Republics Ancient and Modern, Volume II: New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought [Paperback]

Paul A. Rahe (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 516 pages
• Publisher: University of N. Carolina Press (August 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807844748
• ISBN-13: 978-0807844748
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #988,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

After reading Litterae Humaniores at Wadham College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship from 1971-1974, Paul A. Rahe completed a Ph.D. in ancient history at Yale University under the direction of Donald Kagan in 1977. In subsequent years, he taught at Cornell University, Franklin and Marshall College, and the University of Tulsa, where he spent twenty-four years before accepting a position at Hillsdale College, where he is Professor of History and holds The Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage.

Professor Rahe's entire scholarly career has been focused on studying the origins and evolution of self-government within the West. His range is considerable. His first book, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (1992), was 1200 pages in length and surveyed the origins and development of self-government in ancient Greece and Rome, its re-emergence in a new form in the Middle Ages, the transformation it underwent at the hands of the political philosophers of early modernity, and the statesmanship of the American Founding Fathers. Within the first thirteen months of publication, the hardback edition sold out. Thereafter, it reappeared as an alternative selection of the History Book Club. In 1994, it was reissued in a three-volume paperback edition by the University of North Carolina Press, and it remains in print.

In the course of his career, Professor Rahe has published dozens of chapters on related subjects in edited books and scholarly articles in journals such as The American Journal of Philology, Historia, The American Journal of Archaeology, The American Historical Review, The Review of Politics, The American Journal of Business and Professional Ethics, The Journal of the Historical Society, The National Interest, The Woodrow Wilson Quarterly, and History of Political Thought. He spent two years in Istanbul, Turkey in the mid-1980s as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs; he has been awarded research fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Earhart Foundation; and he has held research fellowships at the Center for Hellenic Study, the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D. C. , Clare College at Cambridge University, All Souls College at Oxford University, and the American Academy in Berlin; and he has given a host of public lectures at universities in the United States and abroad--most recently at the Hebrew University and at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, at the Sorbonne in Paris, at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in England and the Free University in Berlin. In 1997-98, he was named to the Templeton Honor Rolls for Education in a Free Society by The John M. Templeton Foundation, and in 2006 the Society for French Historical Studies awarded him the Koren Prize for the Best Article Published in French History the preceding year.

Professor Rahe co-edited Montesquieu's Science of Politics: Essays on the Spirit of Laws (2001) with David W. Carrithers and Michael A. Mosher, and he edited Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy (2006). His second book, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic, which examines the political thought inspired by the abortive republican experiment that took place in England in the period stretching from 1649 to 1660, was published by Cambridge University Press in April, 2008. His third and fourth books, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic and Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville on the Modern Prospect, were published by Yale University Press in 2009. For his fifth book, The Spartan Way of War, which he hopes to finish in 2011 or 2012, Professor Rahe has received a contract from Yale University Press.

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5.0 out of 5 stars The core ideas that have shaped our modern world, August 28, 2011

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This review is from: Republics Ancient and Modern, Volume II: New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought (Paperback)

"New Modes & Orders" by Paul Rahe is an exceptionally well-written intellectual history of the Enlightenment. Comprising book two in his outstanding "Republics Ancient & Modern" trilogy, "New Modes & Orders" shows how philosophers working around the middle of the past millennium succeeded in breaking Western society away from the ancien regime system of monarchy and priestcraft; and setting the stage for a new order of ages. Displaying consummate mastery of his subject matter, Mr. Rahe's thoroughly engaging book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the core ideas that have shaped our modern world.

Mr. Rahe takes care to contextualize the subject matter which helps make the important debates of centuries past come alive. We are reminded that philosophers deployed the art of dissimulation to avoid the wrath of an intolerant Catholic church in service to monarchy; an insight that is key to unraveling the writings of important philosophers including Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Harrington, Locke and dozens more. Mr. Rahe demonstrates how the Enlightenment sought to build a human-centered form of self-governance that was based on dispassionate reason and science; and not the whims of an unpredictably passionate God or king.

Mr. Rahe discusses various aspects of Enlightenment thought including the dignity of labor, virtue and vice, natural science and technology, political architecture, governance, humanity, and more. Understanding that the masses 'cannot know' but must be made to 'believe' (Locke), Mr. Rahe shows how Christian teachings that traditionally had stressed judgement and fear were coopted by savvy philosophers to advance their agenda. We see how Protestant leaders encouraged their parishioners to use their God-given faculties to develop the sciences and engage in commercial society; through which the faithful's good works might create peace, prosperity and salvation. As a result, to the extent that deists such as Benjamin Franklin could successfully espouse a moral code of industriousness, discipline and autonomy to guide human actions by the latter part of the 18th century, a wide-spread belief in the divine right of kings was all but dead.

On that point, Mr. Rahe briefly discusses how the British people at this historic juncture were too riven by deep-rooted factions that more or less broke along Catholic and Protestant lines to free themselves from the ancien regime; whereas the American colonies were more than primed for revolution. It is recommended that you read Republics Ancient & Modern, Vol. 1: The Ancien Régime in Classical Greece to understand how the Founding Fathers drew inspiration from the public spiritedness of Greece (and more specifically, of democracy as a lived experience); and Republics Ancient and Modern, Volume III: Inventions of Prudence: Constituting the American Regime to learn how Enlightenment ideas were specifically applied to the architecting of the United States government. The deep insights to be gained from reading Mr. Rahe include a more sophisticated appreciation for the underlying values that make a just, civil and progressive society possible - lessons that could not be more relevant to us than today.