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In The Psychology of Inequality, Michael Locke McLendon looks to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thought for insight into the personal and social pathologies that plague commercial and democratic societies. He emphasizes the way Rousseau appropriated and modified the notion of self-love, or amour-propre, found in Augustine and various early modern thinkers. McLendon traces the concept in Rousseau's work and reveals it to be a form of selfish vanity that mimics aspects of Homeric honor culture and, in the modern world, shapes the outlook of the wealthy and powerful as well as the underlying assumptions of meritocratic ideals. According to McLendon, Rousseau's elucidation of amour-propre describes a d...
How the philosophers and polemicists of eighteenth-century Britain used ridicule in the service of religious toleration, abolition, and political justice The relaxing of censorship in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century led to an explosion of satires, caricatures, and comic hoaxes. This new vogue for ridicule unleashed moral panic and prompted warnings that it would corrupt public debate. But ridicule also had vocal defenders who saw it as a means to expose hypocrisy, unsettle the arrogant, and deflate the powerful. Uncivil Mirth examines how leading thinkers of the period searched for a humane form of ridicule, one that served the causes of religious toleration, the abolition of t...
Robin Douglass presents the first comprehensive study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's engagement with Thomas Hobbes. Douglass reconstructs the intellectual context of this engagement to reveal the deeply polemical character of Rousseau's critique of Hobbes and to show how Rousseau sought to expose that much modern natural law and doux commerce theory was, despite its protestations to the contrary, indebted to a Hobbesian account of human nature and the origins of society. Throughout the book Douglass explores the reasons why Rousseau both followed and departed from Hobbes in different places, thereby supplying a nuanced account of the relationship between the two thinkers, which resists the tempt...
Hobbes's Philosophy of Religion presents a new scholarly interpretation of Hobbes's treatment of religious speech and practice. It argues that the key to Hobbes's treatment of religion is his theory of religious language. According to Hobbes, the proper function of religious language is not to describe, state facts, or affirm truths. Instead, such talk ought only to express attitudes of honour, reverence, and humility before the incomprehensible great cause of nature. His theory valorises the traditional discourses of theism, natural religion, and revealed religion, but only as an expression of reverence without descriptive import. Hobbes is sincerely pious, rejecting atheism and irreligion....
The unlikely story of how Americans canonized Adam Smith as the patron saint of free markets Originally published in 1776, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was lauded by America’s founders as a landmark work of Enlightenment thinking about national wealth, statecraft, and moral virtue. Today, Smith is one of the most influential icons of economic thought in America. Glory Liu traces how generations of Americans have read, reinterpreted, and weaponized Smith’s ideas, revealing how his popular image as a champion of American-style capitalism and free markets is a historical invention. Drawing on a trove of illuminating archival materials, Liu tells the story of how an unassuming Scotti...
Includes the decisions of the Supreme Courts of Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas, and Court of Appeals of Kentucky; Aug./Dec. 1886-May/Aug. 1892, Court of Appeals of Texas; Aug. 1892/Feb. 1893-Jan./Feb. 1928, Courts of Civil and Criminal Appeals of Texas; Apr./June 1896-Aug./Nov. 1907, Court of Appeals of Indian Territory; May/June 1927-Jan./Feb. 1928, Courts of Appeals of Missouri and Commission of Appeals of Texas.
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