The Circle of Rights Expands: Modern Political Thought After the Reformation, 1521 (Luther), to 1762 (Rousseau) (Mcgill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas)

The Circle of Rights Expands explores ideas of limit on political authority through a fresh reading of the political philosophy of the fifteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, including the work of representative thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, Athusius, Grotius, Hobbes, and Hume. Arthur Monahan examines problems of sovereignty, religious toleration, and individual rights, emphasizing the relationship between such individual rights and economic change. Monahan's reading of individual philosophers, including the work of Spinoza, sixteenth-century advocates of religious toleration, and the radical Diggers and Levellers of England in the mid- seventeenth century, constitutes a convincing overview of the political theory of the period. This is the last volume in Monahan's trilogy on the effect of medieval thinking and practice on modern ideas about democracy.