In his political thought, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy’s premier jurist, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, adopted a Hobbesian state of nature, a Hobbesian social contract, and a Hobbesian idea of law as collective will; he fused these ideas with the Roman legal tradition, a tradition that he trained in and later ordered when he wrote his masterpiece, the Three Books on the Origins of the Civil Law. But Gravina was more than a Roman Hobbesian. While he held a Hobbesian view of political (...) legitimacy, he also held an anti-Hobbesian view of human life’s true ends. Gravina set out to restore these true ends – reason, virtue, and internal tranquility – and to do that he turned to Plato. In synthesizing Hobbes’s legal innovations with prior understandings of law, Gravina demonstrates just how far those innovations reached in eighteenth-century Europe. (shrink)

Montesquieu and the Spirit of Rome argues that the eighteenth-century French author Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755) developed a novel, comprehensive account of Roman history that framed his new political science and grounded his political teachings. Rome's legacy in early-modern thought turns on the work of Montesquieu, and through Rome Montesquieu articulated the strengths and weaknesses of the modern state-the moderation that can distinguish it and sources of extremism that must haunt it. This book (...) is the first to unify Montesquieu's Roman thoughts; it is the first to reconstruct the Rome that was one of his most powerful legacies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Montesquieu and the Spirit of Rome restores Rome to its proper place at the peak of Montesquieu's thought and Montesquieu's thought to its proper place in the history of classical study. It treats Montesquieu as what he claimed to be - a jurist, a poet, a historian, and a political writer of the first rank, ad it revives his hard-nosed defence of moderation. (shrink)