Visions of Politics 3 Volume Set

Volume I: General Introduction; Acknowledgments; Notes on the text; 1. Introduction: seeing things their way; 2. The practice of history and the cult of the fact; 3. Interpretation, rationality and truth; 4. Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas; 5. Motives, intentions and interpretation; 6. Interpretation and the understanding of speech acts; 7. 'Social meaning' and the explanation of social action; 8. Moral principles and social change; 9. The idea of a cultural lexicon; 10. Retrospect: Studying rhetoric and conceptual change. Volume II. 1. Introduction; 2. The rediscovery of republican values; 3. Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the portrayal of virtuous government; 4. Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the power and glory of republics; 5. Republican virtues in an age of princes; 6. Machiavelli on virtu and the maintenance of liberty; 7. The idea of negative liberty: Machiavelli and modern perspectives; 8. Thomas More's Utopia and the virtue of true nobility; 9. Was there a Calvinist theory of revolution? 10. Moral ambiguity and the renaissance art of eloquence; 11. John Milton and the politics of slavery; 12. Classical liberty, Renaissance translation and the English civil war; 13. From the state of princes to the modern state; 14. Augustan party politics and Renaissance constitutional thought. Volume III: 1. Introduction: Hobbes's career in philosophy; 2. Hobbes and the studia humanitatis; 3. Hobbes's changing conception of a civil science; 4. Hobbes on rhetoric and the construction of morality; 5. Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state; 6. Hobbes on the proper signification of liberty; 7. Hobbes and the classical theory of laughter; 8. History and ideology in the English revolution; 9. The context of Hobbes's theory of political obligation; 10. Conquest and consent: Hobbes and the engagement controversy; 11. Hobbes and his disciples in France and England; 12. Hobbes and the politics of the early Royal Society; 13. Hobbes's last word on politics.