Donald R. Kelley

The Medieval and Early Modern World tells the colorful story of a pivotal period in human history, an era that is crucial to understanding our own times. The expansion of trade and city life, the spread and reform of religious institutions, the rise of regional empires and local feudal regimes, and revolutionary advances in science and technology laid the foundation for the modern world. Told through the words and experiences of the people who lived it kings, queens, and commoners, priests and lay people, explorers, scientists, artists, and world travelers this is a world history for a new generation.

The world is becoming more complex, fraught with increasing possibilities for conflict over national rivalries, economic competition, and cultural and ideological fault lines. Understanding a Changing World: Alternative Futures of the International System offers a structured and theoretically grounded way to think about the forces that animate change and the alternative futures they may create.The existing widely-used textbooks in international relations and global studies do not adequately address this need. At best they offer a concluding chapter on what might come next, usually citing a few key works, most of which are listed below. Some build upon the conventional paradigms of the realist, liberal, or constructivist approaches to extrapolate possible futures. The former approach usually produces a hit-and-miss view of the future, while the latter builds on familiar paradigms which are too general to lead to detailed analysis or specific future scenarios.

The world is becoming more complex, fraught with increasing possibilities for conflict over national rivalries, economic competition, and cultural and ideological fault lines. Understanding a Changing World: Alternative Futures of the International System offers a structured and theoretically grounded way to think about the forces that animate change and the alternative futures they may create.The existing widely-used textbooks in international relations and global studies do not adequately address this need. At best they offer a concluding chapter on what might come next, usually citing a few key works, most of which are listed below. Some build upon the conventional paradigms of the realist, liberal, or constructivist approaches to extrapolate possible futures. The former approach usually produces a hit-and-miss view of the future, while the latter builds on familiar paradigms which are too general to lead to detailed analysis or specific future scenarios.

Russian Politics and Presidential Power takes an in-depth look at the Russian presidency and uses it as a key to understanding Russian politics. Donald R. Kelley looks at presidents from Gorbachev to Putin as authoritarian, transformational leaders who set out to build the future, while sometimes rejecting and reinterpreting the work of past modernizers. Placing the presidency in this context helps readers understand both the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the nature of the Russian Federation that rose in its place. And by setting the presidency within a longer historical context, Kelley shows how the future of the presidency is dependent on other features of the political system.

The lifetime of Francois Hotman (1524-1590) was one of the most tumultuous periods in European history. Donald R. Kelley shows how this protege of Calvin and agent of many of the great Protestant princes became involved in ecclesiastical politics, Huguenot diplomacy, and conspiracy. One of the first modern revolutionaries, Hotman rebelled not only against his family and its faith, but against the laws and eventually the government of his country. As an embittered exile lie produced a voluminous body of propaganda aimed at recovering a lost political and religious innocence on which to found a new community. At the same time he was one of the greatest and most versatile scholars of his age, achieving distinction as a jurist, teacher, classical scholar, dialectician, theologian, and historian. His Franco-Giallia and Anti-Tribonian have fascinated generations of political theorists, and his letters, reports, and anonymous works are of inestimable value to historians. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In the Romantic fascination with Europe's past, scholars of Restoration France proposed to reconstruct their national traditions with more attention to social and cultural factors than older-fashioned political historians had shown. Donald R. Kelley examines a major feature of this new history": the convergence of the profession of law and the study of history between 1804 and 1848. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The lifetime of Francois Hotman (1524-1590) was one of the most tumultuous periods in European history. Donald R. Kelley shows how this protege of Calvin and agent of many of the great Protestant princes became involved in ecclesiastical politics, Huguenot diplomacy, and conspiracy. One of the first modern revolutionaries, Hotman rebelled not only against his family and its faith, but against the laws and eventually the government of his country. As an embittered exile lie produced a voluminous body of propaganda aimed at recovering a lost political and religious innocence on which to found a new community. At the same time he was one of the greatest and most versatile scholars of his age, achieving distinction as a jurist, teacher, classical scholar, dialectician, theologian, and historian. His Franco-Giallia and Anti-Tribonian have fascinated generations of political theorists, and his letters, reports, and anonymous works are of inestimable value to historians. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In the Romantic fascination with Europe's past, scholars of Restoration France proposed to reconstruct their national traditions with more attention to social and cultural factors than older-fashioned political historians had shown. Donald R. Kelley examines a major feature of this new history": the convergence of the profession of law and the study of history between 1804 and 1848. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In Fortunes of History Donald R. Kelley offers an authoritative examination of historical writing during the “long nineteenth century”—the years from the French Revolution to those just after the First World War. He provides a comprehensive analysis of the theories and practices of British, French, German, Italian, and American schools of historical thought, their principal figures, and their distinctive methods and self-understandings.Kelley treats the modern traditions of European world and national historiography from the Enlightenment to the “new histories” of the twentieth century, attending not only to major authors and schools but also to methods, scholarship, criticisms, controversies, ideological questions, and relations to other disciplines.

