The Reason Of State

Originally published in 1978, this book examines how the states-system grew over generations, first within Europe, then world wide and how the idea of the state came to monopolise our vision of the world. It discusses the grounds for the division of humanity into separate states in reason and history and whether or not we can use terms like ‘obligation’ and ‘justice’ in seeking to understand our relations with people of other states.

One of the most significant novels in Latin American literature, written by Cuba's most important modern novelist—to win a bet with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the early 1970s, friends Gabriel García Márquez, Augusto Roa Bastos and Alejo Carpentier reached a joint decision: they would each write a novel about the dictatorships then wreaking misery in Latin America. García Márquez went on to write The Autumn of the Patriarch and Roa Bastos I, the Supreme. The third novel in this remarkable trinity is Reasons of State, hailed as the most significant novel ever to come out of Cuba. As with Garcia Marquez, Reasons of State is a bold story, boldly told --- daring in its perceptions, rich in lush detail, inventive in prose, and deadly compelling in its suspenseful plot. Inexplicably out of print for years, it tells the tale of the dictator of an unnamed Latin American country who has been living the life of luxury in high-society Paris. When news reaches him of a coup at home, he rushes back and crushes it with brutal military force. But returning to Paris he is given a chilly welcome, and learns that photographs of the atrocities have been circulating among his well-to-do friends. Meanwhile World War One has broken out, and another rebellion forces the dictator back across the ocean. As he struggles with the Marxist forces beginning to find footing in his own country, and Europe is devastated, Carpentier constructs a masterful and biting satire of the new world order.

This study fills a notable gap in the history of political thought.

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 way to secularized reason of state to a very limited degree. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

An original work on the important idea of reason of state and British and imperial history and constitutional theory.

This highly influential anti-Machiavellian text is an important primary source for the understanding of early modern political thought.

THE PRESENT STUDY proposes to explore the history of the problem of ‘reason of state’ in a constitutional political order. The writers treated belong among the ‘great’ in modern political thought and therefore it is not and cannot be a question of dealing with the integral thought of the writers here examined. All we can hope to do is to seek out those aspects which bear more immediately upon this particular problem. Ratio status,—the very term shows that we are moving within the context of the great tradition of Western rationalism, where everything has its particular ratio or inner rationale which it behoves the mind to grasp and to understand. For the idea of such rationes is prominent in the Middle Ages,—an aspect of the matter which receives scant attention in Friedrich Meinecke’s magistral treatment of the subject Die Idee der Staatsräson in der Neueren Geschichte published in 1925 and by now become something of a classic. Perhaps partly because of his lack of sympathy for this rational basis of the idea which he was discussing, he also paid scant attention to that aspect of it which we are particularly concerned with here: reason of state in its application to the government of law, the constitutional order, in short ‘constitutional reason of state’ or more precisely ‘reason of the constitutional state.’