Angus Gowland (UCL)

This course analyses key works of political thought in Europe in the period c. 1350-1651, surveying the development and flourishing of classical humanist theories of monarchy and republicanism in Italy and subsequently in Northern Europe. It involves detailed study of a number of influential authors, concentrating on those in the humanist tradition, such as Francesco Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, Niccolò Machiavelli, Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, Francesco Guicciardini, Michel de Montaigne, Jean Bodin, and Justus Lipsius. Emphasis is placed throughout both on the problematic character of the relationship between political theory and philosophical knowledge – especially in the field of ethics – and on the various political, religious and social contexts in which Renaissance political discourse was situated.  Key concepts, themes and debates addressed at various stages in the course include republicanism, monarchy, liberty, virtue, absolutism, and reason of state. The course ends by considering the waning of classical humanism in the seventeenth century and the attack mounted upon humanist political thought in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651).