[PDF] Sovereignty Seventeenth Century England And The Making Of The Modern Political Imaginary eBook

Author : Feisal G. Mohamed
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 12,80 MB
Release : 2020-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0198852134

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This book argues that sovereignty is the first-order question of political order, and that seventeenth-century England provides an important case study in the roots of its modern iterations. It offers fresh readings of Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell, as well as lesser-known figures and literary texts. In addition to political philosophy and literary studies, it also takes account of the period's legal history, exploring the exercise of the crown's feudal rights in the Court of Wards and Liveries, debates over habeas rights, and contests of various courts over jurisdiction. Theorizing sovereignty in a way that points forward to later modernity, the book also offers a sustained critique of the writings of Carl Schmitt, the twentieth century's most influential, if also most controversial, thinker on this topic.

Author : Feisal G. Mohamed
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 37,48 MB
Release : 2020-02-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0192593064

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This book argues that sovereignty is the first-order question of political order, and that seventeenth-century England provides an important case study in the roots of its modern iterations. It offers fresh readings of Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell, as well as lesser-known figures and literary texts. In addition to political philosophy and literary studies, it also takes account of the period's legal history, exploring the exercise of the crown's feudal rights in the Court of Wards and Liveries, debates over habeas rights, and contests of various courts over jurisdiction. Theorizing sovereignty in a way that points forward to later modernity, the book also offers a sustained critique of the writings of Carl Schmitt, the twentieth century's most influential, if also most controversial, thinker on this topic.

Author : Todd Butler
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 394 pages
File Size : 17,79 MB
Release : 2017-03-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1351928724

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Todd Butler here proposes a new epistemology of early modern politics, one that sees-as did writers of the period-human thought as a precursor to political action. By focusing not on reason or the will but on the imagination, Butler uncovers a political culture in seventeenth-century England that is far more shifting and multi-polar than has been previously recognized. Pursuing the connection between individual thought and corporate political action, he also charts the existence of a discourse that grounds modern scholarly interests in the representational nature of early modern politics - its images, rituals and entertainment-within a language early moderns themselves used. Through analysis of a wide variety of seventeenth-century texts, including the writings of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, Caroline Court masques, and the poetry and prose of John Milton, he reveals a society deeply concerned with the fundamentally imaginative nature of politics. It is a strength of the study that Butler looks at unusual or slighted texts by these authors alongside their more canonical texts. The study also ranges widely across disciplines, engaging literature alongside both natural and political philosophy. By emphasizing the human mind rather than human institutions as the primary site of the period's political struggles, this study reframes critical understandings of seventeenth-century English politics and the texts that helped define them.

Author : Robert Appelbaum
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 11,50 MB
Release : 2002-04-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1139432869

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Hundreds of writers in the English-speaking world of the seventeenth-century imagined alternative ideal societies. Sometimes they did so by exploring fanciful territories, such as the world in the moon or the nations of the Antipodes; but sometimes they composed serious disquisitions about the here and now, proposing how England or its nascent colonies could be conceived of as an 'Oceana,' or a New Jerusalem. This book provides a comprehensive view of the operations of the utopian imagination in literature from 1603 to the 1660s. Appealing to social theorists, literary critics, and political and cultural historians, this volume revises prevailing notions of the languages of hope and social dreaming in the making of British modernity during a century of political and intellectual upheaval.

Author : Deni Kasa
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 32,43 MB
Release : 2024-03-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1503638316

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This book tells the story of how early modern poets used the theological concept of grace to reimagine their political communities. The Protestant belief that salvation was due to sola gratia, or grace alone, was originally meant to inspire religious reform. But, as Deni Kasa shows, poets of the period used grace to interrogate the most important political problems of their time, from empire and gender to civil war and poetic authority. Kasa examines how four writers—John Milton, Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, and Abraham Cowley—used the promise of grace to develop idealized imagined communities, and not always egalitarian ones. Kasa analyzes the uses of grace to make new space for individual and collective agency in the period, but also to validate domination and inequality, with poets and the educated elite inserted as mediators between the gift of grace and the rest of the people. Offering a literary history of politics in a pre-secular age, Kasa shows that early modern poets mapped salvation onto the most important conflicts of their time in ways missed by literary critics and historians of political thought. Grace, Kasa demonstrates, was an important means of expression and a way to imagine impossible political ideals.

Author : Richard Bourke
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 421 pages
File Size : 40,36 MB
Release : 2016-03-24
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 131645391X

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This collaborative volume offers the first historical reconstruction of the concept of popular sovereignty from antiquity to the twentieth century. First formulated between the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, the various early modern conceptions of the doctrine were heavily indebted to Roman reflection on forms of government and Athenian ideas of popular power. This study, edited by Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner, traces successive transformations of the doctrine, rather than narrating a linear development. It examines critical moments in the career of popular sovereignty, spanning antiquity, medieval Europe, the early modern wars of religion, the revolutions of the eighteenth century and their aftermath, decolonisation and mass democracy. Featuring original work by an international team of scholars, the book offers a reconsideration of one of the formative principles of contemporary politics by exploring its descent from classical city-states to the advent of the modern state.

Author : Arihiro Fukuda
Publisher : Clarendon Press
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 42,39 MB
Release : 1997-10-16
Category : History
ISBN : 0191583731

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The English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century produced two political thinkers of genius: Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington. They are known today as spokesmen of opposite positions, Hobbes of absolutism, Harrington of republicanism. Yet behind their disagreements, argues Arihiro Fukuda, there lay a common perspective. For both writers, the primary aim was the restoration of peace and order to a divided land. Both men saw the conventional thinking of the time as unequal to that task. Their greatest works — Hobbes's Leviathan of 1651, Harrington's Oceana of 1656 — proposed the reconstruction of the English polity on novel bases. It was not over the principle of sovereignty that the two men differed. Fukuda shows Harrington to have been, no less than Hobbes, a theorist of absolute sovereignty. But where Hobbes repudiated the mixed governments of classical antiquity, Harrington's study of them convinced him that mixed government, far from being the enemy of absolute sovereignty, was its essential foundation.

Author : Emma Depledge
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 26,62 MB
Release : 2021-03-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0192555022

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This volume consists of fourteen original essays that showcase the latest thinking about John Milton's emergence as a popular and canonical author. Contributors consider how Milton positioned himself in relation to the book trade, contemporaneous thinkers, and intellectual movements, as well as how his works have been positioned since their first publication. The individual chapters assess Milton's reception by exploring how his authorial persona was shaped by the modes of writing in which he chose to express himself, the material forms in which his works circulated, and the ways in which his texts were re-appropriated by later writers. The Milton that emerges is one who actively fashioned his reputation by carefully selecting his modes of writing, his language of composition, and the stationers with whom he collaborated. Throughout the volume, contributors also demonstrate the profound impact Milton and his works have had on the careers of a variety of agents, from publishers, booksellers, and fellow writers to colonizers in Mexico and South America.