scholarly journals BOURGEOIS MODERNITY VERSUS THE HISTORICAL ARISTOCRACY IN CHRISTOPH MEINERS'S POLITICAL THOUGHT

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 943-966 ◽  
Author(s):  
MORGAN GOLF-FRENCH
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Bourgeois Modernity

AbstractChristoph Meiners (1747–1810), a major historian and philosopher of the German late Enlightenment, has received increasing recognition as a significant thinker in the emergence of nineteenth-century racial theories. The scholarly focus on Meiners's hierarchical view of race and its legacy has led to the classification of his broaderoeuvreas conservative, or even reactionary. By examining hisGeschichte der Ungleichheit der Stände unter den vornehmsten europäischen Völkern(1792), written in response to the French Revolution and the contemporary circumstances of the Holy Roman Empire, this article sheds new light on his work, as well as on an under-researched line of thought in the 1790s. Rather than a conservative or reactionary work, this text is a radical critique of the German aristocracy that ultimately recommends the abolition of most significant aristocratic privileges and the overhaul of its membership in favour of the bourgeoisie. This article presents not only a more complex understanding of Christoph Meiners's ideas, but also calls for a reappraisal of the categories applied to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century intellectuals both in Germany and in Europe more broadly.

scholarly journals In the Theater of Counterrevolution: Loyalist Association and Conservative Opinion in the 1790s

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Gilmartin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
Civic Activism ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Negative Role

Conservative movements have generally played a negative role in accounts of the history of political expression in Britain during the period of the French Revolution. Where E. P. Thompson and others on the Left tended to identify radicalism with the disenfranchised and with a struggle for the rights of free expression and public assembly, conservative activists have been associated with state campaigns of political repression and legal interference. Indeed, conservatism in this period is typically conceived in negative terms, as antiradicalism or counterrevolution. If this has been the view of hostile commentators, it is consistent with a more sympathetic mythology that sees nothing novel about the conservative principles that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. They represent an establishment response to alien challenges. Even where conservatives set about mobilizing the resources of print, opinion, and assembly in a constructive fashion, the reputation for interference has endured. John Reeves's Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers is a useful case in point, since it managed in its brief but enterprising history to combine fierce anti-Jacobinism with the later eighteenth century's rising tide of voluntary civic activism. The association came together at the Crown and Anchor Tavern when a group of self-professed “private men” decided “to form ourselves into an Association” and announced their intentions through the major London newspapers in November and December of 1792. The original committee then called on others “to make similar exertions in their respective neighbourhoods,” forming energetic local associations that would be linked by regular correspondence with the central London committee. In this way, the loyalist movement grew with astonishing speed.

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.

scholarly journals Freedom and liberty: the influence of the ideology of the polish uprising of 1830 on Russian philosophy and literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-84
Author(s):  
Tetiana Murha
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Russian Philosophy ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Philosophy And Literature ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Principles ◽  
The French Revolution

The relevance of the topic is due to the history of the concept of freedom in the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian thesauri in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Because the concept of "freedom" is important in shaping the national identities of these Slavic peoples.The aim of the article was to consider the causes of metamorphoses that occurred in the use of words and changes in the connotations of the concept of "freedom". It is determined that the development of philosophical ideas about freedom in Russia in the early nineteenth century is influenced by two contradictory tendencies: nihilistic-deterministic and religious-libertarian. It is studied that in the Soviet official philosophy and ideology the concept of "freedom" acquires ritual-official and rational-determinist meaning ("freedom as a known necessity"). In contrast, "freedom" is replaced by the concept of "freedom", which has acquired positive connotations. At the same time, the identification of "freedom" with "arbitrariness" in recent years has been a source of Russian anti-liberal discourse.Conclusions. The concept of "freedom" in literature, official documents and philosophical considerations originally had two verbal reflections "liberty" and "freedom". And the first of them actually dominated until the early nineteenth century. Its meanings were related to the influence of Polish political principles and the Ukrainian Orthodox tradition, which was spread by graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium (Academy). At the same time, it was gradually supplanted by another word, "liberty," especially under the influence of the reaction to the events and slogans of the French Revolution.

‘The Prince of Sceptics’ and ‘The Prince of Historians’: Hume’s Influence and Image in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryu Susato
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
Problematic Issue ◽  
Edinburgh Review ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter deals with the reception of Hume in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. The subject of the contemporary and early nineteenth century receptions of Hume’s writings has already been addressed by James Fieser’s series of Early Responses to Hume. The problematic issue of the relationship between Hume as a philosopher and historian, however, is insufficiently addressed. The lack of a sustained analysis of the relationship between Hume’s philosophy and politics might be the result of the continued influence exerted by John Stuart Mill’s evaluation that Hume’s philosophical scepticism leads him to political conservatism. Through detailed analysis of British pamphlets and periodicals (such as The Edinburgh Review, The Quarterly Review, and The Annual Register) published at the turn of the eighteenth century, this chapter argues that Mill’s evaluation was not widely accepted among the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers and reviewers. Some radicals (Mary Wollstonecraft, Jeremy Bentham, the young James Mackintosh) left positive comments regarding Hume’s supposed liberal and anti-religious attitude in his History. Interestingly, some Romantics such as Coleridge suspected that Hume, as ‘infidel’ writer, was responsible for the French Revolution along with the philosophes.

