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The present article considers Francis Bacon's New Atlantis against the backdrop of Bacon's Short View to be taken of Great Britain and Spain, one of Bacon's least studied and most imperially audacious and bellicose texts. In the Short View to be taken of Great Britain and Spain, Bacon argues for a naval war and blockade of both the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish colonies in the Americas, advocating the British seizure of the latter. The article argues that the fulfillment of these imperials and colonial proposals is, in Bacon's view, a prerequisite and presupposition of the action of Bacon's New Atlantis.

AbstractThis article offers a textual and historical reconstruction of Francis Bacon's thought on imperial and colonial warfare. Bacon holds that conquest, acquisition of peoples and territory through force, followed by subjugation, confers a legal right and title. Imperial expansion is justified both by arguments concerning the interstate balance of power and by arguments related to internal order and stability. On Bacon's view, a successful state must be expansionist, for two key reasons: first, as long as its rivals are expansionist, a state must keep up and even try to outpace them, and, second, a surplus population will foment civil war unless this "surcharge of people" is farmed out to colonies. These arguments for imperial state expansion are held to justify both internal and external colonization and empire. Paradoxically, Bacon holds that the internally colonized may be treated with greater severity, as suppressed rebels, than the externally colonized, who are more fitly a subject of the ius gentium. Bacon holds that toleration offers both an imperial stratagem and a comparative justification for why English and British imperial expansion is more desirable than Spanish imperial expansion. The article concludes with reflections about how one might understand the place of imperial and colonial projects in Bacon's thought, contending that these projects are central to an understanding of Bacon's political aims and thought more broadly.

This article situates Carl Schmitt's The Tyranny of Values (1960/1967/1979) within the context of Schmitt's 1940s and 1950s op-ed campaign for full amnesty for Nazi war criminals as well as the context of the Veit Harlan trials and the 1958 Lüth judgment of the German Constitutional Court. The article further examines the revisions to Schmitt's 1967 version of the text in the light of Karl Löwith's criticisms of Schmitt in an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 1964. The article argues that The Tyranny of Values is a work of post-Second World War Nazi apologetics, in which Nazi racial theory can be seen being put to polemical ends in the 1960s and 1970s. The article concludes with broader reflections on the relation of Schmitt's The Tyranny of Values to Nazi discourse in the aftermath of the Second World War and the history of Nazism post-1945.

This dissertation examines war and peace in the political thought of Francis Bacon, moving from internal warfare (civil war) outward via wars of expansion, attrition, and empire to Bacon's conception of peace. The first chapter considers Bacon's views of the causes of civil war and strife within the body politic in relation to the contemporary and near-contemporary views held by Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bodin, and Edward Forset, concluding that for Bacon civil wars are caused by poverty and discontentment, both of which are themselves caused by excess population. Excess population may, in Bacon's assessment, best be reduced by being spread outward in wars for colonies, expansion, and empire and by wars of attrition in which a state engages in wars of aggression for the purposes of killing its own population. The second chapter of the dissertation examines Bacon's views of empire based upon the title of conquest and Bacon's preference for the government of colonies under martial law. Wars for colonies, expansion, and empire, do not, in Bacon's assessment, justify themselves, but had to be legitimized in terms of the justifications of war that then predominated. Chapters three and four of the dissertation thus examine Bacon's deployments of and innovations within the just war tradition and within the tradition of justifying war on religious grounds. Here, Bacon's views are contrasted with those of his contemporaries Justus Lipsius and Alberico Gentili. The final chapter of the dissertation examines Bacon's views of peace and his understanding of true peace as the incapacity of rival states and opponents to do harm. The chapter argues that this view of peace is in concord with Bacon's views of empire and amounts to an understanding of peace as hegemony. The final chapter further examines Bacon's distaste for the 1604 Treaty of London and offers a reading of Bacon's classic fable, The New Atlantis, in light of Bacon's views on peace. The dissertation concludes with a summation of its findings alongside a consideration of avenues for future research.

An invaluable reflection on the essence of liberal democracy-and an ideal introduction to the work of political philosopher Raymond AronLiberty and Equality is the first English translation of the last lecture delivered at the Collège de France by Raymond Aron, one of the most influential political and social thinkers of the twentieth century. In this important work, the most prominent French liberal intellectual of the Cold War era presents his views on the core values of liberal democracy: liberty and equality. At the same time, he provides an ideal introduction to key aspects of his thought.Ranging from Soviet ideology to Watergate, Aron reflects on root concepts of democracy and representative government, articulates a notion of liberty or freedom as equal right as distinct from equal outcome, and discusses different kinds of liberties: personal, political, religious, and social. In search of a common truth or at least a common good, and analyzing what he perceives as the crisis of liberal democracies, Aron opens a space for reexamining the relation between liberty and equality

Many of Carl Schmitt's major works have by now been translated, with two notable exceptions: Schmitt's two early monographs Statute and Judgment (first published in 1912) and The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual (first published in 1914). In these two works Schmitt presents a theory of adjudication as well as an account of the state's role in the realization of the rule of law, which together form the theoretical basis on which Schmitt later developed his political and constitutional theory. This new book makes these two key texts available in English translation for the first time, together with an introduction that relates the texts to their historical context, to Schmitt's other works, and to contemporary discussions in legal and constitutional theory.