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Historians have long debated the nature of the relationships between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This study traces a cultural and doctrinal current from the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century to 1789, arguing that the contribution of the philosophes to this current had a fundamental bearing on the events of the revolutionary decade. How might a state in decline reform, in not transform, its constitution? Two generations of French philosophes struggled to answer this question. Their conclusions took the form of a deistic political theology, according to which comprehensive reform had to be the work of an enlightened legislatior. The generation of 1789 inherited this outlook and set about enacting the reforms of their philosophic forefathers. Important to this enterprise was the rich variety of symbolic representations accompanying the theoretical writings of eighteenth-century publicists and activists. Enlightenment historiography, reflecting the reforming tendencies in the writing of the philosophes, included multiple allusions to the figure of the lawgiver in history, all the while looking for improvement. By the 1770s such reform appeared both necessary and imminent. Meanwhile, the various loci of enlightenment sociability took in the air of the 'constitutional arena'. But the philosophes also invested their movement with a variety of religious forms, which complemented the logic of their political theology. Theirs was indeed a cult of the legislator. These varied tendecies crystallised during the early years of the Revolution. The author shows how Frenchmen self-consciously imitated their historic role models as they participated in revolutionary assemblies. A new phase in history seemed to be dawning, one in which goodness would reign supreme. As Hegel put it some decades later, it appeared as if the heavens and the earth had been rejoined. Such sentiments found a central place in Jacques-Louis David's Serment du Jeu de Paume, commissioned in 1790 by the Paris Jacobin Club to hang in the chambers of the National Assembly. In a novel interpretation of David's project, the author demonstrates how his composition wove the strands of the Enlightenment cult of the legislator into a lively canvas in which future generations of French men and women would be confronted with the providentially inspired founding act of the new regime.
A comparative study of the French Revolution's most famous artist and a little-known illustrator.
Fourteen wide-ranging chapters by distinguished international scholars treat key aspects of the rapidly changing political and cultural scene in France from the First Republic, through the Consulate and Empire to the death of Louis XVIII in 1824. Falling into two interlinked parts, this collection of original essays explores new developments as well as continuities characterising the transition between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth. It includes chapters on feminism, politics and theatre, elections and plebiscites, revolution and counter-revolution, patronage, universities and education, medicine, music and science.
A study of three centuries of radical ideas and activity in English political and social history.
Arguing that the question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's relationship to the Enlightenment has been eclipsed and seriously distorted by his association with the French Revolution, Graeme Garrard presents the first book-length case that shows Rousseau as the pivotal figure in the emergence of Counter-Enlightenment thought. Viewed in the context in which he actually lived and wrote—from the middle of the eighteenth century to his death in 1778—it is apparent that Rousseau categorically rejected the Enlightenment "republic of letters" in favor of his own "republic of virtue." The philosophes, placing faith in reason and natural human sociability and subjecting religion to systematic criticism and doubt, naively minimized the deep tensions and complexities of collective life and the power disintegrative forces posed to social order. Rousseau believed that the ever precarious social order could only be achieved artificially, by manufacturing "sentiments of sociability," reshaping individuals to identify with common interests instead of their own selfish interests.
By reconsidering Kleist's reception of Rousseau and placing it in historical context, this book sheds new light on a range of political and ethical issues at play in Kleist's work. Heinrich von Kleist is renowned as an author who posed a radical challenge to the orthodoxies of his age. Today, his works are frequently seen to relentlessly deconstruct the paradigms of Idealism and to reflect a Romantic, even postmodern, perspective on the ambiguities of the world. Such a view fails, however, to do full justice to the more complex manner in which Kleist articulates the tensions between the securities of Enlightenment thought and the anxieties of the revolutionary age. Steven Howe offers a new angle on Kleist's dialogue with the Enlightenment by reconsidering his investment in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Where previous critics have trivialized this as intense but fleeting and born of personal identification, Howe here establishes Rousseau's importance as a lasting source of inspiration for the violent constellations of Kleist's fiction. Taking account of both Rousseau'scritique of modernity and his later propositions for working toward the Enlightenment promise of emancipation, the book locates a mode of discourse which, placed in the historical context of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, sheds new light on the political and ethical issues at play in Kleist's work. Steven Howe is Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. He is co-editor, with Ricarda Schmidt and Seán Allan, of Heinrich von Kleist: Konstruktive und Destruktive Funktionen von Gewalt (forthcoming, 2012).
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Comprehensive and accessible, this book offers a concise synthesis of the evolution of the law in Western Europe, from ancient Rome to the beginning of the twentieth century. It situates law in the wider framework of Europe’s political, economic, social and cultural developments.
This timely volume by distinguished scholar Günter Frankenberg offers a sophisticated analysis and sharp critique of the reactions of nations such as the US, Great Britain and Germany to perceived terrorist threats, organized crime actions and other political emergencies that have occurred in recent years.
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