Oakeshott's memorable lectures on the history of political thought, delivered each year at the London School of Economics, will now be available in print for the first time as Volume II of his Selected Writings. Based on manuscripts in the LSE archive for 1966-67, the last year of Oakeshott's tenure as Professor of Political Science, these thirty lectures deal with Greek, Roman, mediaeval, and modern European political thought in a uniquely accessible manner. Scholars familiar with Oakesho...

The third edition of Ethics & International Affairs provides a fresh selection of classroom resources, ideal for courses in international relations, ethics, foreign policy, and related fields. Published with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, this collection contains some of the best contemporary scholarship on international ethics, written by a group of distinguished political scientists, political theorists, philosophers, applied ethicists, and economic development...

What obligations do nations have to protect citizens of other nations? As responsibility to our fellow human beings and to the stability of civilization over many years has ripened fully into a concept of a "just war," it follows naturally that the time has come to fill in the outlines of the realities and boundaries of what constitutes "just" humanitarian intervention.Even before the world changed radically on September 11, policymakers, scholars, and activists were engaging in de...

Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. All are examples where humanitarian intervention has been called into action. This timely and important new volume explores the legal and moral issues which emerge when a state uses military force in order to protect innocent people from violence perpetrated or permitted by the government of that state. Humanitarian intervention can be seen as a moral duty to protect but it is also subject to misuse as a front for imperialism without regard to internatio...

A superb introduction to the ethical aspects of war and peace, this collection of tightly integrated essays explores the reasons for waging war and for fighting with restraint as formulated in a diversity of ethical traditions, religious and secular. Beginning with the classic debate between political realism and natural law, this book seeks to expand the conversation by bringing in the voices of Judaism, Islam, Christian pacifism, and contemporary feminism. In so doing, it addresses a set...

This unique collection presents texts in international relations from Ancient Greece to the First World War. Major writers such as Thucydides, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant and John Stuart Mill are represented by extracts of their key works; less well-known international theorists including John of Paris, Cornelius van Bynkershoek and Friedrich List are also included. Fifty writers are anthologised in what is the largest such collection currently available. The texts, most...

This is the first comprehensive study of Michael Oakeshott as a philosopher rather than a political theorist, which is how most commentators have regarded him. Indeed, the careful reading of his published and unpublished writings that Terry Nardin provides here shows that Oakeshott's concerns have been primarily philosophical, not political. These writings go far beyond politics to offer a critical philosophy of human activity and of the disciplines that interpret and explain it. Oakeshott...

The word ‘rationality’ and its cognates, like ‘reason’, have multiple contexts and connotations. Rational calculation can be contrasted with rational interpretation. There is the rationality of proof and of persuasion, of tradition and of the criticism of tradition. Rationalism (and rationalists) can be reasonable or unreasonable. Reason is sometimes distinguished from revelation, superstition, convention, prejudice, emotion, and chance, but all of these also involve reasoning. In politics...

In a time of eroding sovereignty and resurgent nationalism, this collection provides a searching investigation of the moral foundations of the international order. Drawing on diverse philosophical and theological perspectives, the contributors debate the character of international society, the authority of international law and institutions, and the demands of international justice. In a series of philosophical essays, each followed by a critical commentary, the book considers the contribu...

This highly readable new collection of thirty pieces by Michael Oakeshott, almost all of which are previously unpublished, covers every decade of his intellectual career, and adds significantly to his contributions to the philosophy of historical understanding and political philosophy, as well as to the philosophy of education and aesthetics. The essays were intended mostly for lectures or seminars, and are consequently in an informal style that will be accessible to new readers as well as...

This volume brings together for the first time over a hundred of Oakeshott’s essays and reviews, written between 1926 and 1951, that until now have remained scattered through a variety of scholarly journals, periodicals and newspapers. A new editorial introduction explains how these pieces, including the lengthy essay on the philosophical nature of jurisprudence that occupies an important position in Oakeshott’s work, illuminate his other published writings. The collection throws new light...

The Vocabulary of a Modern European State is the companion volume to The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence and completes the enterprise of gathering together Oakeshott's previously scattered essays and reviews. As with all the other volumes in the series it contains an entirely new editorial introduction explaining how the writings it contains find their place in his work as a whole. It covers the years 1952 to 1988, the period during which Oakeshott wrote his definitive work, On Hu...