JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS最新文献

This article explores the legacy of Aristotle's advice for the preservation of tyrannies found in Politics Book 5, Chapter 11 on the formation of medieval and Renaissance fiscal literature. The tyrant's economic techniques for preserving his regime established commonplaces of fiscal governance in the medieval commentary and mirrors-for-princes tradition. Authors' engagement with the legacy of this passage led to controversial treatments of a ruler's disposition toward the moral virtue of liberality. Machiavelli's intervention over the danger of liberality to the fiscal governance of the state needs to be placed in this longer context.

The decade extending from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s in the career of the American historian Richard Hofstadter (1916-70) was marked by a series of engagements with American right-wing politics. This article seeks to re-evaluate the evolution of Hofstadter's thinking over this decade, in part by drawing upon the recently discovered transcript of a BBC radio lecture that Hofstadter recorded in 1959 and that represents the first occasion on which he developed the notion of a "paranoid style" as a pattern of thought and action recurring through American political history.

A review essay of recent biographies of Descartes.

This article examines the teaching of political ideas at the Scottish universities between 1600 and 1650. It demonstrates that regents did not direct their students toward one consistent Reformed view of political participation as a divinely mandated duty to control sin and advance the true religion, a position frequently advanced in contemporary printed works. Instead, university education provided students with a cross-confessional intellectual framework that emphasized both Augustinian and Aristotelian elements of early modern political thought. These differences would become essential for the languages of political legitimacy advanced by Scottish Reformed intellectuals during the wars of the 1640s.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of the long-awaited MEGA2 I/5, which contains the manuscripts that Marx and Engels wrote for their failed journal project of 1845/46. This essay considers what it will mean to study Marx's ideas and intellectual development in the wake of its publication. The volume offers an uncommon opportunity to develop new ways of reading and teaching these manuscripts, and thus of understanding the corresponding period in Marx's intellectual development, but certain features of the MEGA2 I/5 also risk another outcome: little will change due to deeply ingrained habits.

How did "revolution" obtain its particular meanings in political thought? This article examines the role played by translations of Polybius's Histories (Book 6), where "revolution" was the near-unanimous choice for rendering "anacyclosis." It further claims "revolution" displaced the earlier Aristotelian vocabulary of political change (in translations, "mutation" and "sedition"). Finally, it argues that recognizing the Polybian source of much "revolutionary" language in the early modern period fills in an important chapter in the conceptual history of revolution. For Polybians, revolution was a problem to be solved by a mixed government. Only in the eighteenth century would revolution become a solution.

This article presents a case study in the complex of pressures and attitudes that shaped the professional lives and intellectual legacies of twentieth-century American philosophers, examining the writings and careers of two of the discipline's pioneering women: Ruth Barcan Marcus and Marjorie Glicksman Grene. As members of the small cohort of women trained in philosophy during the first half of the century who achieved permanent academic appointments, their stories illuminate the salience of gender within the professional world of mid-twentieth century American academia.

This article studies the connected history of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, Spanish American colonial culture, and republican antislavery. Rather than adopting novel abolitionist paradigms wholesale, Colombia's antislavery legislators resorted to old ideas and convictions. Antislavery legal formulations did not diverge from Spanish culture, adapting long-existing Mediterranean notions instead. Legislators turned to the figure of the Christian captive as the spiritual equivalent of the African slave, making legible, and possible, republican manumission as an act of pious redemption. Under pressure from slave claimants, Colombian antislavery legislators passed a gradual manumission law in 1814, selectively applying Gaetano Filangieri's celebrated Science of legislation.