Browsing by Subject "History of political thought"

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    The Cambridge School, c.1875-c.1975
    (Imprint Academic, 2016) Alexander, J.
    The ‘Cambridge School’ is a term associated with some historians of political thought who since the 1960s have claimed to have something to say of contemporary relevance about politics. Here it is argued that the School has to be understood as a long consequence of Seeley’s determination at the foundation of the Historical Tripos in the 1870s to relate history and politics to each other. For a century almost all the major figures in Cambridge agreed that history and politics should be related, but disagreed about how to do it. The writings of Seeley, Sidgwick, Acton, Maitland, Figgis, Barker, Oakeshott, Cowling, Laslett, Runciman, Dunn, Skinner and others are studied here in order to indicate how the historians of the Cambridge School for a century attempted to relate history and politics in not one but four ways — through political science, the history of political thought, political philosophy and political theology. © 2017 Imprint Academic. All rights reserved.
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    The triumvirate of the Cambridge School: Pocock’s, Dunn’s and Skinner’s methodological articles on the history of political thought, 1962‐1969
    (Imprint Academic, 2024-05) Alexander, James
    The Cambridge School of the history of political thought exists as a tradition of teaching in the History Faculty of Cambridge University, and as a set of works including famous books such as The Political Thought of John Locke, The Machiavel- lianMoment and The Foundations ofModern Political Thought. It acquired its distinctive status because of three methodological articles written in the 1960s by the triumvirate of J.G.A. Pocock, John Dunn and Quentin Skinner. These articles are usually assimilated to each other. No doubt there was much consonance between the three articles. But I demonstrate through a close reading of the three articles that each author placed a very different emphasis on the status and purpose of the history of political thought, and that the differences between the articles help to explain the remarkable differences in the subsequent writings of the authors fromthe late 1960s onwards. This article is not part of the recent tendency to study the thought of the last fifty years historically, though it may of course be a preliminary to that. My concern is textual, not contextual. This article should interest anyone concerned with the question of the relevance of historiography, the history of ideas and the history of political thought to the study of politics.
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    What’s it got to do with the price of bread? Condorcet and Grouchy on freedom and unreasonable laws in commerce
    (SAGE Publications, 2018) Bergès, Sandrine
    István Hont identified a point in the history of political thought at which republicanism and commercialism became separated. According to Hont, Emmanuel Sieyès proposed that a monarchical republic should be formed. By contrast the Jacobins, in favour of a republic led by the people, rejected not only Sieyès’s political proposal, but also the economic ideology that went with it. Sieyès was in favour of a commercial republic; the Jacobins were not. This was, according to Hont, a defining moment in the history of political thought. In this article, I offer a different analysis of that particular moment in the history of the commercial republic, one that instead of focusing on Sieyès and the Jacobins, looks at the thought of Girondins philosophers Nicolas de Condorcet and Sophie de Grouchy. I argue that their arguments provide sound models for a commercial republic, reconciling late 18th century republican ideals in which virtue was central, with the need for a flourishing and internationally active market economy.