‘A Blessed and Glorious Work of God, … Attended with Some Irregularity’: Managing Methodist Revivals, c.1740–1800

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 210-232
Author(s):  
Clive Murray Norris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Good Practice ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Holy Spirit

The Connexion established by John Wesley (1703–91) experienced many outbreaks of local revival in the late eighteenth century. These were examples of the tension between reason and emotion, spontaneity and regularity, which characterized the movement. This article discusses how, amidst concerns from within Methodism and beyond, the leadership sought to manage but not suppress what was perceived to be this work of the Holy Spirit. Its challenge to the connexional polity was especially acute in the 1790s, during the Great Yorkshire Revival. In 1800, a Methodist-inspired publication sought to present good practice on validating and encouraging local revivals while maximizing their effectiveness and minimizing any disruption to the connexional order or wider civil society. However, despite fears that institutional concerns were dampening the Spirit's work, around 1800 Wesley's successors acted to reassert the control of the Preachers’ Conference over Methodist practice and premises, and a cautious rationalism came to the fore.

scholarly journals The Businessmen of Sveaborg: Civil–Military Interaction in an Atypical Eighteenth Century Nordic Military Town

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 73-94
Author(s):  
Juha-Matti Granqvist
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Civilian Population ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Military ◽  
Mutual Agreement

Late eighteenth-century Helsinki was, due to the sea fortress Sveaborg, one of the most prominent Nordic military towns. At the same time, Helsinki differed from other Nordic military towns of the era because of its geography. The fortress Sveaborg, with its large military and civilian population, was built on islands unconnected to the mainland and thus was isolated from the outside world every spring and autumn due to the Nordic climate. The burghers of Helsinki, who had shops and taverns on the islands, were vital to the maintenance of the fortress. At the same time, their presence caused tension between the civil society and the military society, as the Army tried to control the burghers’ business and the burghers saw this as a violation of their economic rights. During the sixty-year period of the fortress’s construction (1748–1808), the situation evolved from an open conflict to a mutual agreement and, finally, led to the birth of a new kind of business circle that shook the borders between civil society and the military.

Inward Baptism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baird Tipson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Evangelical Christian ◽  
New Birth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
George Whitefield

Inward Baptism describes theological developments leading up to the great evangelical revivals in the mid-eighteenth century. It argues that Martin Luther’s insistence that a participant’s faith was essential to a sacrament’s efficacy would inevitably lead to the insistence on an immediate, perceptible communication from the Holy Spirit, which evangelicals continue to call the “new birth.” A description of “conversion” through the sacrament of penance in late-medieval Western Christianity leads to an exploration of Luther’s critique of that system, to the willingness of Reformed theologians to follow Luther’s logic, to an emphasis on “inward” rather than “outward” baptism, to William Perkins’s development of a conscience religion, to late-seventeenth-century efforts to understand religion chiefly as morality, and finally to the theological rationale for the new birth from George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards. If the average Christian around the year 1500 encountered God primarily through sacraments presided over by priests, an evangelical Christian around 1750 received God directly into his or her heart without the need for clerical mediation, and he or she would be conscious of God’s presence there.

scholarly journals Foucault, Ferguson, and civil society

2015 ◽  
pp. 36-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Ashenden
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Way Of Thinking

In contrast to those who trace civil society to “community” per se, Foucault is keen to locate this concept as it emerges at a particular moment in respect of specific exigencies of government. He suggests that civil society is a novel way of thinking about a problem, a particular problematization of government that emerges in the eighteenth century and which combines incommensurable conceptions of the subject as simultaneously a subject of right and of interests. This article takes up Foucault’s discussion of the Scottish Enlightenment in The Birth of Biopolitics to trace the distinctiveness of his discussion of civil society, but also in order to suggest that we ought to pay closer attention to the tensions between commercial-civilizational and civic republican themes in the literature of the late eighteenth century than does Foucault. It is my tentative suggestion that Foucault’s account leaves out significant aspects of these debates that offer counter-valences to the dominant models of the subject available to contemporary political discourse.

They Were Prodigals and Enslavers

2019 ◽  
pp. 108-138
Author(s):  
Sean D. Moore
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Almost All

This chapter examines the founding of the New York Society Library as part of the trend of merchants made wealthy by slavery and related commerce establishing philanthropic and civil society institutions in the mid- and late eighteenth century. By mapping the reading network around Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in this library, it establishes that almost all of its readers from 1789–90 supported Defoe’s pro-slavery views as articulated by Crusoe’s choice to go to sea to engage in the Africa trade, and how most American editions of the novel advocated young men doing the same. The library’s City Readers database also makes it easy to inventory the other books that readers of Crusoe were reading in order to gauge the level of pro-slavery versus Manumission Society sentiment. In doing so, it provides a portrait of New York society as one in which whites of every background benefited from the slave trade.

scholarly journals Adam Smith's Influence on Hegel's Philosophical Writings

1991 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
James P. Henderson ◽  
John B. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Philosophical Writings

Historians of economics and philosophy have noted Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel's debt to Adam Smith and have suggested that Hegel's analysis of civil society rests on a Smithian foundation. Laurence Dickey recognized that “Hegel's interest in the Scots coincided with the late eighteenth-century German interest in the relationship between socioeconomic processes in history and the development of civil institutions” (Dickey 1987, p. 194). Georg Lukacs emphasized that “it is highly probable that the study of Adam Smith was a turning-point in Hegel's evolution” (Lukacs 1976, p. 172). In his study of The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, Ernest Mandel maintained that Marx discovered political economy and its importance to philosophy in his reading of Hegel. Says Mandel:

scholarly journals Civil Society and Paths to Abolition

2015 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-57
Author(s):  
Seymour DRESCHER
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Abstract Through a comparative analysis, this article aims to present an overview of British, French, Russian, American and Brazilian abolitionist action, between the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century. Indicating the struggles of pro-abolition civil associations, the paths taken in Britain, France, the US and Brazil are presented in parallel - either to emphasize approaches, either to highlight the undeniable peculiarities - revealing the marks of violence and negotiation present in the emancipation process.

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