This book captures the Indian state's difficult dialogue with divorce, mediated largely through religion. By mapping the trajectories of marriage and divorce laws of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities in post-colonial India, it explores the dynamic interplay between law, religion, family, minority rights and gender in Indian politics. It demonstrates that the binary frameworks of the private-public divide, individuals versus group rights, and universal rights versus legal pluralism collapse before the peculiarities of religious personal law. Historicizing the legislative and judicial response to decades of public debates and activism on the question of personal law, it suggests that the sustained negotiations over family life within and across the legal landscape provoked a unique and deeply contextual evolution of both, secularism and religion in India's constitutional order. Personal law, therefore, played a key role in defining the place of religion and determining the content of secularism in India's democracy.

These volumes are the fruits of a major European Science Foundation project and offer the first comprehensive study of republicanism as a shared European heritage. Whilst previous research has mainly focused on Atlantic traditions of republicanism, Professors Skinner and van Gelderen have assembled an internationally distinguished set of contributors whose studies highlight the richness and diversity of European traditions. Volume I focuses on the importance of anti-monarchism in Europe and analyses the relationship between citizenship and civic humanism, concluding with studies of the relationship between constitutionalism and republicanism in the period between 1500 and 1800. Volume II, first published in 2002, is devoted to the study of key republican values such as liberty, virtue, politeness and toleration. This volume also addresses the role of women in European republican traditions, and contains a number of in-depth studies of the relationship between republicanism and the rise of a commercial society in early modern Europe.

Kant is widely acknowledged for his critique of theoretical reason, his universalistic ethics, and his aesthetics. Scholars, however, often ignore his achievements in the philosophy of law and government. At least four innovations that are still relevant today can be attributed to Kant. He is the first thinker, and to date the only great thinker, to have elevated the concept of peace to the status of a foundational concept of philosophy. Kant links this concept to the political innovation of his time, a republic devoted to human rights. He extends the concept by adding to it the right of nations and cosmopolitan law. Finally, Kant democratizes Plato's notion of philosopher kings with a concept of 'kingly people'. This book examines all aspects of this important, but neglected, body of Kant's writings.

This ambitious work has two novel goals: to overcome the extreme fragmentation of early Southeast Asian historiography, and to connect Southeast Asian to world history. Combining careful local research with wide-ranging theory Lieberman argues that over a thousand years, each of mainland Southeast Asia's great lowland corridors experienced a pattern of accelerating integration punctuated by recurrent collapse. These trajectories were synchronized not only between corridors, but most curiously, between the mainland as a whole, much of Europe, and other sectors of Eurasia. He describes in detail the nature of mainland consolidation - which was simultaneously territorial, religious, ethnic, and commercial - and dissects the mix of endogenous and external factors responsible. Here, then, is a fundamentally original analysis not only of Southeast Asia, but of the pre-modern world.

This ambitious two-volume handbook of social theory consists of forty original contributions. The researchers take stock of the state of social theory and its relationship to the canon, exploring such topics as the nature, purpose, and meaning of social theory; the significance of the classics; the impact of specific individual and theory schools; and more. Both volumes reflect a mixture of what intellectual historian Morton White distinguished as the 'annalist of ideas' and the 'analyst of ideas,' locating theoretical thought within the larger socio-historical context that shaped it - within the terrain of the sociology of knowledge. Exploring the contemporary relevance of theories in a manner that is historically situated and sensitive, this impressive and comprehensive set will likely stand the test of time.

The hundred years covered by this book, from the death of Hegel to the establishment of the Third Reich, is often regarded as the heyday of German philosophy, of metaphysics in the grand style and of what J. S. Mill characterised as 'the German or a priori view of human knowledge'. Yet apart from selective attention to individual figures, such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Husserl or Heidegger, little is known by English-speaking philosophers of most of the animating concerns and continuing traditions of German philosophy of the time. This book sets out to present a detailed history of the period, adopting a thematic approach which emphasises the more distinctive German approach. It is hoped that the growing but piecemeal interest in German philosophy will be both stimulated and consolidated by this book, which should also interest individuals working in related areas such as the history of ideas, religious studies and the history of science.

