Foundations of Modern International Thought

This insightful and wide-ranging volume traces the genesis of international intellectual thought, connecting international and global history with intellectual history.

David Armitage (Author)

9780521001694, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 29 November 2012

311 pages, 2 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.4 cm, 0.49 kg

'… profound and erudite …' Gilles Andréani, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy

Between the early seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, major European political thinkers first began to look outside their national borders and envisage a world of competitive, equal sovereign states inhabiting an international sphere that ultimately encompassed the whole globe. In this insightful and wide-ranging work, David Armitage – one of the world's leading historians of political thought – traces the genesis of this international turn in intellectual history. Foundations of Modern International Thought combines important methodological essays, which consider the genealogy of globalisation and the parallel histories of empires and oceans, with fresh considerations of leading figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Burke and Bentham in the history of international thought. The culmination of more than a decade's reflection and research on these issues, this book restores the often overlooked international dimensions to intellectual history and recovers the intellectual dimensions of international history.

Introduction: rethinking the foundations of modern international thought
Part I. Historiographical Foundations: 1. The international turn in intellectual history
2. Is there a pre-history of globalisation?
3. The elephant and the whale: empires and oceans in world history
Part II. Seventeenth-Century Foundations: Hobbes and Locke: 4. Hobbes and the foundations of modern international thought
5. John Locke's international thought
6. John Locke, Carolina and the Two Treatises of Government
7. John Locke: theorist of empire?
Part III. Eighteenth-Century Foundations: 8. Parliament and international law in eighteenth-century Britain
9. Edmund Burke and Reason of State
10. Globalising Jeremy Bentham
Part IV. Building on the Foundations: Making States since 1776: 11. The Declaration of Independence and international law
12. Declarations of independence, 1776–2012.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History [HB]