Class and political action in nineteenth-century England: Theoretical and comparative perspectives

1983 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krishan Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Sociology ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The French Revolution

Political sociology has from its very inception had an overriding concern with the nature of political order and stability, and the threats to that stability. Ever since ‘the entry of the masses on to the stage of history’, at the time of the French Revolution, one source of that threat has regularly been seen as the industrial working class. That has been so, whether the threat was perceived by the liberal centre and conservative right; or whether is was converted, by the left, into a definite promise to overthrow ‘bourgeois’ stability. In both cases, in the anxious speculations of Mill and Tocqueville as much as the triumphant predictions of Marx and Engels, a key role was marked out for the developing working class of nineteenthcentury Europe.

The Glut of Doctors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France

1977 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
George D. Sussman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Professional Services ◽  
Success Story ◽  
The West ◽  
Professional Careers ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
History Of ◽  
Great Attraction ◽  
The French Revolution

The history of the professions in the West since the French Revolution is a success story, a triumph, but not always an easy one. From the beginning of the nineteenth century in continental Europe the professions had a great attraction as careers presumably open to talent, but the demand for professional services developed more slowly than interest in professional careers and more slowly than the schools that supplied the market. Lenore O'Boyle has drawn attention to this discrepancy and the revolutionary potential of the frustrated careerists produced by it.

Sovereignty, Politics, and Reason in the Post-Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 146-162
Author(s):  
James Livesey
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
International Order ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Direct Effects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter focuses on the French Revolution as one of the most important moments in the entangled history of local cosmopolitanisms. Such ideas as rights, property, and democracy were consciously articulated during the Revolution as universals with cosmopolitan spheres of application, and those ideas had profound global consequences over the following two centuries. Alongside this impact on states and legal structures, the Revolution also had direct effects in every community in France and touched communities outside the hexagon, from India to Ireland. The Revolution transformed the most general contexts, putting the nation-state rather than empire as the organizing principle at the heart of the international order, but it also put the most intimate experiences, such as family and emotion, under new light. The drama of the Revolution exemplified the power of ideas and the ambition to create a rational political order.

James Mill's ‘The History of British India’ and Utilitarianism as a Rhetoric of Reform

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Majeed
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural identities, with which both political languages were preoccupied.

Symbols of Power: Statues in Nineteenth-Century Provincial France

1989 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
North Americans ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Political Iconography ◽  
The Many ◽  
The French Revolution

Maurice Agulhon, in his classic French historical study, revealed how the changing political fortunes of Republicanism were reflected in the many metamorphoses that statues of the Republic had undergone in the century after the French Revolution. This study and a number of important works by North Americans, like those of James Leith and Lynn Hunt, are also important in making us understand French political iconography.

“Children of Liberty”: Idealist Historiography in Staël, Shelley, and Sand

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari Lokke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
George Sand ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Spirit World ◽  
Historical Agency ◽  
The French Revolution

This essay explores the contributions of a tradition of nineteenth-century Künstlerromane by Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand to European idealist historiography as exemplified in Kant's writings on perfectibility. Corinne, Valperga, and Consuelo represent the historical agency of the intellectual and artist as communication with a spirit world inhabited by ghosts of the past so that their secrets and wisdom can be transmitted to the future. In canonical Romanticism, contact with these phantasms provokes crippling guilt over the failure of past projects of perfectibility like the French Revolution (doomed by violence and bloodshed), guilt that is figured in the interdependent tropes of the titanic hero and Romantic melancholy. The novels discussed here perform an explicit critique of masculinist individualism in the name of women and humanity as a whole, replacing melancholy with enthusiasm and deploying spirits aesthetically, as sublime signs of future historical potentiality.

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

Dickens’s Neutral Philosophy of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 1123
Author(s):  
Ali Abdullah AL-Zuhairi
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Decent Life ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Full Power ◽  
French People ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Revolutionary Period ◽  
The French Revolution

This paper delves into Charles Dickens’s objectivity of the events of the French Revolution and his unique stand and transparency in his representation for the two great power rivals and their prolonged conflict. The pre-revolutionary period was remarkable for the tyranny, cruelty, Socioeconomic-Inequality, and Subjugation of the Barbarous aristocratic rule against the masses. Conversely, the post-revolutionary period underwent sweeping social and political chaos and the form of administration set after the revolution was not a democracy, as French people were fond of calling it, but a mischievous and shameful anarchy lasted from 1789 until 1799. This discussion is an attempt to analyze and sort out a complex of hostile relationships involving the aristocrats and the peasants of A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens’ universal appeal indicates that whoever is in authority, aristocracy or masses, will get lavishly tempted to practice their full power depressingly and be obsessed with the dilemma of the establishment of the supremacy and dictatorship at any cost ignoring other’s right in decent life , freedom ,and equal opportunity. As the novel advanced, oppression is shown to breed oppression; violence to beget violence, evil to provoke evil. Instead of progress there is something more like the catastrophic continuum and piling wreckage upon wreckage.

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