Lineages Of European Political Thought

This book examines some of the salient historiographical and conceptual issues that animate current scholarly debates about the nature of the medieval contribution to modern Western political ideas

The European seventeenth century saw the seeming resolution of two great conflicts. Through the nightmares of the Thirty Years War and the British civil wars, the murderous religious hatreds that had dominated the previous period finally burnt themselves out. Extreme Protestants were defeated, expelled, contained or subordinated, and Catholicism successfully re-established itself through much of Europe as the dominant religion. Dr. Spellman studies all the great political theorists of the century (dominated inevitably by Hobbes). This book will be invaluable for anyone studying seventeenth century European history - it allows those studying the thought of the period to understand the historical context, and those studying the military and political events to understand their intellectual underpinning.

"This is the only fully comprehensive account of European political thought in the early modern era; the first in English that pays due regard to Hungary, to Poland-Lithuania and to the Scandinavian kingdoms; and the first that encompasses the realm of Eastern Orthodoxy, specifically through the case of Muscovy. The book embraces the political thought of Islam, both a seminal influence upon the political consciousness of what 'Europe' was becoming and a military threat to the rest of the continent, and places all within a geographic rather than a chronological structure."--BOOK JACKET.

This book presents an overview of European political thought from the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by placing the major ideas within their historical context, including discussions of major twentieth-century totalitarian movements.

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural entanglement of political ideas and discourses. Its principal aim is to make these cultures available for the global 'market of ideas' and revisit some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought, and modernity as such. The present volume is the final part of the project, following Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century', and Volume II, Part I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Short Twentieth Century' (1918-1968) (OUP, 2018). Its starting point is the defeat of the vision of 'socialism with a human face' in 1968 and the political discourses produced by the various 'consolidation' or 'normalization' regimes. It continues with mapping the exile communities' and domestic dissidents' critical engagement with the local democratic and anti-democratic traditions as well as with global trends. Rather than achieving the coveted 'end of history', however, the liberal democratic order created in East Central Europe after 1989 became increasingly contested from left and right alike. Thus, instead of a comfortable conclusion pointing to the European integration of most of these countries, the book closes with a reflection on the fragility of democracy in this part of the world and beyond.

This is a two-volume project, authored by an international team of researchers, and offering a synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. Covering twenty national cultures and languages, the ensuing work goes beyond the conventional nation-centred narrative and offers a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural entanglement of discourses.

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive tothe cross-cultural entanglement of political ideas and discourses. Its principal aim is to make these cultures available for the global 'market of ideas' and revisit some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought, and modernity as such.The present volume is a sequel to Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century'. It begins with the end of the Great War, depicting the colorful intellectual landscape of the interwar period and the increasing political and ideological radicalization culminating in the SecondWorld War. Taking the war experience both as a breaking point but in many ways also a transmitter of previous intellectual traditions, it maps the intellectual paradigms and debates of the immediate postwar years, marked by a negotiation between the democratic and communist agendas, as well as thesubsequent processes of political and cultural Stalinization. Subsequently, the post-Stalinist period is analyzed with a special focus on the various attempts of de-Stalinization and the rise of revisionist Marxism and other critical projects culminating in the carnivalesque but also extremelydramatic year of 1968. This volume is followed by Volume II: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Short Twentieth Century' and Beyond, Part II: 1968-2018.