Books in the Ideas in Context series

The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but in dramatically different disciplinary and historical contexts. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centres on how these technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind and society. Written by an interdisciplinary team of historians and philosophers, this readable, lucid account keeps technical material to an absolute minimum. It is aimed not only at specialists in the history and philosophy of science, but also at the general reader and scholars in other disciplines.

"Exploring reason of state in a global monarchy, The Power of Necessity examines how thinkers and agents in the Spanish monarchy navigated the tension between political pragmatism and moral-religious principle. This tension lies at the very heart of Counter-Reformation reason of state. Nowhere was the need for pragmatic state management greater than in the overstretched Spanish Empire of the seventeenth century. However, pragmatic politics were problematic for a Catholic monarchy steeped in ideals of justice and divine justifications of power and kingship. Presenting a broad cast of characters from across Europe, and uniting published sources with a wide range of archival material, Lisa Kattenberg shows how non-canonical thinkers and agents confronted the political-moral dilemmas of their age by creatively employing the legitimizing power of necessity. Pioneering new ways of bridging the persistent gap between theory and practice in the history of political thought, she casts fresh light on the struggle to preserve the monarchy in a modernizing world. Lisa Kattenberg is Assistant Professor in Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Amsterdam. Between 2019 and 2022, she was Research Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. Her doctoral dissertation, from which she developed this book, was awarded the Keetje Hodshon Award for the best doctoral thesis in history completed at a Dutch university during the past five years by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published broadly in Spanish, English and Dutch"--

This book reassesses the relationship between Enlightenment and religion in England, providing a fresh analysis of rational dissent within English Enlightenment culture. Its wide perspective and research make Enlightenment and Religion an important and original contribution to eighteenth-century studies.

Defining Science, first published in 1993, deals with the major role of the historian and philosopher of science, William Whewell, in early Victorian debates about the nature of science and its moral and cultural value.

Harro Hopfl presents here a full-length study of the single most influential organized group of scholars and pamphleteers in early modern Europe (1540-1630), namely the Jesuits. He explores the academic and political controversies in which they were engaged in and their contribution to academic discourse around ideas of 'the state' and 'politics'. He pays particular attention to their actual teaching concerning doctrines for whose menacing practical implications Jesuits generally were vilified: notably tyrannicide, the papal power to depose rulers, the legitimacy of 'Machiavellian' policies in dealing with heretics and the justifiability of breaking faith with heretics. Hopfl further explores the paradox of the Jesuits' political activities being at once the subject of conspiratorial fantasies but at the same time being widely acknowledged as among the foremost intellects of their time, with their thought freely cited and appropriated. This is an important work of scholarship.

Annabel Brett takes a fresh look at the texts traditionally cited in the history of thinking about rights, using an enormous variety of new primary sources. She begins her analysis with scholastic texts from the thirteenth century and ends with a discussion of Hobbes' theory of natural rights.

Four distinguished authors have been brought together to produce this elegant study of a much-neglected figure. Exploring Neurath's biographical background as well as his theory of science, this timely publication is a major contribution to our understanding of analytical philosophy.

This book examines the radical transformation in the language of politics which took place between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. For three centuries politics enjoyed the status of the noblest human science, but it emerged from this 'revolution of politics' as an ignoble and sordid activity.

The aspiration to relate the past 'as it really happened' has been the central goal of American professional historians since the late nineteenth century. In this remarkable history of the profession, Peter Novick shows how the idea and ideal of objectivity were elaborated, challenged, modified, and defended over the last century. Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writings of hundreds of American historians from J. Franklin Jameson and Charles Beard to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Eugene Genovese, That Noble Dream is a richly textured account of what American historians have thought they were doing, or ought to be doing, when they wrote history - how their principles influenced their practice and practical exigencies influenced their principles.

These two volumes present a new kind of political and legal theory that James Tully calls a public philosophy, and a complementary new way of thinking about active citizenship, called civic freedom. The volumes represent a genuine landmark in political theory, from one of its most distinguished practitioners alive today.

This book provides an overview of 200 years of German economic thought from the Staatswissenschaften of the eighteenth century to the Social Market. It highlights the important continuity of an essentially practical approach to economic thought, in business administration and in government policy.

This book investigates the specific conception and descent of a language of 'degeneration' from 1848-1918.

These two volumes present a new kind of political and legal theory that James Tully calls a public philosophy, and a complementary new way of thinking about active citizenship, called civic freedom. The volumes represent a genuine landmark in political theory, from one of its most distinguished practitioners alive today.

