Politics, Democracy and Liberalism in the origins of the Modern Era

Abstract

This article refers to leading authors on political theory during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, trying to show and reinterpret their contributions, because they are still important for the analysis of the problems in the contemporary world. The idea of politics could recover its original sense of common interest over private groups is stressed, and also the one that points out that leaders and legislators should remember the social pact. The purpose is to show how political theory was reborn at the beginning of modernity with some ideological currents: the conception of an authoritarian sovereign State through absolutism, the rebirth of democratic thought through popular sovereignty and a model of rational democracy as the highest form of government. In that time was born also the proposal for the separation of internal State powers by creating the concept of liberalism, which has, at its starting point, the freedom of citizens.