reaching political consequences. After 1945, even while the term was an accepted part of the political vocabulary of Great Britain, in the Federal Republic of Germany their young democracy was conflicted due to anti-democratic instability. The Guardians of Concepts analyzes the historical changes in the political languages of conservatism in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany between 1945 and the early 1980s which plagued intellectuals, politicians, and entire parties. As one of the most difficult concepts in both the political and historiographical vocabulary of the German language, conservatism's analysis takes a linguistically focused path through comprehensive and transnational connection of intellectual history with the history of politics, which are subjects that are otherwise commonly addressed separately from each other.

Paul Guyer is acknowledged as one of the world's foremost Kant specialists, and he collects here some of his most celebrated essays from the past decade and a half. The governing theme of the volume is the role of systematicity in Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. Featuring two brand-new papers and an introduction to orient the reader, Kant's System of Nature and Freedom will be an essential purchase for anyone working on the history of philosophy and related areas of ethics, philosophy of science, and metaphysics.

This book is about the idea of the university in modern Germany. Its primary focus is how the Humboldtian tradition was transformed and how it gave direction to debates around higher education. By combining approaches from intellectual history, conceptual history and the history of knowledge, the study investigates the ways in which Humboldt's ideas have been appropriated for various purposes in different historical contexts and epochs. Ultimately, it shows that Humboldt's ideals are not timeless - they are historical phenomena and have always been determined by the predicaments and issues of the day. Nevertheless, many of the key concepts and fundamental ideas have endured throughout the twentieth century, though they have been interpreted in different ways. An electronic version of this book is available under a creative commons licence: manchesteropenhive.com/view/9789198376814/9789198376814.xml -- .

The copy of A Letter to Peter du Moulin from which this facsimile is taken is in the National Library of Scotland, pressmark NG.1341.c.1(8). The first and only issue, it runs to 36 pages with a title page and blank preliminary leaf, and cost sixpence; it is coarsely and probably hurriedly printed, with an error on the title page: to make sense of 'Prebendarie of the same Church, ' the &c. after Casaubon's name should have been expanded to read 'and Prebendarie of Christ-Church, Canterbury.' An obliging contemporary has annotated the copy with the names of those whom Casaubon alludes to indirectly. There is no date in the pamphlet other than on the title page, and the only evidence for a more precise dating, in the absence of any ms. or notes for it, is in a letter written by Casaubon to J.G. Graevius on July 19th, 1668, from Cambridge. Casaubon and Graevius (1632-1703), Professor of Politics, History and Eloquence in the University of Utrecht, were accustomed to bewail the contemporary state of the republic of letters in their correspondence, and on this occasion Casaubon wrote: Prima mali labes a Philosophia Cartesiana, quae stultae iuventuti et novitatis avidae bonos lade ad Experimenta ventum est, in quibus nunc omnis eruditio, tibros excussit e manibus.

In 1930s Bucharest, some of the country's most brilliant young intellectuals converged to form the Criterion Association. Bound by friendship and the dream of a new, modern Romania, their members included historian Mircea Eliade, critic Petru Comarnescu, Jewish playwright Mihail Sebastian and a host of other philosophers and artists. Together, they built a vibrant cultural scene that flourished for a few short years, before fascism and scandal splintered their ranks. Cristina A. Bejan asks how the far-right Iron Guard came to eclipse the appeal of liberalism for so many of Romania's intellectual elite, drawing on diaries, memoirs and other writings to examine the collision of culture and extremism in the interwar years. The first English-language study of Criterion and the most thorough to date in any language, this book grapples with the complexities of Romanian intellectual life in the moments before collapse.

Pre-eighteenth century America was a uniquely pragmatic, utopian society a new world in which the expectations of a new beginning brought by explorers, traders, and settlers often conflicted violently the Native Americans they encountered. In Era of Persuasion: American Thought and Culture 1521 1680, E. Brooks Holifield identifies the act of persuasion as the common ground on which these disparate groups stood. As he clearly documents and persuasively interprets an America that some readers may not recognize, Holifield includes compelling insights into the social expressions of Native Americans and Africans as well as Europeans. His view extends from the pueblos of New Mexico and the missions of France to the plantations of Virginia and the towns of New England. Era of Persuasion portrays an early American society populated by passionate visionaries with urgently persuasive purposes who lived by applied philosophy and inspired action, and will be appreciated by the curious reader and avid historian alike."

Plato of Athens (c 429-347 BC) is the earliest European thinker whose thoughts on politics survive to any great extent. His work, contained in The Republic, the Statesman, the Laws and the unfinished Critias, amongst other works, has made major contributions to the agenda of Western Political thought and its content. [In The Republic, Plato's preoccupation was the concept of the just individual and the just state.] His view that intellect and political authority should be correlated has been a major theme of political thought down the centuries, influencing both authoritarian and egalitarian attitudes to government and democracy. In his later work Plato's concern shifted from the question of justice to questions of the competence of rulers, which in The Statesman he treated as of the first importance, and eventually to the role of law and a mixed constitution, along with religion, in guaranteeing political order. The papers in this authoritative selection explore various aspects of Plato's thought including social structure, education, freedom, property, the status of women, human motivation and racism in addition to his views on law, reason and justice. The vast array of topics covered shows how Plato's work adumbrates many of the concerns of political thought up to the present day and indeed is still relevant in our modern age.

