Social Institutions and the Politics of Recognition: From the Reformation to the French Revolution

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This second volume continues the story told in the first by focusing on the writings of a selection of seminal thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in England, the German speaking world and in France, ending with the debate around the French Revolution of 1789.

Tony Burns discusses the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Selden, Sir Matthew Hale, John Locke, Samuel Clarke, Johannes Althusius, Samuel Pufendorf, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Jean Barbeyrac, the anonymous author of Militaire philosophe, Claude Buffier, labb de Saint-Pierre, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, labb de Sieys, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft and Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon. The author concludes with an analysis of the concept of administration in the writings of Saint-Simon, as a point of transition to the discussion of the themes of bureaucracy, technocracy and managerialism in the third volume.

Reviews

In this second volume on the politics of recognition in social institutions, Tony Burns provides a masterful assessment of the ideas of thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is an outstanding contribution to the history of political thought, drawing our gaze away from a narrow focus on the state to those institutions in civil society, which are often so decisive in policy-making. I highly recommend this book! -- Andreas Bieler, Professor of Political Economy, University of Nottingham

Author Bio

Tony Burns is professor of political theory in the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, and director of its Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ).