(Paperback)

Focusing on the theories of human motivation that emerged during the transition from feudalism to the modern period, this book includes essays on the relationship between politics and the passions from Machiavelli to Bentham. It addresses the crisis of moral and philosophical discourse in the early modern period.

(Paperback)

(Hardback)

Why did the language of contract become the dominant metaphor for the relationship between subject and sovereign in mid-seventeenth-century England In Wayward Contracts, Victoria Kahn takes issue with the usual explanation for the emergence of contract theory in terms of the origins of liberalism, with its notions of autonomy, liberty, and equalit