Reason Of State And Statecraft In Spanish Political Thought 1595 1640

Arts of Perception offers a new account of a key period in Spanish history and culture and a fundamental reassessment of its major writers and intellectuals, including Gracián, Quevedo, Calderón, Saavedra Fajardo, López de Vega, and Sor Juana. Reading these figures in the context of European thought and the new science, and philosophy, the study considers how they developed various ‘arts of perception’ - complex perceptual strategies designed to overcome and exploit epistemic problems to enable an individual to act effectively in the moral, political, social or religious sphere. The study takes as its subject the distinctive epistemological mentality behind such ‘arts of perception’. This mentality was fostered by the creative interaction of scepticism and Stoicism, and found expression in the key concepts ser/parecer and engaño/desengaño. The work traces the emergence, development, and impact of these concepts on Spanish thought and culture. As well as offering new interpretations of specific major figures, Arts of Perception offers an interpretation of the mentality of an entire culture as it made the fraught transition to intellectual modernity. As such it ranges over numerous discourses and formative contexts and provides a wealth of new material which will be of use to all those seeking to understand and interpret the literature, culture and thought of Golden Age Spain. This book was previously published as a special issue of The Bulletin of Spanish Studies.

Natural Law, Constitutionalism, Reason of State, and War: Counter-Reformation Spanish Political Thought (Volumes I and II) aims at understanding how Spanish thinkers in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries approached the emerging institution of the state. The volumes are divided evenly into four distinct but related parts that cover the Spaniards' central concerns. In the first, a fundamental question is asked: Is the state a natural institution? In the second, the theme is the best form of government. The third part is concerned with the imperative need to define the ethical boundaries beyond which the state must not trespass. Finally, the fourth part examines the question of war as an instrument of policy.

Voices of Conscience analyzes how the link between politics and conscience was articulated and shaped throughout the seventeenth century by confessors who acted as counsellors to monarchs. Against the backdrop of the momentous intellectual, theological, and political shifts that marked this period, the study examines comparatively how the ethical challenges of political action were confronted in Spain and France and how questions of conscience became a major argument in the hegemonic struggle between the two competing Catholic powers. As Nicole Reinhardt demonstrates, 'counsel of conscience' was not a peripheral feature of early-modern political culture, but fundamental for the definition of politics and conscience. Tracing the rise and fall of confessors as counsellors reveals the parallel transformation of both, approaching a historical understanding of the modernisation of politics with the idea of an 'individual conscience' at its heart. Placed at the junction of norms and practices, royal confessors, directly or in oblique reflection, shaped the ways in which the royal conscience was identified and scrutinized. By the same token, the royal confessors' expertise and activities remained a source of anxiety and conflict that triggered wide debate on the relationship between State and Church, religion and politics. The notion of 'counsel of conscience', of which this book provides the first in-depth analysis, allows the reader to re-examine and challenge fundamental historical paradigms such as the emergence of 'absolutism', individualisation, and the division of public and private. Putting theological concepts and religious dimensions back into political theory and practice sheds new light, not only on the importance of counselling for early modern statecraft, but also on the reconfiguration of the normative frameworks underlying it.

Part One examines the late medieval northern Italian city-state republics and the humanist depiction of their form of polity. Part Two reviews the legal (principally canonical) and political thought behind the development of a theory of popular consent and limited authority employed to resolve the Great Schism in the Western church. Part Three describes sixteenth-century Spanish neoscholastic political writings and their application to Reformation Europe and Spanish colonial expansion in the New World. Part Four examines the political thought of some of those who responded to new problems in church/state relations caused by the fracturing of medieval Christendom in the West: Luther, Calvin, and other Reformation writers; the Protestant resistance pamphleteers; and Richard Hooker. Featuring an extensive bibliography, From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights will be of specific interest to intellectual historians as well as historians of political ideas and political theories and students in history, political science, and religious studies.

In this book Mark Neocleous explores such questions through a critique of what he describes as the statist political imaginary. Unpicking this imaginary while also avoiding traditional approaches to state power, the book examines the way that the state has been imagined in terms traditionally associated with human subjectivity: body, mind, personality and home.

“This is an excellent study… a valuable asset for anyone teaching or studying political theory or political sociology.” Network "Mark Neocleous offers a contemporary understanding of the modern state through the unusual medium of its body, mind and personality, and through the space it occupies in the social world. It's a work that not only draws upon our existing imagination of the state, but also feeds it." Professor Robert Fine *What is the connection between Ronald Reagan's bottom and the King's head? *Why are weather maps profoundly ideological? *How do corporations get away with murder? *Who are the scum of the earth? In this book Mark Neocleous explores such questions through a critique of what he describes as the statist political imaginary. Unpicking this imaginary while also avoiding traditional approaches to state power, the book examines the way that the state has been imagined in terms traditionally associated with human subjectivity: body, mind, personality and home. Around these themes and through an engagement with the work of a diverse range of writers, Neocleous weaves a set of arguments concerning the three icons of the political imagination - the political collective, the sovereign agency and the enemy figure. From these arguments he draws out some telling connections between the role of the state in fabricating order, the social and juridical power of capital, and the relation between fascism and bourgeois ideology.