Conventionally, ``absolutism'' in early-modern Europe has suggested unfettered autocracy and despotism -- the erosion of rights, the centralisation of decision-making, the loss of liberty. Everything, in a word, that was un-British but characteristic of...

"Literacy in Early Modern Europe" is an analysis of that momentous change in European society from widespread illiteracy in 1500 to mass literacy by 1800. The book explores the importance of education, literacy and popular culture in Europe during this...

The triumphant rise of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte over his Republican opponents has been the central theme of most narrative accounts of mid-nineteenth-century France, while resistance to the coup d'état generally has been neglected. By placing the...

"Of those who created the intellectual capital used to launch the enterprise of professional sociology, Georg Simmel was perhaps the most original and fecund. In search of a subject matter for sociology that would distinguish it from all other social...

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This important new book analyzes the position of women in the writings of the major political philosophers. The authors argue that the moral status of women both affects and is affected by the conceptions of their political status. Women have only...

760 pages.

Concerned with the origins of capitalism and the conditions that accompanied its birth, this work argues that capitalism is more than an economic system: it is a culture that affects not just the material but also the social, familial and even spiritual...

`Religion and politics are necessarily related', declared Ronald Reagan, while addressing an ecumenical prayer breakfast of 17,000 people in Dallas. But how are they connected? Many popular images of God - King, Lord, and Judge - are essentially...

This collection of the most brilliant and characteristic letters of Niccolò Machiavelli displays the vital and penetrating mind of the man who wrote the first work of modern political science. These letters, which reveal Machiavelli's critical...