Medieval Political Ideas

Plato's Political Ideas

Self-enforcing Political Systems and Economic Growth: Late Medieval Genoa

This paper presents a micro-level historical and theoretical analysis of Genoa's economic and political history during the twelfth and thirteenth century by examining the factors influencing the extent to which its political system was self-enforcing and their change over time. It combines narrative and theoretical analysis to resolve questions that can not be resolved by either narrative or th...

Self-enforcing Political System and Economic Growth: Late Medieval Genoa

This paper presents a micro-level historical and theoretical analysis of Genoa's economic and political history during the twelfth and thirteenth century by examining the factors influencing the extent to which its political system was self-enforcing and their change over time. It combines narrative and theoretical analysis to resolve questions that can not be resolved by either narrative or th...

Political Theology and the Theology of Politics: Carl Schmitt and Medieval Christian Political Thought1

In societies where religion plays a strong and important role, the institutions of the society reflect the religion. Yet in societies where religion plays a more secondary role to say that all political concepts are secularized theological concepts is an overstatement. While Carl Schmitt does make a persuasive argument on the role of religion in political thought, he is also mistaken. In this a...

Policy ideas , knowledge regimes and comparative political economy

Despite much attention to how ideas affect policy making, where these ideas come from is a blind spot in comparative political economy. We show that an important source of policy ideas are knowledge regimes—fields of policy research organizations. We show as well that the organization of knowledge regimes is heavily influenced by the organization of their surrounding political economies such th...