Neostoicism was one of the most important intellectual movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It started in the Protestant Netherlands during the revolt against Catholic Spain. Very quickly it began to influence both the theory and practice of politics in many parts of Europe. It proved to be particularly useful and appropriate to the early modern militaristic states; for, on the basis of the still generally accepted humanistic values of classical antiquity, it promoted a strong central power in the state, raised above the conflicting doctrines of the theologians. Characteristically, a great part of Neostoic writing was concerned with the nationally organized military institutions of the state. Its aim was the general improvement of social discipline and the education of the citizen to both the exercise and acceptance of bureaucracy, controlled economic life and a large army.

To be modern may mean many different things, but for nineteenth-century Europeans 'modernity' suggested a new form of life in which bourgeois activities, people, attitudes and values all played key roles. Jerrold Seigel's panoramic new history offers a magisterial and highly original account of the ties between modernity and bourgeois life, arguing that they can be best understood not in terms of the rise and fall of social classes, but as features of a common participation in expanding and thickening 'networks of means' that linked together distant energies and resources across economic, political and cultural life. Exploring the different configurations of these networks in England, France and Germany, he shows how their patterns gave rise to distinctive forms of modernity in each country and shaped the rhythm and nature of change across spheres as diverse as politics, money and finance, gender relations, morality, and literary, artistic and musical life.

This is an innovative study of how race and empire transformed French republican citizenship in the early Third Republic. Elizabeth Heath integrates the histories of the wine-producing department of Aude and the sugar-producing colony of Guadeloupe to reveal the ways in which empire was integral to the Third Republic's ability to stabilize a republican regime that began to unravel in an age of economic globalization. She shows how global economic factors shaped negotiations between local citizens and the Third Republic over the responsibilities of the Republic to its citizens leading to the creation of two different and unequal forms of citizenship that became constitutive of the interwar imperial nation-state and the French welfare state. Her findings shed important new light on the tensions within republicanism between ideals of liberty and equality and on the construction of race as a meaningful social category at a foundational moment in French history.

The emergence of the military agency of the Soviet state is a crucial but neglected aspect of inter-war Soviet history, and in this pioneering study Francesco Benvenuti provides a detailed analysis of the politics (as opposed to the operational activities) of the Red Army during the Civil War. Several historians have suggested that the roots of Stalinism may be found in the Bolshevik experience during the Civil War, and Benvenuti shows that the military opposition inside the party was much stronger than conventionally supposed: Trotsky's subsequent political weakness owed much to his ruthless pursuit of military goals not always in direct harmony with party interests, as did his technocratic attempts to extend the role of specialist advisers at the expense of party officials.

Sixties Europe examines the border-crossing uprisings of the 1960s in Europe on both sides of the Cold War divide. Placing European developments within a global context formed by Third World liberation struggles and Cold War geopolitics, Timothy Scott Brown highlights the importance of transnational exchanges across bloc boundaries. New Left ideas and cultural practices easily crossed bloc boundaries, but Brown demonstrates that the 1960s in Europe did not simply unfold according to a normative western model. Everywhere, innovations in the arts and popular culture synergized radical politics as advocates of workers' democracy emerged to pursue longstanding demands predating the Cold War divide. Tracing the development of a distinctive blend of cultural and political activism across diverse national settings, Sixties Europe examines an important, historically-recent attempt to address unresolved questions about human social organization that remain relevant in the present, and it offers an original history of Europe across a transformative decade.

