Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Select Pivotal Ideas, Volume II: ’Despotism’ to ’Law, common’

The editors have invited contributions from scholars of many countries, especially those scholars who have shown a particular awareness of the cultural and historical affiliations of their respective disciplines with other allied fields. Departmental and national boundaries have thus been crossed in the cooperative exchange of ideas and cultural perspectives among editors and contributors. We cannot emphasize too strongly the point expressed in the subtitle of our work, that we are presenting a varied array of selected pivotal topics in intellectual history and of methods of writing about such topics. Although the number of topics discussed is large, we do not pretend that these volumes represent the entire range of intellectual history. To attempt a complete history of ideas would be to attempt (of course, in vain) to exhaust the history of the human mind; hence, the limited number of topics dealt with, and even these contain lacunae which we hope will encourage further studies. Students of the history of ideas should profit from the substance and methods of interpretation contained in the scholarship of our contributors, and in future research the cross-references, bibliographies, and index should be valuable aids. The topics chosen are intended to exhibit the intriguing variety of ways in which ideas in one domain tend to migrate into other domains. The diffusion of these ideas may be traced in three directions: horizontally across disciplines in a given cultural period, vertically or chronologically through the ages, and "in depth" by analysis of the internal structure of pervasive and pivotal ideas. Internal analysis is needed if one is to discover the component ideas that have become elements of newer and larger thoughts or movements.