Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catharine Macaulay
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Revolution

Probleme de interpretare privind constituționalitatea și capacitatea juridică a subdiviziunilor administrativ-teritoriale

2020 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 126-133
Author(s):  
Vlad-Cristian SOARE ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Legal Capacity ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Revolution

"The fundamental transformations through the Romanian state passed since the Revolution of December 1989, have also put their mark on the legal system. For this reason, there have been major changes in the content of administrative law. However, the regulation of the territorial-administrative subdivisions survived the change of political regime, due to Law 2/1968. Moreover, regulations on administrative-territorial subdivisions are also found in Law 215/2001 and in the 1991 Constitution, revised in 2003. This has led to problems of interpretation. Thus, on the one hand, we need to identify who has the right to constitute administrative-territorial subdivisions, and on the other hand, it must be seen whether the answer to the first question, leads to a possible interpretation that would be unconstitutional. At the same time, administrative-territorial subdivisions have created problems of interpretation regarding their legal capacity. Through this article, we have proposed to look at the issues mentioned above."

Does Nature Confer Rights?

2019 ◽  
pp. 183-210
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
The Real ◽  
The People ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter takes Hannah Arendt’s engagement with Edmund Burke in Origins of Totalitarianism as a starting-point for considering the interrelation in the Revolution controversy of nature, history, and rights. Evidence is presented of a mode of argumentation that is (by today’s standards) eclectic and historicising. Thus, the rights of man were at once natural and historical, and while Thomas Paine asserted the novelty of their study, Thomas Spence framed his exposition of the ‘real rights of man’ with reference to an older tradition that links him to the people and events touched on in earlier chapters of this book.

Edmund Burke and the Ambivalence of Protection for Slaves: Between Humanity and Control

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 246-268
Author(s):  
Parvathi Menon
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Protection Measures ◽  
Slave Rebellion ◽  
The Right ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Impact

Abstract This article focuses on the period between 1812 and 1834, when the British Empire introduced protection measures to mitigate the suffering of slaves from planter brutality, but also to protect planters from slave rebellion. By examining the impact and influences wielded by Edmund Burke’s Sketch of a Negro Code (1780), this article studies protection as an alliance between the abolitionists and planters who, despite contestations, found in Burke’s Code a means to attain their separate ends. Through the workings of the Office of the Protector, instituted by the imperial authorities in the slave colony of Trinidad, this study examines how it granted slaves the humanity of ‘rights’ against their masters, while also protecting the right to property (in slaves) of the planters. I argue that the paternalistic practice of protection was, as is in the present, at the center of the exploitation of subjugated groups.

The aesthetics of Burke’s constitutionalism: A dialectical reading

2020 ◽  
pp. 019145372091314
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Rustighi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Partial Representation ◽  
Constitutional Thought ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

I propose taking the beautiful and the sublime in Edmund Burke not just as aesthetic but also as theoretical categories which can help us read his constitutional thought in dialectical terms. I suggest indeed that his usage of these categories in the Reflections on the Revolution in France points to a consistently held argument concerning the aporias of early-modern contractarian theories and their influence on the French Revolution. My hypothesis is that for Burke the Revolution is unable to think of any concrete relation between beauty and sublimity, insofar as they can be associated, respectively, with particularity and universality. Furthermore, I underscore how Burke’s defence of partial representation against contractarian representation aims to overcome this impasse. My goal is to demonstrate that Burke raises decisive questions as to the intrinsically anti-democratic effects of the contractarian concept of democracy and is still useful to confront the contemporary crisis of democratic participation.

Hegel's Critique of the Triumph of Verstand in Modernity

1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (01) ◽  
pp. 54-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Houlgate
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
The People ◽  
Universal Suffrage ◽  
The World ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Revolution

In his lectures on the philosophy of history Hegel passes this famous judgement on the French Revolution. “Anaxagoras had been the first to say that nous governs the world; but only now did humanity come to recognize that thought should rule spiritual actuality. This was thus a magnificent dawn”. What first gave rise to discontent in France, in Hegel's view, were the heavy burdens that pressed upon the people and the government's inability to procure for the Court the means of supporting its luxury and extravagance. But soon the new spirit of freedom and enlightenment began to stir in men's minds and carry them forward to revolution. “One should not, therefore, declare oneself against the assertion”, Hegel concludes, “that the Revolution received its first impulse from Philosophy” (VPW, p 924). However, Hegel points out that the legacy of the revolution is actually an ambiguous one. For, although the principles which guided the revolution were those of reason and were indeed magnificent – namely, that humanity is born to freedom and self-determination – they were held fast in their abstraction and turned “polemically”, and at times terribly, against the existing order (VPW, p 925). What ultimately triumphed in the revolution was thus not concrete reason itself, but abstract reason or understanding (VPW, p 923). In Hegel's view, the enduring legacy of such revolutionary understanding was, not so much the Terror, but the principle that “the subjective wills of the many should hold sway” (VPW, p 932). This principle, which Hegel calls the principle of “liberalism” and which we would call the principle of majority rule, has since spread from France to become one of the governing principles of modern stat. It has been used to justify granting universal suffrage, to justify depriving corporations and the nobility of the right to sit in the legislature, and in some cases to justify abolishing the monarchy. What is of crucial importance for Hegel, however, is that such measures have not rendered the state more modern and rational, but have in fact distorted the modern state.

ALEXANDER GEDDES AT THE LIMITS OF THE CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK GOLDIE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Catholic Priest ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
French Republicanism ◽  
The Revolution ◽  
Episcopal Authority

ABSTRACTIn the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) pressed Catholicism and the Enlightenment to the limits of their tolerance. A Catholic priest, he fled the censure of his Scottish superiors and settled in England, where he became a spokesman for the Catholic laity in their controversies with the hierarchy, and mingled in radical Protestant circles among the ‘Rational Dissenters’. In three domains, he appalled his contemporaries. First, Geddes prepared a new version of the Bible, which threatened to undermine the integrity of revelation, and offered mythopoeic accounts of the Old Testament that influenced Blake and Coleridge. Second, he embraced ‘ecclesiastical democracy’, denouncing papal and episcopal authority and proclaiming British Catholics to be ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’. Third, he applauded French republicanism, and adhered to the Revolution long after Edmund Burke had rendered such enthusiasm hazardous. Geddes was an extreme exponent of the Catholic Enlightenment, yet equally he was representative of several characteristic strands of eighteenth-century Catholicism, which would be obliterated in the ultramontane revanche of the following century.

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