Selections from Early Political Writings of German Romanticism (Cambridge History of Political Thought Original Series, Facsimile Edition)

Author: (German) Besser translated
Publisher:
Publishing Time: 2003-05-01
Features: In the field of political theory, the "Cambridge History of Political Thought Original Series" has firmly established its position as a major student textbook series. This series aims to enable students to obtain all the most important original works of Western political thought from ancient Greece to the early 20th century. It includes 7 famous classic works, but at the same time, it expands the traditional evaluation criteria to include a wide range of less famous works. Many of these works had never had a modern English version available before. As far as possible, the selected original works are published in their complete and unabbreviated form, with translations specifically arranged for the purpose of this series. Each book has a critical introduction, plus a historical timeline, biographical sketches, further reading guides, as well as necessary glossaries and annotations to the original text. The ultimate goal of this series is to provide a clear outline of the entire development of Western political thought. For a list of published works in this series, please refer to the back of the book.
The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics contains all the essential political writings of Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Novalis during the formative period of romantic thought (1797 to 1803). While the political thought of the German Romantics has been generally recognized as important, it has been little studied, and most of the texts have been unavailable in English until now. The early Romantics had an ambition still relevant to contemporary political thought: to find a middle path between conservatism and liberalism, between an ethic of community and the freedom of the individual.
Author Bio: Frederick C. Beiser's edition comprises all kinds of texts relevant for understanding the political ideas of the early romantic circles in Berlin and Jena—essays, lectures, aphorisms, chapters from books, and jotting from notebooks. All have been translated anew, many for the first time. Frederick C. Beiser is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has also authored The Fate of Reason (Harvard, 1987) and Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism (Harvard, 1992), and edited The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (1992).