Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- General preface
- Full contents: Volumes 1–3
- Acknowledgements
- Conventions
- 1 Introduction: The reality of the Renaissance
- 2 The rediscovery of republican values
- 3 Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the portrayal of virtuous government
- 4 Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the power and glory of republics
- 5 Republican virtues in an age of princes
- 6 Machiavelli on virtù and the maintenance of liberty
- 7 The idea of negative liberty: Machiavellian and modern perspectives
- 8 Thomas More's Utopia and the virtue of true nobility
- 9 Humanism, scholasticism and popular sovereignty
- 10 Moral ambiguity and the Renaissance art of eloquence
- 11 John Milton and the politics of slavery
- 12 Classical liberty, Renaissance translation and the English civil war
- 13 Augustan party politics and Renaissance constitutional thought
- 14 From the state of princes to the person of the state
- Bibliographies
- Index
- Plate section
13 - Augustan party politics and Renaissance constitutional thought
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- General preface
- Full contents: Volumes 1–3
- Acknowledgements
- Conventions
- 1 Introduction: The reality of the Renaissance
- 2 The rediscovery of republican values
- 3 Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the portrayal of virtuous government
- 4 Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the power and glory of republics
- 5 Republican virtues in an age of princes
- 6 Machiavelli on virtù and the maintenance of liberty
- 7 The idea of negative liberty: Machiavellian and modern perspectives
- 8 Thomas More's Utopia and the virtue of true nobility
- 9 Humanism, scholasticism and popular sovereignty
- 10 Moral ambiguity and the Renaissance art of eloquence
- 11 John Milton and the politics of slavery
- 12 Classical liberty, Renaissance translation and the English civil war
- 13 Augustan party politics and Renaissance constitutional thought
- 14 From the state of princes to the person of the state
- Bibliographies
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
In the discussion of his political career, as in his career itself, Lord Bolingbroke has been less fortunate than his lifelong rival, Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole's rise to power and the conduct of his administration have been classically analysed in the two volumes of Sir John Plumb's biography, but the conduct of Bolingbroke's opposition has been less satisfactorily discussed. This can no longer be explained by citing Edmund Burke's sneering dismissal: ‘Who now reads Bolingbroke?’ A growing number of scholars do, and a lengthening list of studies have in consequence been devoted in recent years to establishing the facts about Bolingbroke's career and to analysing his political works. What seems unsatisfactory about these studies is not that they have failed to agree about the facts or in general to present them fairly and well. It is rather that the facts seem to have been fitted into inappropriate schemes of explanation. Accordingly, my aim in what follows will not primarily be to provide new information about Bolingbroke and his party of opposition to Walpole's government. It will rather be to argue that the existing facts fit a theory about the behaviour of Bolingbroke and his party which does not seem to have been entertained by any of Bolingbroke's interpreters, but which seems to me to offer the best explanation of his political career.
The thesis I wish to advance can be stated in a general as well as a more specific form.
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- Visions of Politics , pp. 344 - 367Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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