For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors such as Burke, Constant, and Mill, a powerful representative assembly that freely deliberated and controlled the executive was the defining institution of a liberal state. Yet these figures also feared that representative assemblies were susceptible to usurpation, gridlock, and corruption. Parliamentarism was their answer to this dilemma: a constitutional model that enabled a nation to be truly governed by a representative assembly. Offering novel interpretations of canonical liberal authors, this history of liberal political ideas suggests a new paradigm for interpreting the development of modern political thought, inspiring fresh perspectives on historical issues from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. In doing so, Selinger suggests the wider significance of parliament and the theory of parliamentarism in the development of European political thought, revealing how contemporary democratic theory, and indeed the challenges facing
From the French Revolution onwards, constituent power has been a key concept for thinking about the principle of popular power, and how it should be realised through the state and its institutions. Tracing the history of constituent power across five key moments - the French Revolution, nineteenth-century French politics, the Weimar Republic, post-WWII constitutionalism, and political philosophy in the 1960s - Lucia Rubinelli reconstructs and examines the history of the principle. She argues that, at any given time, constituent power offered an alternative understanding of the power of the people to those offered by ideas of sovereignty. Constituent Power: A History also examines how, in turn, these competing understandings of popular power resulted in different institutional structures and reflects on why contemporary political thought is so prone to conflating constituent power with sovereignty.
Thomas Hobbes and John Locke sit together in the canon of political thought but are rarely treated in common historical accounts. This book narrates their intertwined careers during the Restoration period, when the two men found themselves in close proximity and entangled in many of the same political conflicts. Bringing new source material to bear, In the Shadow of Leviathan establishes the influence of Hobbesian thought over Locke, particularly in relation to the preeminent question of religious toleration. Excavating Hobbes's now forgotten case for a prudent, politique toleration gifted by sovereign power, Jeffrey R. Collins argues that modern, liberal thinking about toleration was transformed by Locke's gradual emancipation from this Hobbesian mode of thought. This book investigates those landmark events - the civil war, Restoration, the popish plot, the Revolution of 1688 - which eventually forced Locke to confront the limits of politique toleration, and to devise an account of re
In one of the most influential philosophical works ever writer, John Stuart Mill explores the risks and responsibilities of liberty. Examining the tyranny that can come both from government and from t
More than any other early modern text, Montaigne's Essais have come to be associated with the emergence of a distinctively modern subjectivity, defined in opposition to the artifices of language and social performance. Felicity Green challenges this interpretation with a compelling revisionist reading of Montaigne's text, centred on one of his deepest but hitherto most neglected preoccupations: the need to secure for himself a sphere of liberty and independence that he can properly call his own, or himself. Montaigne and the Life of Freedom restores the Essais to its historical context by examining the sources, character and significance of Montaigne's project of self-study. That project, as Green shows, reactivates and reshapes ancient practices of self-awareness and self-regulation, in order to establish the self as a space of inner refuge, tranquillity and dominion, free from the inward compulsion of the passions and from subjection to external objects, forces and persons.
This book explores one of the great questions of our time: How can we preserve our sense of what it means to be a person while at the same time accepting what science tells us to be true--namely, that
Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks
The love of God is perhaps the most essential element in Judaism--but also one of the most confounding. In biblical and rabbinic literature, the obligation to love God appears as a formal commandment.
The Story of Hebrew explores the extraordinary hold that Hebrew has had on Jews and Christians, who have invested it with a symbolic power far beyond that of any other language in history. Preserved b
Jews, Christians, and Muslims supposedly share a common religious heritage in the patriarch Abraham, and the idea that he should serve only as a source of unity among the three traditions has become w
A former minister of a Northern England Baptist church offers tips for leading a school assembly that teaches moral values benefiting the whole community. The brief chapters include bulleted ideas on
100 IDEAS: QUICK - EASY - INSPIRED - OUTSTANDINGThe school budget for gifted and talented provision may have been reduced, but the expectation and need for it is higher than ever. This brand new title
