Summary
Contents
Subject index
This major new Handbook provides a definitive state-of-the-art review to political theory, past and present. It offers a complete guide to all the main areas and fields of political and philosophical inquiry today by the world's leading theorists. The Handbook is divided into five parts which together serve to illustrate: - the diversity of political theorizing - the substantive theories that provide an over-aching analysis of the nature/or justification of the state and political life - the political theories that have been either formulated or resurgent in recent years - the current state of the central debates within contemporary political theory - the history of western political thought and its interpretations - traditions in political thought outside a western perspective. The Handbook of Political Theory marks a benchmark publication at the cutting edge of its field. It is essential reading for all students and academics of political theory and political philosophy around the world.
Political Theory of the Renaissance and Enlightenment
Political Theory of the Renaissance and Enlightenment
Approaches
The period covered by this chapter extends through three centuries from the time of Machiavelli to that of Burke. The unit as a whole may be thought of as the ‘early modern’ period of European history, post-medieval and yet premodern, if such developments as the Industrial Revolution and effectual movements towards mass democracy are taken to have brought about decisively ‘modern’ social and political change. One must immediately acknowledge the ambiguity of these categories, however. Recent research, for example, has set Machiavelli's thought in a tradition of Italian civic humanism and republicanism that extends back a century or more before the conventional medieval-modern dividing line of 1500, while it is now ...
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