Imperial Sceptics provides a highly original analysis of the emergence of opposition to the British Empire. Tracing critical strands of anti-imperial thought from 1850 to the First World War, Gregory Claeys proposes a new chronology for the contours of resistance to imperial expansion, shedding fresh light on nineteenth-century political thought.

This book provides a way into understanding a momentous development in human intellectual history: the phenomenon of deductive argument in classical Greek mathematics. The argument rests upon a close description of the practices of Greek mathematics, principally the use of lettered diagrams and the regulated, formulaic use of language.

The Taming of Chance brings out the relations between philosophy, the physical sciences, mathematics and the development of social institutions, and provides a unique and authoritative analysis of the 'probabilisation' of the western world.

This rich and provocative study is the first to examine Herbert Spencer's critical role in the development of liberal utilitarian moral and political philosophy in the nineteenth century. While several scholars correctly see Mill as a founder of liberal utilitarianism, none have appreciated Spencer's equally important formative role.

This book explores ancient 'foundational' texts relating to property and their reception by later thinkers in their various contexts up to the early nineteenth century. The texts include Plato's vision of an ideal polity in the Republic, Jesus' teachings on renunciation and poverty, and Golden Age narratives and other evolutionary accounts of the transition of mankind from primeval communality to regimes of ownership. The issue of the legitimacy of private ownership exercises the minds of the major political thinkers as well as theologians and jurists throughout the ages. The book gives full consideration to the historical development of Rights Theory, with special reference to the right to property. It ends with a comparative study of the Declarations of Rights in the American and French Revolutions and seeks to explain, with reference to contemporary documents, why the French recognised an inalienable, human right to property whereas the Americans did not.

While the efforts of George Eliot's fictional Mr Casaubon to create a 'Key to All Mythologies' may seem fruitless and obscure, Colin Kidd's interdisciplinary study excavates Casaubon's hinterland and illuminates the fierce ideological war which raged over the use of pagan myths to defend Christianity from radical Enlightenment thought.

This fundamental re-evaluation of the origins and importance of the idea of 'party' in British political thought and politics in the eighteenth century draws on the writings of Rapin, Bolingbroke, David Hume, John Brown and Edmund Burke to demonstrate that attitudes to party were more complex and penetrating than previously thought.

This volume draws upon the expertise of both historians and literary critics to examine the classical sources of Milton's republicanism, the genesis of that republicanism in the 1640s, its disappointment in the 1650s and its presence in his work (particularly in Paradise Lost) after the Restoration.

Offering novel interpretations of canonical liberal authors, including Burke, Constant, and Mill, this history of liberal political ideas suggests a new paradigm for interpreting the development of modern political thought, inspiring fresh perspectives on historical issues from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

Charts the evolution of 'theological utilitarianism', one of the most influential traditions in eighteenth-century Anglophone moral and political thought, and addresses the contested issue of whether there was an 'English Enlightenment', through the life and thought of moral philosopher and clergyman, William Paley (1743-1805).

How did the Victorian era - the epoch when the modern democratic state was made - understand democracy, parliamentary representation, and diversity? Here, Gregory Conti examines how the Victorians conceived the representative and deliberative functions of the House of Commons and what it meant for parliament to be the 'mirror of the nation'.

This book is a comprehensive study of the history of the political thought of the Dutch Revolt (1555-90). It explores the development of the political ideas which motivated and legitimized the Dutch resistance against the government of Philip II in the Low Countries, and which became the ideological foundations of the Dutch Republic as it emerged as one of the main powers of Europe.

Traditional views of puritan social thought have done a great injustice to the intellectual history of the sixteenth century. They have presented puritans as creators of a disciplined, progressive, ultimately revolutionary theory of social order. Professor Todd demonstrates that this view is fundamentally ahistorical.

This major study of Hegel's intellectual development up to the writing of The Phenomonology of Spirit argues that his work is best understood in the context of the liberalisation of German Protestantism in the eighteenth century.

The author chronicles the rise of Sociology, a hybrid of science and literary traditions, by discussing the lives and works of the most prominent thinkers of the nineteenth-century. The book presents a penetrating study of idealists grappling with reality when industrial society was in its infancy.

In this book, David Summers provides an investigation of the philosophical and psychological notions invoked in this new theory and criticism.

This account of Gassendi's life and work offers a provocatively new perspective from which to view the influence of humanism on seventeenth-century thought. As Professor Joy makes clear, his reform of philosophy raised questions about the aims of science, which we ourselves are still asking.