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.

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Visions of Politics

Introduction J. H. BURNS PART I. RENAISSANCE AND COUNTER-RENAISSANCE: 1. Humanism and political theory ANTHONY GRAFTON 2. Italian political thought, 1450-1530 NICOLAI RUBINSTEIN 3. Law DONALD R. KELLEY 4. Transalpine humanism BRENDAN BRADSHAW 5. Scholasticism: survival and revival J. H. BURNS PART II. RELIGION, CIVIL GOVERNMENT, AND THE DEBATE ON CONSTITUTIONS: 6. Christian obedience and authority, 1520-50 FRANCIS OAKLEY 7. Calvinism and resistance theory, 1550-80 ROBERT KINGDON 8. Catholic resistance theory, ultramontanism, and the royalist response, 1580-1620 J. H. M. SALMON 9. Constitutionalism HOWELL A. LLOYD 10. Sovereignity and the mixed constitution: Bodin and his critics JULIAN H. FRANKLIN 11. Utopianism J. C. DAVIES PART III. ABSOLUTISM AND REVOLUTION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: 12. Absolutism and royalism J. P. SOMMERVILLE 13. England: ancient constitution and common law Corinne C. Weston 14. Leveller democracy and the puritan revolution DAVID WOOTTON 15. English republicanism BLAIR WORDEN PART IV. THE END OF ARISTOTELIANISM: 16. Tacitism, scepticism, and reason of state Peter Burke 17. Grotius and Selden RICHARD TUCK 18. Hobbes and Spinoza NOEL MALCOLM PART V. NATURAL LAW AND UTILITY: 19. Pufendorf ALFRED DUFOUR 20. The reception of Hobbes MARK GOLDIE 21. Locke JAMES TULLY.

The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700

Grotius and Selden

Hobbes prefaces Leviathan with a letter in which he dedicates the work to Francis Godolphin and at the same time offers him a summary of the theory of public authority contained in the book. ‘I speak’, Hobbes explains, ‘not of the men, but (in the Abstract) of the Seat of Power.’ This seat, he adds in his Introduction, is occupied by ‘that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE’. The essence of Hobbes's theory of public power is thus that the person identifiable as the true ‘subject’ of sovereignty in any lawful state must be the person of the state itself. Hobbes's opening remarks allude to what has proved to be one of the most enduring puzzles in our inherited theories of government. On the one hand, most contemporary political philosophers would agree with Hobbes that the state is the seat of sovereignty. As Hobbes expresses the claim later in Leviathan , it is ‘the Reason of this our Artificiall Man the Common-wealth, and his Command, that maketh Law’, so that civil law is nothing other than ‘the Will and Appetite of the State’. But on the other hand, most contemporary philosophers would also agree with Hobbes when he adds that the state amounts to nothing more than an artifice. To quote Hobbes's way of expressing this further point, the state has no capacity ‘to doe any thing’; it is ‘but a word, without substance, and cannot stand’. There, then, is the puzzle.

Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State

The middle of the fifteenth century was a turning point in the relations between the Italian states, and the relative stability which Italy enjoyed until the Neapolitan expedition of Charles VIII in 1494 forms part of the background to the history of its political thought during that period. The peace of Lodi had put an end, in 1454, to a succession of wars which had begun in the 1420s. It had been followed by the conclusion of an Italian league, aimed at safeguarding the integrity of the Italian states as well as peace among them; in fact, wars were chiefly prevented or contained by triple and dual alliances between the five greater powers which were its members, Milan, Venice, Florence, the papacy, and Naples. To the relative stability and equilibrium in inter-state relations, threatened primarily by the expansionist policies of Venice and the papacy, there corresponded a similar stability in the internal conditions of the Italian states, although it too could be temporarily threatened. Domestic crises occurred in Milan in 1476 with the assassination of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza; in Florence in 1478 with the Pazzi conspiracy, but these were of short duration; far more serious and lasting was the revolt of the Neapolitan barons against Ferrante of Aragon in 1485. The lesser princes, such as the Malatesta at Rimini and the Este at Ferrara, were more vulnerable; a judicious policy of placing themselves under the protection of one or more of the greater powers, as well as serving them as condottieri , could help them to achieve security and dynastic survival.

Italian political thought, 1450–1530

A discussion of the Levellers which concentrates solely on their proposals for a new parliamentary franchise calls for some justification. These proposals formed only one part of the Leveller programme, and not necessarily the most important part at that. In the history of political theory the Levellers are important for many other reasons. They proclaimed that men were born equal and that government could be founded only on consent. They stood for religious toleration and equality before the law. Their concern for civil liberties led them into making the first-known attempt at writing down a law paramount which not even the legislature could alter. Their successive manifestoes, the ‘Agreements of the People’, were the earliest English approximations to a written constitution. They also gave early expression to the doctrine of the separation of powers. If to these achievements we add their advocacy of numerous specific reforms, from the abolition of tithes to the reform of the law, we can recognise that the Levellers have an importance in the history of social and political thought which far transcends any plans they had for remodelling the franchise.

Keith Thomas

Papers

The Levellers and the Franchise