The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought

2006/08/31 by Mark Goldie, Robert Wokler · 199 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought #Political Theory and Influence #American Constitutional Law and Politics #Politics #History of political thought #Enlightenment #Theme (computing) #Reading (process) #History #Relevance (law) #Principal (computer security) #Classics #Intellectual history #Political history #Literature #Social science #Political science #Epistemology #Sociology #Political philosophy #Economic history #Philosophy #Law #Art

paper · doi:10.1017/chol9780521374224

published in Cambridge University Press eBooks (Cambridge University Press)

openalex publication_date 2006/08/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15

Abstract

This major work of academic reference provides a comprehensive overview of the development of western political thought during the European Enlightenment. Written by a distinguished team of international contributors, this Cambridge History is the latest in a sequence of volumes that is now firmly established as the principal reference source for the history of political thought. Every major theme in eighteenth-century political thought is covered in a series of essays at once scholarly and accessible, and the essays are complemented by extensive guides for further reading, and brief biographical notes of the major characters in the text, including Rousseau, Montesquieu and David Hume. Of interest and relevance to students and scholars of politics and history at all levels from beginning undergraduate upwards, this volume chronicles one of the most exciting and rewarding of all periods in the development of western thinking about politics, man (and increasingly woman), and society.

Citations

• An Essay concerning Human Understanding
• Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary
• Christianity not Mysterious (1696):
• The Sources of social power, Volume 1, A history of power from the beginning to AD 1760
• Governing the republic of letters: The politics of culture in the French enlightenment
• Groundwork of The Metaphysic of Morals
• Dialectic of Enlightenment
• Mary Astell and the Conservative Contribution to English Feminism
• Hugo Grotius and the History of Political Thought
• Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
• Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland
• REFLECTIONS ON ENLIGHTENMENT AND LUMIÈRES
• Public Opinion, Popular Politics and the Union of 1707
• The unvirtuous king? clerical rhetoric on the French monarchy, 1760–1774
• Edmund Burke and Reason of State
• Gentlemen Dissenters: The Social and Political Meanings of Rational Dissent in the 1770s and 1780s
• British Politics and the Demise of the Roman Republic: 1700–1939
• EDMUND BURKE'S CHANGING JUSTIFICATION FOR INTERVENTION
• The Protestant Evangelical Awakening
• Voltaire and Candide
• Politics in a Corrupt Society: William Arnall's Defense of Robert Walpole
• "Individualism," "Socialism," and "Social Science": Further Notes on a Process of Conceptual Formation, 1800-1850
• Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
• Enlightened Bureaucracy versus Enlightened Despotism in Baden, 1750-1792
• Literature and the Jacobite Cause
• The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour
• French Political Thought at the Accession of Louis XVI
• The General will Before Rousseau

Cited by

• Mandeville and France: The Reception of The Fable of the Bees in France and its Influence on the French Enlightenment
• The Correspondence of Henry St. John and Sir William Trumbull, 1698-1710
• The Fable of the Bees [wikipedia]