{"title":"Biancamaria Fontana","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the insightful works of Biancamaria Fontana, a distinguished scholar exploring the evolution of political thought. Discover her analyses of key Enlightenment thinkers and the shaping of modern ideologies.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"germaine-de-stael-book-biancamaria-fontana-9780691169040","title":"Germaine de Stael","description":"Germaine de Stael (1766-1817) is perhaps best known today as a novelist, literary critic, and outspoken and independent thinker. Yet she was also a prominent figure in politics during the French Revolution. Biancamaria Fontana sheds new light on this often overlooked aspect of Stael's life and work, bringing vividly to life her unique experience as a political actor in a world where women had no place.  The banker's daughter who became one of Europe's best-connected intellectuals, Stael was an exceptionally talented woman who achieved a degree of public influence to which not even her wealth and privilege would normally have entitled her. During the Revolution, when the lives of so many around her were destroyed, she succeeded in carving out a unique path for herself and making her views heard, first by the powerful men around her, later by the European public at large. Fontana provides the first in-depth look at her substantial output of writings on the theory and practice of the exercise of power, setting in sharp relief the dimension of Stael's life that she cared most about--politics. She was fascinated by the nature of public opinion, and believed that viable political regimes were founded on public trust and popular consensus. Fontana shows how Stael's ideas were shaped by the remarkable times in which she lived, and argues that it is only through a consideration of her political insights that we can fully understand Stael's legacy and its enduring relevance for us today.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49573156356369,"sku":"GOR007746220","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50360218779921,"sku":"CIN0691169047G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691169047.jpg?v=1772275695"},{"product_id":"montaigne-s-politics-book-biancamaria-fontana-9780691131221","title":"Montaigne's Politics","description":"Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) is principally known today as a literary figure--the inventor of the modern essay and the pioneer of autobiographical self-exploration who retired from politics in midlife to write his private, philosophical, and apolitical Essais. But, as Biancamaria Fontana argues in Montaigne's Politics, a novel, vivid account of the political meaning of the Essais in the context of Montaigne's life and times, his retirement from the Bordeaux parliament in 1570 \"could be said to have marked the beginning, rather than the end, of his public career.\" He later served as mayor of Bordeaux and advisor to King Henry of Navarre, and, as Fontana argues, Montaigne's Essais very much reflect his ongoing involvement and preoccupation with contemporary politics--particularly the politics of France's civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. Fontana shows that the Essais, although written as a record of Montaigne's personal experiences, do nothing less than set forth the first major critique of France's ancien regime, anticipating the main themes of Enlightenment writers such as Voltaire and Diderot.\nChallenging the views that Montaigne was politically aloof or evasive, or that he was a conservative skeptic and supporter of absolute monarchy, Fontana explores many of the central political issues in Montaigne's work--the reform of legal institutions, the prospects of religious toleration, the role of public opinion, and the legitimacy of political regimes.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50102683631889,"sku":"GOR013856178","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691131228.jpg?v=1750784036"},{"product_id":"invention-of-the-modern-republic-book-biancamaria-fontana-9780521430883","title":"The Invention of the Modern Republic","description":"Why are republics the most common form of political organization, and the one most readily associated with modern democracy, when until the late eighteenth-century it was generally believed that republics could function only in small urban territories with considerable ethical and political cohesion? In The Invention of the Modern Republic a team of highly distinguished historians of ideas answers this question, and examines the origins of republican governments in America and Europe. These essays explain why from 1776 onwards republics took the place of monarchies as the dominant form of government in the modern world. Given the renewed interest in the functioning and evolution of democratic institutions (especially in their relation with market economies) the issues discussed in The Invention of the Modern Republic have a powerful contemporary resonance.