Conal Condren's fifth and final volume in a decades-long examination of political language, Political Vocabularies: Word Change and the Nature of Politics is a study of the mechanisms of change in pol
Satire was core to the work of Thomas Hobbes although his critics also used it as a weapon to ridicule him. Condren uses Hobbes as an example to demonstrate that an examination of the persona is neede
This is the first full account, analysis and subsequent history of George Lawson's Politica, 1660–89. For long accepted as a significant figure, through his criticism of Hobbes and his possible influence on Locke, Lawson has never been studied in depth, nor has his biography been previously established. Professor Condren here provides the context and the analysis of Lawson's major work, in the process re-dating it and providing a quite different interpretation from previous readings. A substantial section is devoted to the history of the text and its use in controversies in the period 1660–89, and there is some reassessment of the relationship between Hobbes, Locke and Lawson. The study also uses Lawson's text to reopen questions about English seventeenth-century political theory in general, and to prefigure a theoretical study on metaphor and political conceptualisation. The book thus operates on a number of levels, philosophical and linguistic as well as historical.
Conal Condren offers a radical reappraisal of the character of moral and political theory in early modern England through an exploration of pervasive arguments about office. In this context he explores the significance of oath-taking and three of the major crises around oaths and offices in the seventeenth century. This fresh focus on office brings into serious question much of what has been taken for granted in the study of early modern political and moral theory concerning, for example, the interplay of ideologies, the emergence of a public sphere, of liberalism, reason of state, de facto theory, and perhaps even political theory and moral agency as we know it. Argument and Authority is a major new work from a senior scholar of early modern political thought, of interest to a wide range of historians, philosophers and literary scholars.
In this groundbreaking collection of essays the history of philosophy appears in a fresh light, not as reason's progressive discovery of its universal conditions, but as a series of unreconciled disputes over the proper way to conduct oneself as a philosopher. By shifting focus from the philosopher as proxy for the universal subject of reason to the philosopher as a special persona arising from rival forms of self-cultivation, philosophy is approached in terms of the social office and intellectual deportment of the philosopher, as a personage with a definite moral physiognomy and institutional setting. In so doing, this collection of essays by leading figures in the fields of both philosophy and the history of ideas provides access to key early modern disputes over what it meant to be a philosopher, and to the institutional and larger political and religious contexts in which such disputes took place.
Satire was core to the work of Thomas Hobbes although his critics also used it as a weapon to ridicule him. Condren uses Hobbes as an example to demonstrate that an examination of the persona is neede
In this groundbreaking collection of essays the history of philosophy appears in a fresh light, not as reason's progressive discovery of its universal conditions, but as a series of unreconciled dispu