Against the Backdrop of Sovereignty and Absolutism

Against the Backdrop of Sovereignty and Absolutism

Author: Massimiliano Traversino Di Cristo

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-05-09

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9004503706

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With a foreword by Diego Quaglioni. This book analyses the bearing of one of the most long-standing debates of the Middle Ages, the distinction between potentia Dei absoluta and ordinata (God’s absolute and ordered power), on the modern Western legal tradition.


The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

Author: Giordano Bruno

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2024-06-03

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13: 1487552041

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Published in London in 1584, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast is Giordano Bruno’s first work of moral philosophy. It is dedicated with a long Explicatory Letter to Elizabeth I’s most cultured courtier, Sir Philip Sidney. It is a book about moral reform, expelling the beasts of evil, and putting virtues in their place. Its theme is presented as an allegorical drama in which ancient myths assume modern meanings questioning the ways in which moral and religious reform have been conceived in both the ancient world and the cultures of Renaissance Europe. This new Italian text, based on the original printed text of 1584 held in the British Library, presents a less modernized version than those presently available, while maintaining a modern page format. The aim is to provide a text closer to the sound of Bruno’s original mix of classical Tuscan Italian and Neapolitan dialectical forms. This edition also presents a new translation designed to render Bruno’s complex and baroque Italian into easily readable modern English. Hilary Gatti introduces The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, underlining Bruno’s meta-literary reflection on the nature of allegory and myth as well as the dramatic structure of his text. Drama, philosophy, and religion combine in this work to give an epic dimension to the perennial cosmic battle between evil and good.


Hugo Grotius and the Century of Revolution, 1613-1718

Hugo Grotius and the Century of Revolution, 1613-1718

Author: Marco Barducci

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0198754582

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Hugo Grotius and the Century of Revolution, 1613-1718 is a reconstruction of the way Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) was read and used by English political and religious writers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Engaging with the reception of all of Grotius's key works and a wide range of topics, the volume has much to say about the search for peace in an age of religious conflict and about the cultural roots of the Enlightenment. Most of all, Marco Barducci aims to deepen our understanding of the connections that made English political thought part of the history of European thought. To this end, it brings together a succinct account of Grotius's own thinking on key topics, mapping these accounts within English debates, to show why his ideas were seen to be relevant at key moments; shows awareness of the possibilities for the misappropriation inherent in reception; and adds something new to our understanding of why seventeenth-century Englishmen argued in the ways that they did.


Sovereignty and the Sword

Sovereignty and the Sword

Author: Arihiro Fukuda

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 9780198206835

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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.


Bodin: On Sovereignty

Bodin: On Sovereignty

Author: Jean Bodin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1992-04-24

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780521349925

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This volume translates four chapters of Bodin's Six livres de la république, a vast synthesis of comparative public law and politics.


Democracy and Its Others

Democracy and Its Others

Author: Jeffrey H. Epstein

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2016-02-25

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1501312006

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Today's unprecedented levels of human migration present urgent challenges to traditional conceptualizations of national identity, nation-state sovereignty, and democratic citizenship. Foreigners are commonly viewed as outsiders whose inclusion within or exclusion from “the people” of the democratic state rests upon whether they benefit or threaten the unity of the nation. Against this instrumentalization of the foreigner, this book traces the historical development of the concepts of sovereignty and foreignness through the thought of philosophers such as Plato, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Derrida, and Benhabib in order to show that foreignness is a structural feature of sovereignty that cannot be purged or assimilated. Understood in this light, foreignness allows for new forms of democratic political unity to be imagined that reject local practices which deprive individuals of political membership solely on the basis of national citizenship. This cosmopolitan model for citizenship provides a novel conceptual framework that simultaneously upholds the legal importance of democratic citizenship for political justice while ceaselessly contesting the exclusionary logic of the nation-state that reserves democratic rights for members of the nation alone.


Sovereignty and the Stateless Nation

Sovereignty and the Stateless Nation

Author: Keith Azopardi

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2009-10-06

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 1847315429

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Gibraltar is an Overseas Territory of the UK within the EU, which has for three centuries been at the centre of a dispute between Britain and Spain, a dispute based on traditional perceptions of sovereignty. Hitherto the dispute has been managed in a predominantly bilateral way, but this has prevented the people of Gibraltar having an equal say on the issue of Gibraltar's sovereignty and decolonisation. It has produced a paradox of governance and constitutionalism that encases the Gibraltar people. This book considers the effects of sovereignty and the culture of bilateralism on the dispute, and examines the resulting deficits of governance and democracy. In assessing the evolution of the themes underlying the dispute it asks how its resolution might be facilitated by the application of ideas drawn from the modern legal context of late sovereignty, pluralism and stateless nationalism, suggesting that a productive trilateral approach and recognition of the legal and societal context could enable an enduring settlement. The author marries theories from international relations, constitutional law and public international law in the context of modern literature on sovereignty and nationalism, applying these theories to the case-study of Gibraltar with emphasis on constitutionalism in its international and EU context to produce a ground-breaking addition to the literature on stateless nationalism, late sovereignty and constitutional pluralism. As such it also complements recent studies of sub-state societies, regions or nations within Europe and elsewhere, including Catalunya, the Basque Country and Scotland and Wales, and in the broader Commonwealth context, other British overseas territories. This book will be of interest to lawyers, political scientists, constitutional historians and constitutionalists.


Germany in the Age of Absolutism

Germany in the Age of Absolutism

Author: Rudolf Vierhaus

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 9780521339360

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Reconstructs the structures that marked the history of Germany from the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Seven Years' War.