Foundations of modern political thought Vol.1

volume 1 : the Renaissance

The two volumes of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought are intended as both an introduction to the period for students, and a presentation and justification of a particular approach to the interpretation of historical texts. Volume 1 deals with the Renaissance, Volume 2 with the Age of Reformation.

Quentin Skinner gives an outline account of all the principal texts of the period, discussing in turn the chief political writings of Dante, Marsilius, Bartolus, Machiavelli, Erasmus and More, Luther and Calvin, Bodin and the Calvinist revolutionaries. But he also examines a very large number of lesser writers in order to explain the general social and intellectual context in which these leading theorists worked. He thus presents the history not as a procession of 'classic texts' but as the development of ideologies within which the texts themselves are more readily intelligible. Professor Skinner traces the gradual emergence of the vocabulary of modern political thought, and in particular the crucial concept of the State. The reader is given an insight into the actual processes of the formation of ideologies and into some of the linkages between political theory and practice.

Widely recognised as one of the classic pieces of modern historical scholarship, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought won the Wolfson Prize for History for 1979 and was selected by The Times Literary Supplement as one of the 100 most influential books of the last fifty years.