Freedom and the Construction of Europe

An internationally distinguished team of contributors explore the richness, diversity and complexity of ideas about freedom across early modern Europe.

An internationally distinguished team of contributors explore the richness, diversity and complexity of ideas about freedom across early modern Europe, shedding fresh light on the tension between religious freedom and constitutional liberties, debates about the relationship between free persons and free states, and freedom as the ideal of citizenship.Freedom, today perceived simply as a human right, was a continually contested idea in the early modern period. In Freedom and the Construction of Europe an international group of scholars explore the richness, diversity and complexity of thinking about freedom in the shaping of modernity. Volume 2 considers free persons and free states, examining differing views about freedom of thought and action and their relations to conceptions of citizenship. Debates about freedom have been fundamental to the construction of modern Europe, but represent a part of our intellectual heritage that is rarely examined in depth. These volumes provide materials for thinking in fresh ways not merely about the concept of freedom, but how it has come to be understood in our own time.