The comte de Vergennes is best known as one of the great foreign ministers of modern French history, but for much of the 1780s he was also first minister in all but name. This 1995 book was the first to deal in depth with the critical part he played in French domestic policies on the eve of the Revolution. It studies Vergennes' role in the context of the debate on the nature and future of the French monarchy in the two decades before the Revolution. His financial reforms, fully examined here, were the last attempt to restructure the monarchy in accordance with its traditional principles. The failure of this undertaking accelerated the final collapse of the royal government. Preserving the Monarchy is based on archival research, as well as reinterpretations of the established sources. The result is a significant study, not merely of Vergennes but of the end of the ancien regime.

Throughout the modern age, revolutions have spread across state borders, engulfing entire regions, continents, and, at times, the globe. Revolutionary World examines the spread of upheavals during the major revolutionary moments in modern history: the Atlantic Revolutions, Europe's 1848 revolts, the commune movement of the 1870s, the 1905-15 upheavals in Asia, the communist revolutions around 1917, the 'Wilsonian' uprisings of 1919, the 'Third World' revolutions, the global Islamic revolt of 1978-79, the events of 1989, and the rise and fall of the 'Arab Spring'. The chapters explore the nature of these revolutionary waves, tracing the exchange of radical ideas and the movements of revolutionaries around the world. Bringing together a group of distinguished historians, Revolutionary World shows that the major revolutions of the modern age, which have so often been studied as isolated national or imperial events, were almost never contained within state borders and were usually part of broader revolutionary moments.

Published in 1797, the Doctrine of Right is Kant's most significant contribution to legal and political philosophy. As the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals, it deals with the legal rights which persons have or can acquire, and aims at providing the grounding for lasting international peace through the idea of the juridical state (Rechtsstaat). This 2010 commentary analyzes Kant's system of individual rights, starting from the original innate right to external freedom, and ending with the right to own property and to have contractual and family claims. Clear and to the point, it guides readers through the most difficult passages of the Doctrine, explaining Kant's terminology, method and ideas in the light of his intellectual environment. One of the very few commentaries on the Doctrine of Right available in English, this book will be essential for anyone with a strong interest in Kant's moral and political philosophy.

The significance of the German philosopher and social thinker, Georg Simmel (1858–1918), is only now being recognised by intellectual historians. Through penetrating readings of Simmel's thought, taken as a series of reflections on the essence of modernity and modern civilisation, Efraim Podoksik places his ideas within the context of intellectual life in Germany, and especially Berlin, under the Kaiserreich. Modernity, characterised by the growing differentiation and fragmentation of culture and society, was a fundamental issue during Simmel's life, underpinning central intellectual debates in Imperial Germany. Simmel's thought is depicted here as an attempt at transforming the complexity of these debates into a coherent worldview that can serve as an effective guide to understanding their main parameters. Paying particular attention to the genealogy and usage of the concepts of Bildung, culture and civilisation in Germany, this study offers contextual analyses of Simmel's philosophies of culture, society, art, religion and the feminine, as well as his interpretations of Dante, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe and Rembrandt.

This first comprehensive account of French revolutionary thought in the years between the crushing of France's last nineteenth-century revolution and the re-emergence of socialism as a meaningful electoral force offers new interpretations of the French revolutionary tradition. Drawing together material from Europe, North America, and the South Pacific, Julia Nicholls pieces together the nature and content of French revolutionary thought in this often overlooked era. She shows that this was an important and creative period, in which activists drew upon fresh ideas they encountered in exile across the world to rebuild a revolutionary movement that was both united and politically viable in the changed circumstances of France's new Third Republic. The relative success of these efforts, moreover, has significant implications for the ways in which we understand the founding years of the Third Republic, the nature of the modern revolutionary tradition, and the origins of European Marxism.

In this accessible critical introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy Robin Kirkpatrick principally focuses on Dante as a poet and storyteller. He addresses important questions such as Dante's attitude towards Virgil, and demonstrates how an early work such as the Vita nuova is a principal source of the literary achievement of the Comedy. His detailed reading reveals how the great narrative poem explores the relationship that Dante believed to exist between God as creator of the universe and the human being as a creature of God. In addition, Kirkpatrick takes due account of the historical and philosophical dimensions of the poem.