Political Thought and Political Contexts: England 1640-1700
Justin Champion and Blair Worden
The history of political thought is generally studied either separately from, or as a distinct branch of, the study of history. But in the seventeenth century works of political theory were not written to gain entry into syllabuses in the history of political thought. They were composed, as historians have increasingly come to recognise, to influence events. The course relates well-known texts of political theory to the contexts from which they emerged and from which they addressed. It concentrates on the political arguments that arose from the civil wars of 1640-60; from the exclusion crisis of 1679-81; and from the hostility to the Whig ascendancy and to standing armies after the Revolution of 1688. The writers principally studied are Henry Parker, Thomas Hobbes, the Levellers, James Harrington, Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, Walter Moyle, Robert Molesworth and John Toland.
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