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50137923748113,"sku":"CIN0521430887G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52337450909969,"sku":"NLS9780521430883","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0521430887.jpg?v=1751135116"},{"product_id":"benjamin-constant-and-the-post-revolutionary-mind-book-biancamaria-fontana-9780300049954","title":"Benjamin Constant and the Post Revolutionary Mind","description":"The Swiss writer and political theorist Benjamin Constant was a key figure in the early 19th century attempt to come to terms with the new political world created by the French Revolution of 1789. In this book, Biancamaria Fontana presents an overview of Constant's life and writings, showing the unity of his vision and exploring analogies between the issues he discussed and those that confront modern democratic states today. According to Fontana, Constant indicated the principles and designed the constitutional arrangements best suited for a new society that was to be ruled by popular sovereignty and direct political representationa nd oriented toward economic growth and social equality. What made Constant's contribution unique, was the fact that he did not confine himself to investigating the social and political characteristics of the new order, but explored its implications from the perspective of individual existential experience. In his writings on religion, his literary works, and his journals, he analyzes the changes that the end of the culture of the old regime had brought to the moral, aesthetic, and emotional life of the members of the post-revolutionary society. Constant's intelligence, sensibility, and literary imagination were especially directed toward investigating the strategies that would allow people to operate individually and collectively in this new world without apparent rules, in which escaping from the tyranny of dogmatism and absolute authority meant confronting the new dangers of solipsism, moral relativism, and alienation. Fontana shows how Constant accepted the challenge of the new condition, exposing its precariousness and contradictions as well as its hopes and rewards.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50415571796241,"sku":"GOR004373140","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0300049951.jpg?v=1750780198"},{"product_id":"rethinking-the-politics-of-commercial-society-book-biancamaria-fontana-9780521069564","title":"Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society","description":"This book explores the sources of modern British liberalism through a study of the Edinburgh Review, the most influential and controversial early nineteenth-century British periodical. Founded by a group of young Scottish intellectuals in 1802, the Review served as a principal channel through which the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment gained wider currency, and did much to popularize the doctrines of economic and political reform. As Dr Fontana shows in this lucid and keen analysis, the first thirty years in the life of the Review clearly display the new social and economic problems confronting European society in the aftermath of the French Revolution.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52135666549009,"sku":"NLS9780521069564","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52735511888145,"sku":"NIN9780521069564","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780521069564.jpg?v=1757550262"},{"product_id":"invention-of-the-modern-republic-book-biancamaria-fontana-9780521033763","title":"The Invention of the Modern Republic","description":"Why are republics the most common form of political organization, and the one most readily associated with modern democracy, when until the late eighteenth-century it was generally believed that republics could function only in small urban territories with considerable ethical and political cohesion? In The Invention of the Modern Republic a team of highly distinguished historians of ideas answers this question, and examines the origins of republican governments in America and Europe. These essays explain why from 1776 onwards republics took the place of monarchies as the dominant form of government in the modern world. Given the renewed interest in the functioning and evolution of democratic institutions (especially in their relation with market economies) the issues discussed in The Invention of the Modern Republic have a powerful contemporary resonance.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52143177400593,"sku":"NLS9780521033763","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52735387140369,"sku":"NIN9780521033763","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780521033763.jpg?v=1757583322"},{"product_id":"rethinking-the-politics-of-commercial-society-book-biancamaria-fontana-9780521303354","title":"Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society","description":"This book explores the sources of modern British liberalism through a study of the Edinburgh Review, the most influential and controversial early nineteenth-century British periodical. Founded by a group of young Scottish intellectuals in 1802, the Review served as a principal channel through which the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment gained wider currency, and did much to popularize the doctrines of economic and political reform. 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This book shifts the focus from the regime to the remarkable men who shaped it – a cohort of jurists, engineers and administrators who survived the Reign of Terror and set out to safeguard the Revolution’s most important achievements. Working not on battlefields but in offices and council chambers, they built durable laws and institutions that still underpin modern France. The first English-language study on the topic in fifty years, Desk Revolutionaries offers an engaging, character-driven narrative that also sheds light on the enduring power of technical experts in government, inviting reflection on how democracies are made – and maintained.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53237250294033,"sku":"NGR9781836392491","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53698618523921,"sku":"NLS9781836392491","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781836392491.jpg?v=1782382415"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-biancamaria-fontana.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}