Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830-1914

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Jones
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
British History ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Conservatism ◽  
Political Philosopher

Between 1830 and 1914 in Britain a dramatic modification of the reputation of Edmund Burke (1730–97) occurred. Burke, an Irishman and Whig politician, is now most commonly known as the ‘founder of modern conservatism’—an intellectual tradition which is also deeply connected to the identity of the British Conservative Party. The idea of ‘Burkean conservatism’—a political philosophy which upholds ‘the authority of tradition’, the organic, historic conception of society, and the necessity of order, religion, and property—has been incredibly influential in international academic analysis and in the wider political world. This is an intellectual construct of high significance, but its origins have not yet been understood. This book demonstrates that the transformation of Burke into the ‘founder of conservatism’ was in fact part of wider developments in British political, intellectual, and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing from a wide range of sources, including political texts, parliamentary speeches, histories, biographies, and educational curricula, this volume shows how and why Burke’s reputation was transformed over a formative period of British history. It bridges the significant gap between the history of political thought as conventionally understood and the history of the making of political traditions. By 1914, it is demonstrated that Burke had been firmly established as a ‘conservative’ political philosopher and was admired and utilized by political Conservatives in Britain who identified themselves as his intellectual heirs. This was one essential component of a conscious re-working of C/conservatism which is still at work today.

The Art of Love Poetry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Gray
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
Meaning And Function ◽  
Comprehensive History

Love begets poetry; poetry begets love. These two propositions have seemed evident to thinkers and poets across the Western literary tradition. Plato writes that “anyone that love touches instantly becomes a poet.” And even today, when poetry has largely disappeared from the mainstream of popular culture, it retains its romantic associations. But why should this be so—what are the connections between poetry and erotic love that lead us to associate them so strongly with one another? An examination of different theories of both love and poetry across the centuries reveals that the connection between them is not merely an accident of cultural history—the result of our having grown up hearing, or hearing about, love poetry—but something more intrinsic. Even as definitions of them have changed, the two phenomena have consistently been described in parallel terms. Love is characterized by paradox. Above all, it is both necessarily public, because interpersonal, and intensely private; hence it both requires expression and resists it. In poetry, especially lyric poetry, which features its own characteristic paradoxes and silences, love finds a natural outlet. This study considers both the theories and the love poems themselves, bringing together a wide range of examples from different eras in order to examine the major structures that love and poetry share. It does not aim to be a comprehensive history of Western love poetry, but an investigation into the meaning and function of recurrent tropes, forms, and images employed by poets to express and describe erotic love.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Jones
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Conservatism

This introductory chapter introduces the ‘historical Burke’, as well as the more familiar picture we have today of Burke as the ‘founder of modern conservatism’. The chapter provides an overview of previous attempts to chart his posthumous legacy by historians of political thought as well as historians of modern Britain and Ireland, and the Conservative Party in particular. It also explains the differences between Burke’s legacy in Britain and Ireland and that of continental Europe. The final section offers an outline of the publication history of Burke’s works in the period, as well as his three major biographers: James Prior, Thomas Macknight, and John Morley.

scholarly journals Cattle Plague and Society

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 8-33
Author(s):  
Johanna Widenberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Veterinary Medicine ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Retrospective Diagnosis ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Cattle Disease ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of

This article presents the findings of a study showing that rinderpest and anthrax were rife among cattle in eighteenth century Sweden and Finland. These diseases, which caused a widespread loss of animals, were the scourge of owners, medical practitioners and the authorities alike. The study also shows that the epizootic legislation and disease control that evolved at government level was influenced by the particular characteristics of rinderpest and anthrax. Previous research has identified the endemic nature of rinderpest and its far-reaching consequences for society. Yet major outbreaks of anthrax, and the degree to which the disease influenced the development of State epizootic control, were previously unknown. The study uses the perspectives of cultural history and the history of veterinary medicine, a wide range of historical sources, and a method of text analysis for making retrospective diagnoses. In this article the findings are compared with the results of studies of eighteenth century cattle disease and epizootic control in other European countries. Similarities and differences in theoretical perspectives and research methods are identified. Here the use of retrospective diagnosis in the history of veterinary medicine is discussed in particular.

Genius in France

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
History Of

This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, the book examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. The book traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. The book considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. It then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. The book shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and discusses the different ways major theorists—including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva—have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. The book brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.

Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shi-Yan Chao
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Filial Piety ◽  
Chinese Language ◽  
Chinese Opera ◽  
Discursive Analysis ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Historical Investigation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Agency

Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape provides a cultural history of queer representations in Chinese-language film and media, negotiated by locally produced knowledge, local cultural agency, and lived histories. Incorporating a wide range of materials in both English and Chinese, this interdisciplinary project investigates the processes through which Chinese tongzhi/queer imaginaries are articulated, focusing on four main themes: the Chinese familial system, Chinese opera, camp aesthetic, and documentary impulse. Chao’s discursive analysis is rooted in and advances genealogical inquiries: a non-essentialist intervention into the "Chinese" idea of filial piety, a transcultural perspective on the contested genre of film melodrama, a historical investigation of the local articulations of mass camp and gay camp, and a transnational inquiry into the different formats of documentary. This book is a must for anyone exploring the cultural history of Chinese tongzhi/queer through the lens of transcultural media.