scholarly journals SOVEREIGNTY AND THE LEGAL LEGACIES OF EMPIRE IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY PRUSSIA

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
CHARLOTTE JOHANN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Political Order ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Successor State ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Historical School

Abstract The traceless disappearance of the Holy Roman Empire from the map and the minds of nineteenth-century Germany was until recently a pervasive historiographical trope. Revisionist scholarship has since uncovered the empire's modern afterlife as a model for federative political order and archetype of the greater German (großdeutsche) nation. This article identifies a different kind of legacy, by examining the empire's role in shaping the constitutional configuration of an individual successor state – Prussia. In a debate over Prussia's unwritten historical constitution unfolding in the 1840s, narratives of the empire's constitutional history became the basis on which the juridical structure of the kingdom's sovereignty was negotiated by jurists and political actors. These included, among others, King Frederick William IV and his brother William, the leaders of the German historical school of jurisprudence Savigny and Eichhorn, and the Prussian statesman Kamptz. The article contrasts two rival interpretations of the imperial legacy: a teleological narrative focusing on the evolution of state sovereignty within the imperial constitution and a genealogical narrative highlighting the origins of sovereignty as a hereditary fiefdom. In doing so, it questions the rigid distinction that historians have drawn between the empire and the statehood that replaced it in 1806.

Suffering in Art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
The Relationship

Ritchie Robertson situates Lessing’s text within debates over the proper depiction of extreme suffering in art, focusing on Goethe’s essay on the Laocoon group (1798), as well as other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works on the representation of pain. The issue of suffering in art was of utmost significance to Goethe’s ideology of the classical, Robertson explains; more than that, the themes introduced in Lessing’s essay—above all, its concerns with how suffering can be depicted in words and images—proved pivotal within Goethe’s prescriptions about the relationship between idealism and individuality (or ‘the characteristic’) in art. As part of a larger campaign against what he called ‘naturalism’ in art, Goethe argued that the ancients did not share the false notion that art must imitate nature. For Goethe, responding to Lessing, the power of the Laocoon group lay precisely in its depiction of bodily suffering as something not just beautiful, but also anmutig (‘sensuously pleasing’).

The Politics of Chiefs and Commoners before the 1830s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raevin Jimenez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
State Level ◽  
Temporal Context ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
African History ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Level Analysis

The field of pre-1830 South African history has been subject to periodic interrogations into conventional narratives, sources, and methods. The so-called mfecane debates of the 1980s and 1990s marked a radical departure from characterizations of warfare in the interior, generally regarded in earlier decades as stemming solely or mostly from the Zulu king Shaka. Efforts to reframe violence led to more thorough considerations of political elites and statecraft from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century but also contributed to new approaches to ethnicity, dependency, and to some extent gender. A new wave of historiographical critique in the 2010s shows the work of revision to be ongoing. The article considers the debates around the wars of the late precolonial period, including unresolved strands of inquiry, and argues for a move away from state-level analysis toward social histories of women and non-elites. Though it focuses on the 1760s through the 1830s, the article also presents examples highlighting the importance of recovering deeper temporal context for the South African interior.

scholarly journals The Public Sphere in the Field of Power

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Calhoun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
Social Foundations ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Public Sphere

In this article I ask (1) whether the ways in which the early bourgeois public sphere was structured—precisely by exclusion—are instructive for considering its later development, (2) how a consideration of the social foundations of public life calls into question abstract formulations of it as an escape from social determination into a realm of discursive reason, (3) to what extent “counterpublics” may offer useful accommodations to failures of larger public spheres without necessarily becoming completely attractive alternatives, and (4) to what extent considering the organization of the public sphere as a field might prove helpful in analyzing differentiated publics, rather than thinking of them simply as parallel but each based on discrete conditions. These considerations are informed by an account of the way that the public sphere developed as a concrete ideal and an object of struggle in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain.

scholarly journals Smoking Clubs in Graphic Satire and the Anglicizing of Tobacco in Eighteenth-Century Britain

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Cynthia Roman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
Graphic Satire ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Cultural Connotations

Abstract Focusing on A smoking club (1793/7) by James Gillray, this essay presents satiric representations of smoking clubs in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British prints, arguing that they reflect and mediate contemporary understandings of tobacco as an intoxicant in British associational life. The breadth of potential cultural connotations – from political and social parody to light-hearted humour – is traced through the content and imagery of selected prints. These prints rely on the familiarity of contemporary audiences with political and social knowledge, as well as a visual iconography iconically realized in William Hogarth's A midnight modern conversation (1732).

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