HOW TO WRITE ABOUT INFLUENCE: ASSESSING EDMUND BURKE'S CONSERVATIVE LEGACIES

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
CLAIRE RYDELL ARCENAS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Open Question ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Edmund Burke is difficult to classify. Born in Ireland in 1730, he entered parliament in 1765 having already achieved literary distinction for several philosophical works, including On the origins of the sublime and beautiful (1757). His subsequent career as a Whig statesman, politician, and reformer spanned the tumultuous decades of the late eighteenth century and culminated, less than a decade before his death, in his famous polemic against the French Revolution, Reflections on the revolution in France (1790). Over the course of his life, Burke opined with such frequency on so many topics that the nature of his ‘philosophy’ remains an open question, and scholars continue to offer strikingly different interpretations of his life and legacies. ‘Burke's legacy to history’, historian Richard Bourke summarized, ‘has been a complicated affair’.

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.

The French Revolution Controversy

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The rights of man ‘arrived’ in England, in the sense of beginning to circulate in public discourse and becoming a topic on which people staked out positions, during the final decade of the eighteenth century. The context was debate over the significance of the French Revolution for England (the ‘Revolution controversy’). This chapter initiates discussion of the contested meaning of the rights of man in that debate, examining contributions by Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. A vision of the rights of man emerges as the rights of the living to control the political community of which those latter are a part.

scholarly journals The Sublime

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-85
Author(s):  
Karzan A. Mahmood
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This paper aims at analysing the concept of the sublime, which is a pioneering concept of the English Romantics poetry, in relation to the French revolution in the works of Edmund Burke. Burke, unlike all other thinkers who view sublimity as a delightful and elevating feeling, perceives sublimity as an element of dangerous and terrifying incidents and objects mainly in relation with the great incident of the French Revolution. Hence, the paper concentrates on that essential metamorphosis in the content of the concept from progression to regression in the concept of sublime. Burke himself witnessed the revolution in France and propounded his philosophical viewpoints revolving around the notion of the sublime. He contended that the sublimity is whatsoever that brings about terror or is what terrifies the subjects. From this, he concluded that the French revolution was sublime because it was dangerous and threatened the natural laws and order, religion and God’s genuine sublime, traditions and constitution. In this paper, in addition, his ideas to illustrate sublime will ultimately, to some degree, be evaluated and criticised. The second part will be dedicated to demonstrating the aesthetics nature and aspect of the concept of the sublime. While the third part will display the relation of the concept, the way it is exhibited in chapter two, in relation to the great revolution in France.

scholarly journals Being Immortal in Paris: Violence and Prophecy during the French Revolution

2016 ◽  
Vol 71 (02) ◽  
pp. 217-245
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Ramón Solans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Instability ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Emotional Needs ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

This article uses the case of Catherine Théot and her prophetic activity in late eighteenth-century Paris to reflect on the relationship between event and prophecy in the era of the French Revolution. Despite appearing fixed and immobile, Théot's prophecies were constantly changing and evolving, giving rise to hybrid discourses influenced by various currents including both Jansenism and revolutionary discourses. The Théot affair thus provides an occasion to reflect on contemporary supernatural interpretations of the French Revolution. In this context, her prophecies can be read as a response to the emotional needs triggered by political instability, the fear of war and political violence, and religious changes. In conclusion, the article points to a religious discourse that existed on the margins of the dialectic between revolution and counterrevolution, but was nevertheless closely linked to it though the effects of the Revolutionary Wars and the Terror.

From ‘La Grande Chartreuse’ to The British Album

2020 ◽  
pp. 22-57
Author(s):  
Samantha Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Origin Myth ◽  
The French Revolution

By analysing the late-eighteenth-century reception of ‘The Album of the Fathers’ at the Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse, the chapter offers an exemplary instance of the issues at stake in album culture. The book was instrumental in promoting the elite practice of inscribing occasional texts in albums. In 1789 fashionable newspapers the World and the Oracle publicly fought over ownership of a transcript from the album and of ‘Della Cruscan’ poetry. The quarrel gave rise to scurrilous journalism, satirical prose, and parodic verse in which the term ‘album’ and its occasional and heterogeneous aesthetic was claimed and contested. In William Gifford’s attack on the Della Cruscans, Bell’s poetry anthology The British Album (1790) became shorthand for poetry’s debasement through cultural feminization. The Grande Chartreuse album disappeared during the French Revolution, but created a grand origin myth for the Romantic album.

Reflections on the Revolution in France

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund Burke
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Edmund Burke was the dominant political thinker of the last quarter of the eighteenth century in England. His reputation depends less on his role as a practising politician than on his ability to set contemporary problems within a wider context of political theory. Above all, he commented on change. He tried to teach lessons about how change should be managed, what limits should not be transgressed, and what should be reverently preserved. Burke’s generation was much in need of advice on these matters. The Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, and catastrophically, the French Revolution presented challenges of terrible proportions. They could promise paradise or threaten anarchy. Burke was acutely aware of how high the stakes were. The Reflections on the Revolution in France was a dire warning of the consequences that would follow the mismanagement of change.

William ‘Bill’ Doyle and the Origins of the French Revolution

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Blanning
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Marxist Interpretation ◽  
Breaking Work ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter discusses Bill Doyle's contribution to the study of the origins of the French Revolution. It shows how his early work delivered a powerful critique of the dominant Marxist interpretation, already under attack from revisionists led by Alfred Cobban. It examines the three editions of his book Origins of the French Revolution, with both continuities and changes identified. Particular importance is assigned to Doyle's ground-breaking work on the part played by venality in eroding the old regime monarchy. A second topic of major importance to which Doyle's researches have contributed a great deal is the role of the Parlements. This is placed in the context of Doyle's critique of the notion of an ‘aristocratic reaction’ in late-eighteenth century France. The chapter concludes with a discussion of his most recent work on aristocracy.

scholarly journals De lykkelige skatteborgere

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (121) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Jonas Ross Kjærgård
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Century Thought ◽  
The French Revolution

The article offers a contextualized reading of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s forbidden bestseller The Year 2440 (1771). It focuses on Mercier’s financial politics as these are presented both in the novel and in the author’s intervention in the public debate immediately prior to the outbreak of the French revolution. Based on a reading of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the article argues that there is a link between happiness, rights and fiscality, which has rarely been examined. Intervening in this field of discourse, Mercier is co-responsible for the establishment of the unhappiness/happiness-dichotomy that characterizes much of the French late eighteenth century thought on happiness.

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