Renaissance And Enlightenment

Political philosophers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment who reworked the foundations of legitimate authority, from the Renaissance theorist of pragmatic statecraft and Renaissance humanist and utopian political theorists, through the early modern theorists of sovereignty, natural law and the social contract who grounded political authority in the consent of the governed, to the Enlightenment rationalists and the conservative critic of revolutionary change who debated what that consent should permit and constrain. Spans roughly the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries.