This book outlines and illustrates a new approach to intellectual history - the history of "concepts". In distinction to the study of more traditional units of analysis, (authors, texts, traditions, discourses) conceptual history systematically combines the history of ideas and language with social[...]
The essential political writings of Montesquieu - a substantial abridgment of "The Spirit of the Laws", plus judicious selections from "The Persian Letters" and "Considerations of the Romans' Greatness and Decline" - are masterfully translated by Melvin Richter. Prefaced by a new fifty-page introduc[...]