This volume continues the story of European political theorising by focusing on medieval and Renaissance thinkers. It includes extensive discussion of the practices that underpinned medieval political theories and which continued to play crucial roles in the eventual development of early-modern political institutions and debates. The author strikes a balance between trying to understand the philosophical cogency of medieval and Renaissance arguments on the one hand, elucidating why historically-suited medieval and Renaissance thinkers thought the ways they did about politics; and (...) why we often think otherwise. (shrink)

Self-ownership is a central concept not only in Anglo-American liberal/libertarian discourse but also in Marxism. This article investigates what it means to say that a person has fundamental entitlement to full property in himself. It looks at possible moments when pre-modern concepts of the self became modern ones, examining Locke’s Second Treatise and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The aim is to focus on continuities and discontinuities in the transition from pre-modern to modern concepts and practices of identity and agency (...) and the role that attitudes to property played within this transition. It also seeks to alert historians to the pitfalls of accepting contemporary conceptions of moral and civic agency found in normative political theory when they study pre-modern contexts and the people who lived their lives within them. It also attempts to expose certain modern limits on our understanding of society and people’s obligations to one another by rejecting the laws of the oikos as currently applied to the political domain. (shrink)