This book, the third volume of Donald Kelley’s monumental survey of Western historiography, covers the twentieth century, especially Europe. As in the first two volumes, the author discusses historical methods and ideas of all sorts to provide a detailed map of historical learning. Here he carries the survey forward to our own times, confronting directly the challenges of postmodernism and historical narrative. Kelley offers highly original discussions of historians of the last half century (including friends and mentors), the “linguistic turn,” the “end of history,” the philosophy of history, and various new methods of histories.The book focuses first on the state of the art of history in France, Germany, Britain, and the United States on the eve of World War I. Kelley then traces every important historiographical issue and development historians have encountered in the twentieth century. With the completion of this trilogy, Kelley presents the only comprehensive modern survey of historical writing. He provides an unparalleled portrait of the rich variety of historical method along with an insider’s view of the challenges of capturing history on the written page.

In this collection, top scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet studies convene to explore communism's aftermath. They consider state building and consitutionalism; the transition to market capitalism and democracy across Eastern Europe; the political development of Muslim states; the complex and differential developments of electoral systems; the risks and opportunities of nationalism; and new political and economic activities in Russia, from corruption to contracts. Editor Donald Kelley introduces the volume with a synthesis of the theoretical and empirical findings of the volume, and his brief chapter introductions place each contribution in relation to the other essays and to larger debates on democratization.

The 'history of ideas', better known these days as intellectual history, is a flourishing field of study which has been the object of much controversy but hardly any historical exploration. This major new work from Donald R. Kelley is the first comprehensive history of intellectual history, tracing the study of the history of thought from ancient, medieval and early modern times, its emergence as the 'history of ideas' in the 18th century, and its subsequent expansion. The point of departure for this study is the perspective opened up by Victor Cousin in the early 19th-century on 'Eclecticism' and its association with the history of philosophy established by Renaissance scholars. Kelley considers a broad range of topics, including the rivalry between 'ideas' and language, the rise of cultural history, the contributions of certain 19th- and 20th-century practitioners of the history of ideas in interdisciplinary areas of philosophy, literature and the sciences, and finally the current state of intellectual history. The central theme of the book is the interplay between the canon of philosophical thought and the tradition of language and textual study, the divergence of the latter marking the 'descent of ideas' into the realm of cultural history.

In this book, one of the world’s leading intellectual historians offers a critical survey of Western historical thought and writing from the pre-classical era to the late eighteenth century. Donald R. Kelley focuses on persistent themes and methodology, including questions of myth, national origins, chronology, language, literary forms, rhetoric, translation, historical method and criticism, theory and practice of interpretation, cultural studies, philosophy of history, and "historicism."Kelley begins by analyzing the dual tradition established by the foundational works of Greek historiography—Herodotus’s broad cultural and antiquarian inquiry and the contrasting model of Thucydides’ contemporary political and analytical narrative. He then examines the many variations on and departures from these themes produced in writings from Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian antiquity, in medieval chronicles, in national histories and revisions of history during the Renaissance and Reformation, and in the rise of erudite and enlightened history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout, Kelley discusses how later historians viewed their predecessors, including both supporters and detractors of the authors in question.The book, which is a companion volume to Kelley’s highly praised anthology Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, will be a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in interpretations of the past.

This second volume of essays by Professor Kelley takes the study of history as its starting point, then extends explorations into adjacent fields of legal, political, and social thought to confront some of the larger questions of the modern human sciences. The first group of papers examine the historiography of the Protestant Reformation and then of the Romantic and Victorian periods; the last section focuses on the legal tradition and its interpretation in relation to social and cultural, as well as historical thought, in the period from the Renaissance to the French Revolution. Throughout, the author’s interest is to analyse how people at different times have viewed their past - and reconstructed and utilised it in the service of their present concerns.

There was much talk about 'the end of ideology' in the last half of the twentieth century but little attempt to understand the obverse of this phenomenon - the 'beginning of ideology'. This book examines not the exhaustion but the generation of sentiments, values, ideals, justifications and actions which underlie one spectacular case of profound intellectual and social change. The Protestant Reformation, especially in its French phase, is a locus classicus of this process, viewed here in terms of individual and group consciousness, organisation and action which moved from religious disaffection to a social dissent and finally to political revolution. Although a wide variety of sources is used, the book is based on the vast body of pamphlet material produced in the sixteenth century. most abundantly in the Francophone world. The aim of the book is to present an anatomy of the private and public consciousness reflected in the thought and action of Protestant parties and their supported during their ideological supremacy in the late sixteenth century. A case study in the 'beginning of ideology', this book is also a multi-levelled interpretation of modern Europe's first age of revolution.