Overview

Between the cliché that 'a week is a long time in politics' and the aspiration of many political philosophers to give their ideas universal, timeless validity lies a gulf which the history of political thought is uniquely qualified to bridge. For that history shows that no conception of politics has dispensed altogether with time, and many have explicitly sought legitimacy in association with forms of history. Ranging from Justinian's law codes to rival Protestant and Catholic visions of political community after the Fall, from Hobbes and Spinoza to the Scottish Enlightenment, and from Kant and Savigny to the legacy of German Historicism and the Algerian Revolution, this volume explores multiple ways in which different conceptions of time and history have been used to understand politics since late antiquity. Bringing together leading contemporary historians of political thought, Time, History, and Political Thought demonstrates just how much both time and history have enriched the political imagination.

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9781009289368

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'This, in sum, is an ambitious volume, which seeks to win over Hobbes' successors in the timeless 'science of politics' on the one hand, and sceptics about the 'temporal turn' on the other. That it has any chance of success, in both pursuits, owes to the fact that the essays all impressively steer the course between the Scylla of wishy-washy pretension and the Charybdis of banality.' Samuel Rubinstein, Oxford Political Review

Author Information

John Robertson is Honorary Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of St Andrews and Professor Emeritus of the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge. Previously he taught at Oxford, and he has held visiting appointments in the United States, Italy, France and China. He is a Foreign Member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Naples. His publications include The Case for the Enlightenment. Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (2005), The Enlightenment. A Very Short Introduction (2015) and, as editor, A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 (1995) and Andrew Fletcher: Political Works (1997).

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