This is a work vast in scale, soaring in its scholarly ambition, and magnificent . . . in its achievement. The author's command of the primary sources is staggering in breadth and depth, deftly orchestrated and rich with insight. . . . Deploying an avalanche of evidence. . . Rahe shows how alien the modern project, in all its diverse versions, was to the classics as well as the Bible.--Thomas L. Pangle, Political Theory

Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, was one of the most creative political thinkers in eighteenth-century Britain. In this volume, modernised and fully annotated texts of his most important political works, the Dissertation upon Parties, the letter, 'On the Spirit of Patriotism', and The Idea of the Patriot King, are brought together for the first time. Bolingbroke was the first major thinker to face the long-term economic and political consequences of the Glorious Revolution, particularly the creation of the first modern system of party politics. In these works he attempted to forge an ideology of opposition to attack the Whig oligarchy of Sir Robert Walpole. His analyses of constitutional government and the party system are still relevant to the dilemmas of modern democratic politics, as are his recommendations for a patriotic commitment to the common good and the necessity of a non-partisan executive.

James Thomson: Essays for the Tercentenary is the first collection of essays devoted exclusively to the works of the eighteenth-century Scottish poet James Thomson. The volume is divided into two sections, the first addressing Thomson’s writings themselves, and the second the reception of his works after his death and their influence on later writers. The first section contains essays analyzing the politics and aesthetics of Thomson’s major poems and also a reevaluation of Thomson as a heroic dramatist. The second section capitalizes on the certainty felt by many in Thomson’s own century that the poet, especially through his most successful poem The Seasons, had won for himself an indelible fame. This volume provides a definitive reappraisal of his achievement for our own times.

Eighteenth-century England was a place of enlightenment and revolution: new ideas abounded in science, politics, transportation, commerce, religion, and the arts. But even as England propelled itself into the future, it was preoccupied with notions of its past. Jeremy Black considers the interaction of history with knowledge and culture in eighteenth-century England and shows how this engagement with the past influenced English historical writing. The past was used as a tool to illustrate the contemporary religious, social, and political debates that shaped the revolutionary advances of the era. Black reveals this "present-centered" historical writing to be so valued and influential in the eighteenth-century that its importance is greatly underappreciated in current considerations of the period. In his customarily vivid and sweeping approach, Black takes readers from print shop to church pew, courtroom to painter's studio to show how historical writing influenced the era, which in turn gave birth to the modern world.

In Imagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels, Pam Morris traces a dramatic transformation of British public consciousness that occurred between the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867. This brief period saw a shift from a naturalized acceptance of social hierarchy to a general imagining of a modern mass culture. Central to this collective revisioning of social relations was the pressure to restyle political leadership in terms of popular legitimacy, to develop a more inclusive mode of discourse within an increasingly heterogeneous public sphere and to find new ways of inscribing social distinctions and exclusions. Morris argues that in the transformed public sphere of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the urbane code of civility collapsed under the strain of the conflicting interests that constitute mass society. It was replaced by a "code of sincerity," often manipulative and always ideological in that its inclusiveness was based upon a formally egalitarian assumption of mutual interiorities. The irresistible movement toward mass politics shifted the location of power into the public domain. Increasingly, national leaders sought to gain legitimacy by projecting a performance of charismatic "sincerity" as a flattering and insinuating mode of address to mass audiences. Yet, by the latter decades of the century, while the code of sincerity continued to dominate popular and political culture, traditional political and intellectual elites were reinscribing social distinctions and exclusions. They did so both culturally—by articulating sensibility as skepticism, irony, and aestheticism—and scientifically—by introducing evolutionist notions of sensibility and attaching these to a rigorous disciplinary code of bodily visuality. Through an intensive, intertextual reading of six key novels (Bronte's Shirley, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Dickens's Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, Gaskell's North and South, and Eliot's Romola) and an array of Victorian periodicals and political essays, Morris analyzes just how actively novelists engaged in these social transformations. Drawing on a wide range of literary, cultural, and historical thinkers—Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Benedict Anderson, Mary Poovey, and Charles Tilly—Morris makes an original and highly sophisticated contribution to our understanding of the complex and always contested processes of imagining social inclusiveness.

Since the end of the internationalist Soviet experiment in 1989, nationalism is now recognized as a positive, vital force in modern political, cultural, and social life-if kept in check from excess. As a result of the explosion of nationalism, there has been a veritable resurgence of nationalism studies. This proliferation calls for a survey of instruments which have been developed by scholars for the study of nationalism. The Encyclopaedia of Nationalism brings together leading scholars in nationalism studies to survey this complex phenomenon.With over one hundred entries the Encyclopaedia of Nationalism offers a complete and concise set of tools for the study of nationalism in a single volume. The focus throughout is theoretical, and for this reason particular nationalist movements and individual leaders are treated only as illustrative historical and contemporary cases in numerous entries. The Encyclopaedia is organized in an alphabetical sequence of entries, each of which includes a short bibliography for further reading. The reader will find in-depth discussions of the work of modern theoreticians of nationalism.The defining figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including Herder, Rousseau, Fichte, Marx, and Renan. Conceptual entries, are treated historically and sociologically. Crucial influential ideas and phenomena that continually redefine themselves with changing historical circumstances, among them, anti-Semitism, art and nationalism, assimilation, class and nation, decolonization, ethnic competition, genocide, language and nation, multiculturalism, religion and nation, state and nation, and xenophobia are treated in depth. A special attraction of this volume is its essay-long entries, many of which have been written by the scholars who developed them.The Encyclopaedia of Nationalism discusses in lucid terms, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the central issues, debates, concepts, and theories available to students and scholars of nationalism. As such it is the most comprehensive and authoritative guide to the subject in all its varied manifestations and implications. It will be an essential tool for historians, political scientists, sociologists, and scholars of the history of ideas.