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25 results in Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics

Page 1 of 2

The Limits of State Action
  • Wilhelm von Humboldt
  • Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    01 September 1969
  • This text is important both as one of the most interesting contributions to the liberalism of the German Enlightenment, and as the most significant source for the ideas which John Stuart Mill popularized in his essay On Liberty. Humboldt's concern is to define the criteria by which the permissible limits of the state's activities may be determined. His basic principle, like that of Mill, is that the only justification for government interference is the prevention of harm to others. He discusses in detail the role and limits of the state's responsibility for the welfare, security and morals of its citizens. Humboldt's special achievement in this work is to enlarge our sense of what a liberal political theory might be by his particularly sensitive grasp of the complexity of our attitudes to and our need of other people. Dr Burrow has based his translation on Coulthard's version of 1854. In an important introduction, he provides a most perceptive as well as scholarly guide to Humboldt's political thought.

Lectures on the Philosophy of World History
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
  • Translated by Hugh Barr Nisbet
  • Introduction by Duncan Forbes
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    03 July 1975
  • An English translation of Hegel's introduction to his lectures on the philosophy of history, based directly on the standard German edition by Johannes Hoffmeister, first published in 1955. The previous English translation, by J. Sibree, first appeared in 1857 and was based on the defective German edition of Karl Hegel, to which Hoffmeister's edition added a large amount of new material previously unknown to English readers, derived from earlier editors. In the introduction to his lectures, Hegel lays down the principles and aims which underlie his philosophy of history, and provides an outline of the philosophy of history itself. The comprehensive and voluminous survey of world history which followed the introduction in the original lectures is of less interest to students of Hegel's thought than the introduction, and is therefore not included in this volume.

Hegel's Theory of the Modern State
  • Shlomo Avineri
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    14 September 1972
  • This study in English of Hegel's political philosophy presents an overall view of the development of Hegel's political thinking. The author has drawn on Hegel's philosophical works, his political tracts and his personal correspondence. Professor Avineri shows that although Hegel is primarily thought of as a philosopher of the state, he was much concerned with social problems and his concept of the state must be understood in this context.

Alienation
  • Marx's Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society
  • 2nd edition
  • Bertell Ollman
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 January 1977
  • In this book, the most thorough account of Marx's theory of alienation yet to have appeared in English, Professor Ollman reconstructs the theory from its constituent parts and offers it as a vantage point from which to view the rest of Marxism. The book further contains a detailed examination of Marx's philosophy of internal relations, the much neglected logical foudation of his method, and provides a systematic account of Marx's conception of human nature. Because of its almost unique concern with helping readers understand Marx's unusual use of language, Alienation has proven very popular in university courses on Marxism on both undergraduate and graduate levels. The first edition was widely reviewed, and in this new edition Professor Ollman replies to his critics in 'More on internal relations,' published here as Appendix II. In addition to this new appendix the author now provides a more systematic discussion of Marx's theory of ideology, elements of which were formerly dispersed throughout the book. He also attempts to set the treatment of political alienation within the broader framework of Marx's theory of the state as a model of how an approach based on internal relations can be used to integrate various apparently contradictory interpretations of Marx's views.

The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx
  • Shlomo Avineri
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    01 May 1968
  • Ever since the discovery of Marx's Early Writings, most of the literature concerned with Marx's intellectual development has centred around the so-called gap between the 'young' Marx, who was considered to be a humanist thinker, and the 'older' Marx, who was held to be a determinist with little concern for anything outside his narrow theory of historical materialism. Dr Avineri claims that such a gap between the 'young' and 'older' Marx did not exist. He supports his claim by a detailed study of the whole corpus of Marx's writing on social and political thought.

Texts Concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands
  • Edited by E. H. Kossman, A. F. Mellink
  • Published online:
    05 February 2012
    Print publication:
    09 January 1975
  • During the revolt of the Netherlands, 'rebels' developed for the first time in modern history political philosophies that had a decisive impact on political reality, influenced the actual course of events, led in fact to the creation of a new state. This was a form of theorizing from sheer necessity to the legitimate sovereign. As such it stands at the beginning of a long tradition of civil disobedience. The volume contains sixty-seven fragments of pamphlets, letters, treaties and other documents, translated from the Dutch, Latin and French, that together provide an insight into the motives of the 'rebels' and into discussions about the legality of the Revolt. Through detailed annotation and an editorial introduction, Professor Kossman and Dr Mellink gather together the threads of the complicated story and analyse some of the major theoretical problems discussed by sixteenth-century Netherlands, and sixteenth-century Europe in general and to all those interested in the history and development of political theory.

