You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
Nationalism is a movement and a state of mind that brings together national identity, consciousness, and collectivities. A five-country study that spans five hundred years, this historically oriented work in sociology bids well to replace all previous works on the subject.
The seven deadly sins of Christianity represent the abysses of character, whereas Shklar's "ordinary vices"--cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal, and misanthropy--are merely treacherous shoals, flawing our characters with mean-spiritedness and inhumanity. Shklar draws from a brilliant array of writers--Moliere and Dickens on hypocrisy, Jane Austen on snobbery, Shakespeare and Montesquieu on misanthropy, Hawthorne and Nietzsche on cruelty, Conrad and Faulkner on betrayal--to reveal the nature and effects of the vices. She examines their destructive effects, the ambiguities of the moral problems they pose to the liberal ethos, and their implications for government and citizens: liberalism is a difficult and challenging doctrine that demands a tolerance of contradiction, complexity, and the risks of freedom.
The essays assembled here represent forty years of reflection about the European cultural past by an eminent historian. The volume concentrates on the Renaissance and Reformation, while providing a lens through which to view problems of perennial interest. A Usable Past is a book of unusual scope, touching on such topics as political thought and historiography, metaphysical and practical conceptions of order, the relevance of Renaissance humanism to Protestant thought, the secularization of European culture, the contributions of particular professional groups to European civilization, and the teaching of history. The essays in A Usable Past are unified by a set of common concerns. William Bouwsma has always resisted the pretensions to science that have shaped much recent historical scholarship and made the work of historians increasingly specialized and inaccessible to lay readers. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, he argues that since history is a kind of public utility, historical research should contribute to the self-understanding of society.
The problem of the relationship between moral principles and political necessity, of the purposes of power and the justice of means, has always been a central theme in European history. The ministry of Cardinal Richelieu is a focal point for the problem because it existed during a time when the continuing strength of religiously based political ideas and the growth of the modern state converged. In this major study William F. Church examines Richelieu's policies, his efforts to justify them, and the extensive debates they occasioned. His conclusion, contrary to that of many earlier historians, is that the underlying ideology of the Cardinal's policies was strongly religious and opened the wa...
This book offers a conceptual history of compromise demonstrating the connection between understandings of compromise and understandings of political representation.
None
Meredith M. Hale presents the first chapter in the history of modern political satire, one that is critical to the media's emergence as the 'fourth estate'. Discussing themes relevant today, the study locates Dutch printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe (1645-1708) at the birth of modern political satire, and political satire at the heart of the modern media.
Louis XI, known as "The Spider King" because he wove many intricate plots, lives on in popular imagination primarily as a villain and a cruel, cunning, rather unscrupulous character. Absolutists fled to his banner whilst constitutionalists reviled him as a rapacious totalitarian murderer. In Images of Kingship in Early Modern France, Adrianna Bakos uses the changing nature of Louis XI's historical reputation to explore the intellectual and political climate of early modern France. Using Louis XI's historical reputation as a prism for fresh investigation, Adrianna Bakos offers new, more complex interpretations of the ideological landscape of early modern France. Images of Kingship in Early Modern France is an important contribution to European historiography and to debates on historical versus political interpretations of Kingship.