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The crisis and fall of the Roman Republic spawned a tradition of political thought that sought to evade the Republic's fate--despotism. Thinkers from Cicero to Bodin, Montesquieu, and the American Founders saw constitutionalism, not virtue, as the remedy. This study traces Roman constitutional thought from antiquity to the Revolutionary Era.
Crisis and Constitutionalism argues that the late Roman Republic saw, for the first time in the history of political thought, the development of a normative concept of constitution--the concept of a set of constitutional norms designed to guarantee and achieve certain interests of the individual. Benjamin Straumann first explores how a Roman concept of constitution emerged out of the crisis and fall of the Roman Republic. The increasing use of emergency measures and extraordinary powers in the late Republic provoked Cicero and some of his contemporaries to turn a hitherto implicit, inchoate constitutionalism into explicit constitutional argument and theory. The crisis of the Republic thus br...
This book offers a new interpretation of the foundations of Hugo Grotius' highly influential doctrine of natural law and natural rights.
This book explores ways in which both the theory and the practice of international politics was built upon Roman private and public law foundations on a variety of issues including the organization and limitation of war, peace settlements, embassies, commerce, and shipping.
An intellectual history of one of the most important contributions to Western society The Just State explores influential Greek and Roman ideas about justice and their institutional context, and discusses their legacy in later political thought. Bringing Greco-Roman and modern ideas into conversation with each other, Benjamin Straumann traces the history of ancient political thought by focusing on classical ideas about justice. With a readable narrative style, Straumann places Greek and Roman theories of justice in their historical context, starting from Homer and the pre-Socratic period through to the later Roman Empire, and outlines the respective contribution of the Greek and Roman tradit...
Was the Roman Empire just? Did Rome acquire her territories through just wars, and did Rome's rule exert a civilizing effect, ultimately beneficial for its subjects? Or was Roman imperialism a massive injustice - the bellicose conquest and absorption of countless peoples and large swaths of territory under false pretences, driven by greed and a lust for domination and glory? In The Wars of the Romans (1599), the important Italian jurist and Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford University Alberico Gentili (1552-1608) argues both sides of the debate. In the first book he lays out the case against the justice of the Roman Empire, and in the second book the case for. Gentili's polemic and hig...
Combining intellectual history with current concerns, this volume brings together fourteen essays on the past, present and possible future applications of the legal fiction known as the state of nature.
This book is the first comprehensive treatment of Roman political thought, arguing that Romans engaged in wide-ranging reflections on politics.
The entire course of modern Western history has been shaped by the rise and fall of the great European empires. The Burdens of Empire examines different aspects of this long history, focusing on how political theorists, jurists, historians and others sought to explain what an empire is and to justify its very existence.
The Cambridge Companion to Grotius offers a comprehensive overview of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) for students, teachers, and general readers, while its chapters also draw upon and contribute to recent specialised discussions of Grotius' oeuvre and its later reception. Contributors to this volume cover the width and breadth of Grotius' work and thought, ranging from his literary work, including his historical, theological and political writing, to his seminal legal interventions. While giving these various fields a separate treatment, the book also delves into the underlying conceptions and outlooks that formed Grotius' intellectual map of the world as he understood it, and as he wanted it to become, giving a new political and religious context to his forays into international and domestic law.