Administration, Law, and Ideology in the Emergence of "Modernity" in Europe at the Turn of the 17th Century

FAIN: FA-11212-75

Marc Raeff
Columbia University (New York, NY 10027-7922)

To trace the institutional and intellectual sources or "modernity" in Europe at the turn of the 17th century. The hypothetis is that the roots of the dynamics of modernity are to be found in the ideas of natural law, jurisprudence, cartesian cosmology, and the pragmatics of the well ordered police state of European absolutism. The study will be a comparative, all European survey relating the findings to an earlier work on Russia.