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The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union

Name: The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Woodrow Wilson Center Press)
Rating: 3.36 (1 reviews)
ISBN: 9780521795524

This book addresses the question of what it means, and has meant, to be "European," covering the period from Antiquity to the end of the twentieth century. The essays discuss questions of politics, law, religion, culture, literature, and even affectivity in a broad account of how a distinctive European identity has grown over the centuries and its place in the future evolution of the European Union. In the massive literature of European integration, no other book takes such a long historical perspective, and none other deals directly with the question of identity.

GenresHistoryNonfiction

392 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 1998

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About the author

Anthony Pagden

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Anthony Pagden was educated in Santiago (Chile), London, Barcelona and Oxford and holds a B.A.. M.A. and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He has been a free-lance translator and a publisher in Paris a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, Senior Research Fellow of the Warburg Institute (London), Professor of History at the European University Institute (Florence), University Reader in Intellectual History and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and the Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins. He joined UCLA in the Fall of 2002. His research has concentrated on the relationship between the peoples of Europe and its overseas settlements and those of the non-European world from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He is primarily interested in the political theory of empire, in how the West sought to explain to itself how and why it had come to dominate so much of the world, and in the present consequences of the erosion of that domination. His research has led to an interest in the formation of the modern concept of Europe and most recently in the roots of the conflict between the ‘West’ and the (predominantly Muslim) ‘East’. He has also written on the history of law, and on the ideological sources of the independence movements in Spanish-America, and is currently completing a book on cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment . He has written or edited some fifteen books, the most recent of which are, Lords of all the World. Ideologies of Empire in Britain, France and Spain (1995), Peoples and Empires (2001), La Ilustración y sus enemigos (2002), Worlds at War, The 2500 year struggle between East and West (2008), and, as editor, The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union (2002). – all of which have been translated into several European and Asian languages. He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and The London Review of Books, and has written for The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Il Sole 24 Ore (Milan), El Mundo (Spain), El Pais, (Spain) and La Nueva Provincia (Argentina).

He teaches classes in the history of political thought from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, in the theory of international relations, and seminars on imperialism and nationalism and on the theory of racism and ethnicity since antiquity.

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