An attempt to explore the idea that there are historical sedimentations of people into gendered categories, including the asymmetrical distances of both "women" and "men" from changing ideas of the human; the increasing saturation, from the late seventeenth century, of women with their sex; and the nineteenth century elisions between "the social" and "women". It is argued that feminism cannot but play out the inescapable indeterminacy of "women" whether consciously or not, and that this is made plain in its oscillations, since the 1790s, between concepts of equality and of difference.;The author maintains that a full recognition of the ambiguity of the category of "women" is not a semantic doubt, but a condition for an effective feminist political philosophy.

Robert E. Butts (1928-1997) was a philosopher and historian of science whose central concerns were the distinction between the rational and the irrational. He viewed scientific rationality as our major defence against the various conditions that encourage witch hunts and similar outbursts of irrationality, with all their attendant pain and terror. Butts saw himself as a pragmatic realist, combining what he took to be the best aspects of logical empiricism with a historically informed pragmatism, deeply appreciative of the methods of science, trying to describe a kind of rationality essential in the struggle to preserve human values. This volume gathers previously unpublished essays and lectures with some previously published, thematically related essays. It includes essays and lectures on philosophical aspects of the European witch hunt, on scientific rationality and methodology, and on the relationships between science and philosophy exhibited in the writings of such historically significant figures as Leibniz, D'Alembert, Hume, Kant, Carnap and Kuhn.

This book analyses the perceived legitimacy of health and safety in post-1960 British public life. Since 2010 health and safety has appeared to be in crisis, being attacked by press, politicians and public alike, but are these claims of crisis accurate? How have understandings of health and safety changed over the past 60 years? By exploring the history, culture, and operation of health and safety in contemporary Britain, this book provides a new assessment of an understudied, but surprisingly far-reaching, part of the British political and social landscape. Combining archival research with focus group, social survey and oral history testimony, the book examines the historical background to health and safety, how health and safety has been enacted in public and in the workplace, the impact of changing economic, occupational and social structures on the operation of health and safety, and the conflicts and interests that have shaped the area.

This book traces the emergence of the concept of self-identity in modern Western culture, as it was both reflected in and advanced by the development of autobiographical practice in early modern England. It offers a fresh and illuminating appraisal of the nature of autobiographical narrative in general and of the early modern forms of biography, diary and autobiography in particular. The result is a significant and original contribution to the history of individualism.

Michael Mascuch argues that the definitive characteristic of individualist self-identity is the personal capacity to produce a unified retrospective autobiographical narrative, and he stresses that this capacity was first demonstrated in England during the last decade of the eighteenth century. He examines the long-term process of innovation in written discourse leading up to this event, from the first use of blank almanacs and common place books by the pious in the late sixteenth century, through the popular criminal biographies of the late seventeenth century, to the printed-for-the-author scandalous memoirs of the mid-eighteenth century.

While offering a detailed account of a significant period in the rise of a modern literary genre, "Origins of the Individualist Self "also addresses topics which are central in the fields of literary and cultural theory and social and cultural history.

This book deals with three key questions about communitarian ideas: how to distinguish what constitutes communitarian thinking; what lessons to take from the historical development of communitarian arguments; and why their practical implications are relevant in devising reforms at the local, national, and global levels. Each chapter covers a distinct period, with a critical exposition of the leading thinkers of that time who contributed to communitarian philosophy and politics. Beginning with an examination of the rise of proto-communitarian ideas in classical Western and Eastern thought, the book closes with a review of communitarian responses to the emergent social and technological changes in the 21st century. Readers will learn about the core features and significance of communitarian theories and practices in relation to morality, education, the economy, freedom and security, community development, and democratic governance; and how they compare and contrast with other ethical and intellectual outlooks.

The essays address the cultural politics of our global present. They offer a contribution towards keeping the spirit of utopia alive by practicing it, promoting that the struggle for liberation may continue in an era whose landscape is not inhabited by the presence of great utopian constructs. The collection adapts the idea of utopia to the intercultural present using it as a metanarrative projected towards the future and rooted in local experiences and actions. The book presents an interdisciplinary and anti-canonical perspective, and methodological frames from Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Imagining social and cultural change outside hegemonic articulations of power is a practice of freedom opposed to the protective drive that raises borders and walls around potential islands to claim the right of keeping them isolated and self-sufficient.

The Right and the Good, a classic of twentieth-century philosophy by the eminent scholar Sir David Ross, is now presented in a new edition with a substantial introduction by Philip Stratton-Lake, a leading expert on Ross. Ross's book is the pinnacle of ethical intuitionism, which was the dominant moral theory in British philosophy for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Intuitionism is now enjoying a considerable revival, and Stratton-Lake provides the context for a proper understanding of Ross's great work today.

This book studies the circulation of social knowledge by focusing on the reception of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory in the Hispanic Americas. It presents a detailed analysis of knowledge circulation from a science and technology studies perspective and shows that theories need active involvement from scholars in the receiving field in order to travel. As Holub has argued, the success of any transplanted theory is the ability "on the part of advocates to situate a foreign tradition in its new environment and to account for the differences that are operative in the new settings."

From an international perspective the Swedish economy has some unique features and therefore affords a most interesting model for researchers in economic history. The country has experimented with numerous economic strategies including pre-Keynesian policies in the 1930s, active labour market policies and an extensive welfare system. This book covers the most important aspects of the Swedish economy: two brief sections concerning historiography and offering a general background to the subject are followed by a selection of articles on demography, migration, the labour market, agriculture, industrialization, transport, trade, industrial organization, finance and economic policy. The volume brings together a unique and comprehensive collection of the most significant studies on the development of the Swedish economy since 1870. Several of the contributions appear for the first time in English.

In this arresting and extraordinary book the reader is not offered a secondary text, a book about Bataille, in the usual sense. But it is a book of which Bataille would have been proud: untamed, impassionate and fearless.

The First Great Political Realist is a succinct and penetrating analysis of one of the ancient world's foremost political realists, Kautilya. Kautilya's treatise Arthashastra stands as one of the great political books of the ancient world, its ideas on the science of politics strikingly similar to those of Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Clausewitz, and even Sun Tsu. Roger Boesche's excellent commentary on Kautilya's voluminous text draws out the essential realist arguments for modern political analysis and demonstrates the continued relevance of Kautilya's work to modern Indian strategic thinking and our understanding of the relationship between politics and economics. Striking a balance between textual analysis and secondary scholarship, Boesche's work will be an enduring contribution to the study of ancient Indian history, Eastern political thought, and international relations.

Stukeley's antiquarian researches, particularly into the great stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury, were the first to reveal their great antiquity. Friend of Newton, his life embodies the classic Enlightenment confrontation between science and religion. Dr William Stukeley (1687-1765) was the most renowned English antiquary of the eighteenth century. This study discusses his life and achievements, placing him firmly within his intellectual milieu, which he shared with his illustrious friend Isaac Newton and with other natural philosophers, theologians and historians. Stukeley's greatest memorial was his work on the stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury: at a time when most historians believed theywere Roman or medieval monuments, he proved that they were of much greater antiquity, and his influence on subsequent interpretations of these monuments and their builders was enormous. For Stukeley, these stone circles - the work of "Celtic Druids", were a link in the chain that connected the pristine religion of Adam and Noah with the modern Anglican Church. Historians today belittle such speculations, but Stukeley shared his vision of lost religious and scientific knowledge with many of the great minds of his day; this account shows how throughout his distinguished career his antiquarian researches fortified his response to Enlightenment irreligion and the threat he believed itposed to science and society. DAVID BOYD HAYCOCK is a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.

In what was once described as "the century of nerves", a fascination with the mysterious processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This study offers an integrated analysis of how medicine and literature figured the connection between the body and the mind. Alongside detailed examinations of some of the century's most influential neurological and physiological theories, Jane Wood brings readings of both major and relatively neglected fictions - a range which includes work by Charlotte Bronte and George MacDonald, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing. Stepping into an already lively area of interdisciplinary debate, Passion and Pathology is distinguished by its recognition of the intellectual and imaginative force of both discourses: it extends our understanding of the interaction between science and literature in the wider culture of the period.

As its title suggests, this collections of essays by one of the foremost theorists working today takes as its theme the edge or limit between language, time, history, and politics. These are essays that are all on the brink, about the edge, the very extreme at which one can no longer say where one is located, neither on the cliff, say, nor over the edge. To be on the brink, then, is to take up that extreme limit, the point of contamination or indetermination where language, time, history, and politics all converge upon one another. The book begins with a consideration of Kant's treatment of time as representation, before moving toward more explicitly political themes as it engages political theology and messianism in Hegel and Hoelderlin. The second section explores the questionof language in a variety of manifestations-from translation to complaint and greeting-and through a number of literary and cultural forms, from the work of Mallarme to email. The volume concludes with an interview in which Hamacher offers a revealing overview of his work, beginning with an account of his early writings and moving up to his most recent essays.

Steven Nadler explores an intriguing episode in early modern intellectual history: the expulsion of the great philosopher Spinoza from his Portuguese-Jewish community in Amsterdam. Why was Spinoza excommunicated? Nadler's investigation of this simple question gives fascinating new perspectives on Spinoza's thought and the Jewish religious and philosophical tradition from which it arose.