Democracy and Religion
  • Gladstone and the Liberal Party 1867–1875
  • J. P. Parry
  • Published online:
    10 January 2011
    Print publication:
    27 November 1986
  • This book relates the political history of mid-nineteenth-century Britain to the assumptions which then prevailed about the abstract moral purposes of political activity. A great number of mid-Victorian writers and politicians expressed far-reaching hopes for the future development of British society, indeed for its regeneration; and such hopes were inspired by their religious outlook. They contended that these aims would be promoted by the pursuit, by governments, of particular educational, ecclesiastical, Irish and other policies. Part I of this book examines at length the varying aspirations, in this direction, of the different elements of Gladstone's Liberal party. In addition to Gladstone's own views, those of whigs, broad churchmen, theist intellectuals, high churchmen's interests are all analysed, in an account which ranges far beyond the time limits suggested by the book's title. Part II recounts the disputes within the party which these conflicting aims provoked between 1867 and 1875. These years were marked by the rise and fall of Gladstone's first and most active government, by the disestablishment of Irish Church in 1869 and the passage of the 1870 Elementary Education Act. In addition, politicians were introduced to a long series of broader and more intangible problems with connotations for religious and political stability - including those thrown up by the 1867 Reform Act, the Vatican Council, the Franco-Prussian war, the progress of the free-thinking movement, the rise of the home rule party in Ireland, and the growth of ritualism within the Church of England. Dr Parry shows how the attempt to tackle these issues slowly paralysed the effectiveness of Gladstone's government, leading to its fall in 1874, and to a crisis about the identity of British Liberalism which was never subsequently resolved. A long introduction and conclusion reassess the history of the Liberal party between 1832 and 1886, in the light of the book's findings. Dr Parry's work offers a radically new synthesis of political, intellectual and ecclesiastical history. It challenges the view that nineteenth-century politics can be understood properly if it is treated in primarily secular terms.

A Critique of Freedom and Equality
  • John Charvet
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    31 August 1981
  • This book is about the grounds of ethical life, or the nature and basis of our ethical obligations. It contains an original account of these grounds and shows how this understanding requires specific forms of social and political life. Charvet considers the ideas of the freedom and equality of men in the many forms they have taken and shows that there is a radical incoherence underlying them which consists in the failure to integrate in a coherent way the particular and the moral or communal dimensions of individual life. These two dimensions are separated and opposed to each other. In the final section of the book Charvet develops an original account of the grounds of ethical life which satisfactorily integrates these particular and communal elements of individuality. It is designed to show how the moral claims of individuals are grounded in their associated wills in a community and yet how such a conception preserves the separate individuality of the community's members.

Vladimir Akimov on the Dilemmas of Russian Marxism 1895–1903
  • The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. A Short History of the Social Democratic Movement in Russia
  • Edited by Jonathan Frankel
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    01 May 1969
  • Vladimir Akimov was the leading spokesman for the 'Economists' in Russia in the early twentieth century. This group of Marxists rebelled in 1898 against Plekkanov, causing within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party a schism which preceded the major split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in 1903. The two major works of Akimov included in this edition have not been republished since 1969. The first is an analysis of the Party Programme inspired by Plekkanov and Lenin as editors of Iskra. The second is a history of the Russian Marxist movement from the early 1890s to Akimov's day. This was the first history of the movement ever published. Dr Frankel has annotated the texts and provided an important introduction, tracing in general terms the development of Russian Marxism up to 1898 and describing in greater detail the forces which caused the dispute between Plakkanov and Lenin and the 'Economists'.

Lord Salisbury on Politics
  • A selection from his articles in the Quarterly Review, 1860-1883
  • Edited by Paul Smith
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    06 April 1972
  • Leader of the Conservative party for seventeen years and prime minister for fourteen, the third Marquis of Salisbury was one of the most successful political practitioners of modern times, as well as a major international statesman. Yet he was also a prolific and pungent writer on politics. The large body of journalism which he produced during the first thirty years of his career enables us to examine in detail the views on politics and society which underlay his practical action. While his brand of Conservatism was conventional in its conclusions, it was distinguished by the highly sceptical and utilitarian mode of reasoning through which it sought to reach them, and by its insistence on a crudely conceived class struggle as the driving force of history and politics. Its central theme was hostility to 'democracy'; and when, after 1867, 'democracy' seemed to have arrived, it questioned how far the system of parliamentary government could work tolerably under the new dispensation.

