The Contested History of Autonomy: Interpreting European Modernity (Europe’s Legacy in the Modern World) - Hardcover

Rosich, Gerard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 135004864X ISBN 13: 9781350048645

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018

Synopsis

The Contested History of Autonomy examines the concept of autonomy in modern times. It presents the history of modernity as constituted by the tension between sovereignty and autonomy and offers a critical interpretation of European modernity from a global perspective.

The book shows, in contrast to the standard view of its invention, that autonomy (re)emerged as a defining quality of modernity in early modern Europe. Gerard Rosich looks at how the concept is first used politically, in opposition to the rival concept of sovereignty, as an attribute of a collective-self in struggle against imperial domination. Subsequently the book presents a range of historical developments as significant events in the history of imperialism which are connected at once with the consolidation of the concept of sovereignty and with a western view of modernity. Additionally, the book provides an interpretation of the history of globalization based on this connection.

Rosich discusses the conceptual shortcomings and historical inadequacy of the traditional western view of modernity against the background of recent breakthroughs in world history. In doing so, it reconstructs an alternative interpretation of modernity associated with the history of autonomy as it appeared in early modern Europe, before looking to the present and the ongoing tension between 'sovereignty' and 'autonomy' that exists.

This is a groundbreaking study that will be of immense value to scholars researching modern Europe and its relationship with the World.

About this title

About the Authors

Gerard Rosich is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of World Cultures at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the co-editor, along with Peter Wagner, of The Trouble with Democracy: Political Modernity in the 21st Century (2016).

Martti Koskenniemi is Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki, Hauser Global Visiting Professor of Law at New York University and Director of the Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights.

Annabel Brett is Professor of Political Thought and History and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is the author of Changes of State: Nature and the limits of the city in early modern natural law (2011) and Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual rights in later scholastic thought (1997). She is also the editor and translator of Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace (2005).

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 135004864X
• ISBN 13: 9781350048645
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240