Peter M. Beattie, The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1864–1945. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. xxiv + 390 pp. $64.95 cloth; $19.95 paper

2004 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 213-215
Author(s):  
James P. Woodard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Military Recruitment ◽  
Labor Practices ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Duke University ◽  
Brazilian History

The Tribute of Blood has already earned an audience among historians of nineteenth and twentieth-century Brazil, who have found in Peter M. Beattie's analysis of military recruitment and enlisted service an innovative and often compelling exploration of a neglected facet of Brazilian history. But the book deserves a wider audience, not least because of Beattie's stated ambition of providing the first book-length study, “that explicitly focuses on impressment and conscription as transatlantic tribute labor systems intricately linked to other labor practices and relations in broader society” (14). Prospective members of such an audience not only stand to learn a great deal about Brazil (indeed, the novice might read The Tribute of Blood as an introduction to the socio-cultural history of Brazil during a “long nineteenth century” of its own). They also might be forced to rethink some of their own assumptions regarding military service in particular and institutional modernization more generally, and draw inspiration from Beattie's impressive command of a wide range of Brazilian sources and his willingness to extend comparisons to and borrow approaches from fields situated at some remove—geographic and otherwise—from his own.

The Meaning of The Ikhtilāf Al-madhāhib In 'Abd Al-wahhāb Al-sha'rānī's Al-mīzān Al-kubrā

2004 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuela Pagani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Legal Reform ◽  
Substantial Agreement ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Legal Theorist

AbstractThe Mīzān kubrā by 'Abd al-Wahhāb al-ShaAErānī (d. 973/1565) was cited by nineteenth-century Muslim scholars to support a wide range of mutually exclusive conceptions of religious authority. In the twentieth century, modern students of Islamic law have given different assessments of ShaAErānī's view of the relationship between the madhāhib: while some stress its innovativeness and potential for legal reform, others regard it as a conservative restatement of scholastic tradition. In substantial agreement with the latter view, I discuss some of ShaAErānī's theories, focusing on the significance of his peculiar blending of Sufi and legal discourses for the cultural history of Islam in the early Ottoman period. I argue that ShaAErānī's aim is to bring Ibn 'Arabī's spiritual hermeneutics of the revelation into line with the "age of taqlīd." As a "legal theorist" no less than a h agiographer, ShaAErānī was an imaginative and reliable witness of the religious values and mentalités of his time. Far from calling into question the established system of the legal schools, he assigned a pivotal role to the metaphysical validation of ikhtilāf in order to strengthen a pluralist view of mainstream Islam.

Genealogy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson ◽  
Amy Nigh
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Technical Sense ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
As Effects ◽  
Empirical Material ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

In the everyday sense of the term, genealogy describes the study of ancestry and the tracing of a pedigree. As such, genealogy serves to follow the element in question to a singular origin which constitutes its source and guarantees its value. As a philosophical notion, however, genealogy is opposed to such tracing of a pedigree and instead describes the interrupted descent of a custom, practice, or idea, locates its multiple beginnings, and excavates the conditions under which it emerged. In this technical sense of the term, genealogy is a form of historico-philosophical analysis that mobilizes empirical material to uncover historically specific conditions under which the object under examination was able to emerge. Genealogy thus reverses customary explanations of objects of cultural history, according to which these objects are either necessary end points of historical development or results caused by some anthropological principle. Instead, genealogy reconstructs the history of their objectification—that is, of their contingent formation as an object of concern and intervention. Phenomena that are typically assumed to be the causes of certain practices, institutions, laws, norms, and so on are here revealed as effects of the very things they were thought to cause. The problems with which genealogy is concerned are historical formations that rely on and simultaneously make possible forms of knowledge, norms of behavior, and modes of being a subject. While the invention of genealogy in its technico-philosophical sense is usually attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, a genealogy of genealogy itself reveals its numerous beginnings in a wide range of discourses and practices that constitute its conditions of possibility.

scholarly journals CONSERVATISM, EDMUND BURKE, AND THE INVENTION OF A POLITICAL TRADITION, c. 1885–1914

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 1115-1139 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMILY JONES
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Political Capital ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
Modern Conservatism ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThis article addresses the reputation of Edmund Burke and his transformation into the ‘founder of modern conservatism’. It argues that this process occurred primarily between 1885 and 1914 in Britain. In doing so, this article challenges the existing orthodoxy which attributes this development to the work of Peter Stanlis, Russell Kirk, and other conservative American scholars. Moreover, this article historicizes one aspect of the construction of C/conservatism as both an intellectual (small-c) and political (capital-C) tradition. Indeed, though the late Victorian and Edwardian period saw the construction of political traditions of an entirely novel kind, the search for ‘New Conservatism’ has been neglected by comparison with New Liberalism. Thus, this study explores three main themes: the impact of British debates about Irish Home Rule on Burke's reputation and status; the academic systematization of Burke's work into a ‘political philosophy of conservatism’; and, finally, the appropriation of Burke by Conservative Unionists during the late Edwardian constitutional crisis. The result is to show that by 1914 Burke had been firmly established as a ‘conservative’ political thinker whose work was directly associated with British Conservatism.

scholarly journals Web Archive as a Source for Studying Contemporary History

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Povroznik ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Information Society ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Web Archiving ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Web Archive ◽  
The Web

Web archives contain information about political, economic, social, and cultural history, and they can be the basis for the reconstruction of the history of the information society. Contemporary web archiving initiatives aim to preserve the web globally, nationally, and locally and to build a wide range of thematical collections. The paper focuses on the possibilities of using web archival materials in historical research and provides examples of such research projects.

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