Commercial reform against the tide: Reapproaching the eighteenth-century decline of the republics of Venice and the United Provinces
The emergence of ‘civilized monarchies’, reformed European territorial states that had turned commercial, created major challenges to the old trade republics of Venice and the United Provinces. Would they perish and cease to exist, which seemed a logical corollary to the recent history of their decline, or might they be reconstituted and integrated into a new interstate system? Rather than to approach this question from the perspective of the history of political thought, which offers a range of rival outlooks on this issue, the present article treats the issue more from the inside and thus connects theories about decline to their concrete manifestations and experiences; from the spheres of diplomatic tensions over unpaid debts, publishing networks and the oscillation of consular and maritime law reform between Venice and the Dutch Republic.
The Rights of War and Peace. Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant , Oxford University Press, Nueva York, 1999.
In this part of his book, Richard Tuck reveals a new perspective on the philosophical tradition that gave birth to some of the most fundamental liberal principles. The author explains how the skepticism and the raison d´etat  recovered by Renaissance theorists are applied to the behavior of the nation-states in International Relations during the European expansion, suppressing all kind of affective or moral quality and are translated to the civil society in order to convert the individuals into perfect liberal agents.
The articulate citizen and the English Renaissance
While Ferguson's study of civic consciousness is primarily about the early Renaissance (pp. 133-397), the early chapters deal with the medieval background. Ferguson singles out Langland and Gower as important figures in "the first important period in the history of English public discussion" (4). During this period (1360-1415), a new form of public discourse emerged from pure propaganda and from the more generalized complaint literature. Yet while Gower and others show an increasing sense of national identity and eagerly critiqued social maladies, their analysis of social ills generally stops short of actually providing "constructive policies" (42) for fixing the problems. Rather than suggesting systemic reform, Gower and his contemporaries tend to point to the need for personal moral reform (47). Only occasionally – as when Gower deals with the topic of justice – do we see "some awareness of the complexity of social relationships" (53). Otherwise, Gower's solution is to point out the king's need for good counsel and to focus on individual vices (especially sloth and avarice; 57). Gower in fact "failed to think in terms of institutions, much less of constitutions" (62). While Gower's writings become increasingly more political over time, he fails to provide a fully-fledged analysis of the root causes of such issues as the labour crisis, the problem of maintenance, and the war with France. [CvD]