University of Political Science
The Encyclopedia of Political Science
Jean Jacques Rousseau: The Rediscovery of the Community. Between the writers most characteristic of the French Enlightenment and Jean Jacques Rousseau is fixed a great gulf. Its existence was patent to everyone concerned; its exact nature has never been finally settled. Diderot described it as the vast chasm between heaven and hell and said that…
France: The Decadence of Natural Law. The Revolution of 1688 and the publication of John Locke’s tracts brought to a close the astonishing half-century creative Political philosophy which accompanied the civil wars in England are followed, as often happens, a period of quiescence or even of stagnation, The need of the moment was that the…
Halifax and Locke. The final act in the drama of English politics in the seventeenth century came with climactic suddenness in the bloodless Revolution of 1688. The ill-judged efforts of James II to foster Catholicism touched Protestant opinion in England as the stupidities and degradation of Restoration government had not, for this question was settled….
The republicans: Harrington, Milton, and Sidney. The issue of republican as against monarchical government does not appear to have played an important part at any stage of the Puritan Revolution. The officers of Cromwell’s army were prepared in 1648 to release the king and restore his power, with proper safeguards, after an interval in which…
Radicals and Communists. Hobbes’s political thought belonged essentially to the realm of scholarship or science. Though intended to influence the course of events in favor of the royalists, it had little or no effect of that kind, and as a solvent of traditional loyalties and a presentation of enlightened egoism, it contributed in the long…
Thomas Hobbes Moral and Political Philosophy:- It was the logic of local events which drove the leaders of parliament to claim and exercise a sovereign power which was alike contrary to their own preconceived ideas and to the traditions of the English constitution. Neither the desire for logical consistency nor a philosophical perception of the…
England: Preparation for Civil War. Before the outbreak of the civil wars in England in the 1640’s the lines between rival political ideas were much less clearly drawn than they had become in France in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, In the latter country the right to resist had become definitely attached to…
The Modernized Theory of Natural Law. The opening decades of the seventeenth century began a gradual process of releasing political philosophy from the association with theology which had been characteristic of its earlier history throughout the Christian era. The release which came in the seventeenth century was made possible by a gradual recession of religious…
Most of the books on politics produced in France in the last quarter of the sixteenth century were controversial tracts, without detachment and without philosophical originality. There was one work, however, the Six livres de la république, published by Jean Bodin in 1576, of less ephemeral nature. This book also was occasioned by the civil…
Royalist and anti-royalist theories. When Calvin died in 1564 the lines were already drawn for the religious wars which, as Luther had said, were to fill the world with blood. In Germany divisions of territory made, it a struggle between princes, with the result that the fundamental issue of religious liberty need not be pressed….