Table of Contents

Volume I: General Introduction
Acknowledgments
Notes on the text
1. Introduction: seeing things their way
2. The practice of history and the cult of the fact
3. Interpretation, rationality and truth
4. Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas
5. Motives, intentions and interpretation
6. Interpretation and the understanding of speech acts
7. 'Social meaning' and the explanation of social action
8. Moral principles and social change
9. The idea of a cultural lexicon
10. Retrospect: Studying rhetoric and conceptual change. Volume II. 1. Introduction
2. The rediscovery of republican values
3. Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the portrayal of virtuous government
4. Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the power and glory of republics
5. Republican virtues in an age of princes
6. Machiavelli on virtu and the maintenance of liberty
7. The idea of negative liberty: Machiavelli and modern perspectives
8. Thomas More's Utopia and the virtue of true nobility
9. Was there a Calvinist theory of revolution? 10. Moral ambiguity and the renaissance art of eloquence
11. John Milton and the politics of slavery
12. Classical liberty, Renaissance translation and the English civil war
13. From the state of princes to the modern state
14. Augustan party politics and Renaissance constitutional thought. Volume III:
1. Introduction: Hobbes's career in philosophy
2. Hobbes and the studia humanitatis
3. Hobbes's changing conception of a civil science
4. Hobbes on rhetoric and the construction of morality
5. Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state
6. Hobbes on the proper signification of liberty
7. Hobbes and the classical theory of laughter
8. History and ideology in the English revolution
9. The context of Hobbes's theory of political obligation
10. Conquest and consent: Hobbes and the engagement controversy
11. Hobbes and his disciples in France and England
12. Hobbes and the politics of the early Royal Society
13. Hobbes's last word on politics.