The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe [Paperback]

Essays on the political 'languages' of natural law, classical republicanism, commerce and political science.This volume studies the concept of a political 'language', of a discourse composed of shared vocabularies, idioms and rhetorical strategies, which has been widely influential on recent work in the history of political thought.This volume studies the concept of a political 'language', of a discourse composed of shared vocabularies, idioms and rhetorical strategies, which has been widely influential on recent work in the history of political thought.This volume studies the concept of a political 'language', of a discourse composed of shared vocabularies, idioms and rhetorical strategies, which has been widely influential on recent work in the history of political thought. The collection brings together a number of essays by a distinguished group of international scholars, on the four dominant languages in use in Europe between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. They are: the language of political Aristotelianism and the natural law; the language of classical republicanism; the language of commerce and the commercial society; and the language of a science of politics. Each author has chosen a single aspect of his or her language, sometimes the work of a single author, in one case the history of a single team, and shown how it determined the shape and development of that language, and the extent to which each language was a response to the challenge of other modes of discourse.Acknowledgements; Introduction Anthony Pagden; 1. The concept of a language and the m?tier d'historien: some considerations on practice J. G. A. Pocock; Part I: 2. The history of the word politicus in early-modern Europe Nicolai Rubinstein; 3. Civil science in the Renaissance: the problem of interpretation Donald Kelley; 4. Dispossessing the barbarian: the language of Spanish Thomism and the debate over the property rights of the American Indians Anthony Pl.