The Dynamics of Change
  • The Crisis of the 1750s and English Party Systems
  • J. C. D. Clark
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    06 May 1982
  • It is often assumed that Sir Lewis Namier and Sir Herbert Butterfield demolished the 'Whig interpretation of history'. In fact, much was allowed to remain standing by their failure to offer a new synthesis of English party politics. In this book Dr Clark provides the key component for such a new synthesis by a detailed exposition of the crisis of the 1750s, which was instrumental in the destruction of the party system and the emergence of new practices in the multi-factional world. The Court v. Country analysis of the politics of c. 1714–1760, still widely current, is refuted by a demonstration of the survival of the Whig and Tory parties of Queen Anne's reign until the 1750s; the long debate about George III and the constitution is set in a new perspective; and major new insights are offered into the nature of party and party politics.

The Liberal Mind 1914-29
  • Michael Bentley
  • Published online:
    04 May 2010
    Print publication:
    07 April 1977
  • This study is an exercise in the history of political perception and opinion. It broke new ground in considering the decline of Liberalism through the eyes of Liberals themselves. By concentrating on what Liberal politicians said to one another and to their audience (public and private) a picture is built up of the frame of mind in which those responsible for guiding Liberalism faced a worsening world after 1914. The coming of the First World War was a critical element in forming that frame of mind; and the frame of mind was itself critical in deciding the fate of Liberalism in the post-war years. What emerges from this study is the paradox that the Liberal mind was the greatest single obstacle in the way of a Liberal revival.

Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England
  • Volume 1
  • Maurice Cowling
  • Published online:
    08 March 2010
    Print publication:
    11 December 1980
  • In Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, Maurice Cowling defines the principles according to which the intellectual history of modern England should be written and argue that the history of Christianity is of primary importance. In this volume, which is self-contained, he makes a further contribution to understanding the role which Christianity has played in modern English thought. There are critical accounts of the thought of Toynbee, T. S. Eliot, Collingwood, Butterfield, Oakeshott, David Knowles, Evelyn Waugh and Churchill. It also contains less extended accounts of the thought of A. N. Whitehead, of Enoch Powell Minister. The book is given coherence by the connected ideas of the ubiquity of religion, of literature as an instrument of religious indoctrination, and of the intimacy of the connections between the political, philosophical, literary and religious assumptions that are to be found among the leaders of the English intelligentsia.

Adam Smith's Politics
  • An Essay in Historiographic Revision
  • Donald Winch
  • Published online:
    03 February 2010
    Print publication:
    18 May 1978
  • For most of the two hundred years or so that have passed since the publication of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith's writings on political and economic questions have been viewed within a liberal capitalist perspective of nineteenth- and twentieth- century provenance. This essay in interpretation seeks to provide a more historical reading of certain political themes which recur in Smith's writings by bringing eighteenth-century perspectives to bear on the problem. Contrary to the view that sees Smith's work as marking the point at which 'politics' was being eclipsed by 'economics', it claims that Smith has a 'politics' which goes beyond certain political attitudes connected with the role of the state in economic affairs. It argues that he employs a consistent mode of political analysis which cannot be encompassed within the standard liberal capitalist categories, but can be understood by reference to the language and qualities of contemporary political debate, and of the eighteenth-century science of politics cultivated by Montesquieu and, above all, Hume, particularly as revealed by recent scholarship. A concluding chapter draws the various strands of the interpretation together to form a portrait of what Smith might legitimately be said to have been doing when he wrote on these matters.

Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England
  • Volume 2
  • Maurice Cowling
  • Published online:
    23 December 2009
    Print publication:
    28 November 1985
  • In Volume 1 of Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, Maurice Cowling defined the principles according to which the intellectual history of modern England should be written and argued that the history of Christianity was of primary importance. In this volume, which is self-contained, he makes a further contribution to understanding the role which Christianity has played in modern English thought. The book is unusual in its concentration on argument. Cowling relates Christian argument to secular argument and secular argument to Christian argument, discussing Tractarianism and Ultramontanism in the context of secular humanism and pessimistic illusionlessness, and vice versa. The roles of science and history are discussed. The book is given coherence by the connected ideas of the ubiquity of religion, of literature as an instrument of religious indoctrination, and of the intimacy of the connections between the political, philosophical, literary and religious assumptions that are to be found among the leaders of the English intelligentsia.

Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England
  • Volume 3, Accommodations
  • Maurice Cowling
  • Published online:
    23 December 2009
    Print publication:
    16 August 2001
  • The third and concluding volume of Maurice Cowling's magisterial sequence examines three related strands of English thought - latitudinarianism, the Christian thought which has assumed that latitudinarianism gives away too much, and the post-Christian thought which has assumed that Christianity is irrelevant or anachronistic. As in previous volumes, Maurice Cowling conducts his argument through a series of encounters with individual thinkers, including Burke, Disraeli, the Arnolds, Tennyson and Tawney in the first half, and Darwin, Keynes, Orwell, Leavis and Berlin in the second. Central to the whole is Mr Cowling's contention that the modern mind cannot escape from religion. Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England represents a massive contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of modern England, of interest to historians, literary and cultural critics, theologians, philosophers, economists, as well as to that broader reading public with a serious interest in the making of the English mental landscape.

1867 Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution
  • The Passing of the Second Reform Bill
  • Maurice Cowling
  • Published online:
    18 December 2009
    Print publication:
    01 July 1967
  • The passage of the Reform Bill of 1867 is one of the major problems in nineteenth-century British history. Mr Cowling provides a full-scale explanation, based on a wide range of archive material, including four major manuscript collections not previously used. Mr Cowling pays equal attention to the view taken by Parliament of the class structure and to the ambitions and strategies of politicians in Parliament and outside. He sets this detailed historical narrative in an analytical framework, the assumptions of which he discusses at length.

Lloyd George's Secretariat
  • John Turner
  • Published online:
    23 November 2009
    Print publication:
    10 April 1980
  • When Lloyd George became Prime Minister during the First World War he appointed a private secretariat to help him run the complex machinery of wartime government. This book, drawing extensively on private and public archives, describes the work of that Secretariat during its two years of existence and discusses its contribution to policy-making and to the development of the Prime Minister's office. The 'Garden Suburb', so named from its temporary offices in the garden of 10 Downing Street, has won a poor reputation. Contemporaries described it as a nest of intrigue and imperialist, anti-democratic sentiment which helped to turn Lloyd George from a great Radical into a cynical dictator; and historians have tended to accept their word. This examination reveals a different picture. On the one hand, wartime government was imperfectly co-ordinated, and members of the Secretariat performed a genuine administrative task in helping Lloyd George to supervise it and save it from breakdown, although their small number and limited resources allowed them to cover only a few politically sensitive questions. On the other hand, the Garden Suburb was more eclectic in its ideological and political affiliations than has been allowed. Home Rule, collective security, temperance, state supervision of industry, Christian Science and the revival of agriculture, as well as imperial unity and opposition to socialism, each contributed through the Secretariat to the climate of ideas in which policy was made.

Bentham and Bureaucracy
  • L. J. Hume
  • Published online:
    18 November 2009
    Print publication:
    31 August 1981
  • Most accounts of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) deal with him as a prophet of either utilitarianism or of liberal democracy. This book discusses a less familiar but very important aspect of his political thought: his theory of how government institutions should be organised in order to function as efficient and yet responsive guardians of the community's interests. It thus focuses on his programme for he executive and judicial branches of government rather than for the legislature and the electorate. Dr Hume suggests that eighteenth-century political thought was richer in ideas about government that has usually been allowed, but that Bentham's special qualities of mind enabled him to widen and deepen those ideas much further than his contemporaries could have foreseen.

The Christian Polity of John Calvin
  • Harro Höpfl
  • Published online:
    24 October 2009
    Print publication:
    05 August 1982
  • This book explores the relationship between Calvin's thought about civil and ecclesiastical order and his own circumstances and activities. The early chapters argue that in his pre-Genevan writings, including the first edition of the Institution, Calvin's political thinking was entirely conventional; his subsequent thought and conduct were not an implementation of previously formulated ideas. Later chapters examine whether and to what extent Calvin developed a distinctive vision of the Christian polity as part of an overall conception of the Christian life.

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