Wars of the Roses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lincoln Taiz ◽  
Lee Taiz
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
The Political ◽  
Floral Ecology ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Linnaean System ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Wars Of The Roses ◽  
Marquis De Condorcet ◽  
Sexual Theory

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, opposition to the sexual theory intensified among social and religiously conservative asexualists who felt threatened by the political theories of the Enlightenment. For some, the Linnaean system was a stalking horse for libertinism, radical Jacobinism, feminism and anarchy. They maintained their ideological purity citing philosophical, religious and pedagogical reasons for rejection. Among the opponents were the Marquis de Condorcet, Hans Möller and William Smellie. Lazzaro Spallanzi and Charles Alston tried, but failed, to repeat Camerarius’s experiments. Flowers were so feminized symbolically the idea that most flowers were hermaphroditic seemed perverse, but Mary Wollstonecraft attacked hyper-feminine poetic metaphors for women as inimical to the struggle for equality. Meanwhile, hybridization experiments by Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter eliminated the last rational objection to the sexual theory and demolished the preformationist theory, in both ovist and spermist versions. Christian Konrad Sprengel laid the foundation for floral ecology.

The Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment: Between Reform and Revolution

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Soares Guimarães
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Absolute Power ◽  
Portuguese Empire ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Political Form

This chapter examines transformations of state–society relations in eighteenth-century Portugal in relation to Enlightened political debates of the time. It also explores how these transformations shaped the relations between Portugal and Brazil in the nineteenth century, the debate about the political form of independent Brazil, and the intra-Brazilian struggles over this form before and after independence. More importantly, it challenges the notion that the Enlightenment was absent from the Portuguese Empire as a result of the rejection of modern ideas by conservative world views and projects. It argues that there was a Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment that was plural and eclectic, supporting both critiques and defences of the absolute power of the king, endorsing simultaneously a secularisation process, the promotion of reason and Roman Catholicism, and fostering not only revolutionary projects but also conservative state reforms.

scholarly journals Revolution and human rights thought in the political philosophy of Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
The Political ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Public Reasoning ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
Core Issues

The Age of Reason is first and foremost an age of public reasoning. Equipped with a fresh and indeed unprecedented consciousness of feasibility and responsibility, educated citizens start to participate actively – and in many cases by taking personal risks – in discourses on political, religious and philosophical issues. In this article, I will highlight two core issues of the late eighteenth century – the dispute about the legitimacy of the French Revolution as well as its underlying philosophical conceptions and the rising human rights idea – and thereby revisit the interventions of three women who, though rediscovered in various fields of research, still have to gain their due recognition as pre-eminent political philosophers of their time.

Ideology Hunting: The Case of James Harrington

1959 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 662-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith N. Shklar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
History Of

It is well known that each age writes history anew to serve its own purposes and that the history of political ideas is no exception to this rule. The precise nature of these changes in perspective, however, bears investigation. For not only can their study help us to understand the past; it may also lead us to a better understanding of our own intellectual situation. In this quest the political theories of the 17th century and particularly of the English Civil War are especially rewarding. It was in those memorable years that all the major issues of modern political theory were first stated, and with the most perfect clarity. As we have come to reject the optimism of the eighteenth century, and the crude positivism of the nineteenth, we tend more and more to return to our origins in search of a new start. This involves a good deal of reinterpretation, as the intensity with which the writings of Hobbes and Locke, for instance, are being reexamined in England and America testify. These philosophical giants have, however, by the force of their ideas been able to limit the scope of interpretive license. A provocative minor writer, such as Harrington, may for this reason be more revealing. The present study is therefore not only an effort to explain more soundly Harrington's own ideas, but also to treat him as an illustration of the mutations that the art of interpreting political ideas has undergone, and, perhaps to make some suggestions about the problems of writing intellectual history in general.

Religious Themes in Contemporary Art

2016 ◽  
pp. 188-218
Author(s):  
Codrina Laura Ionita
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between art and religion, evident throughout the entire history of art, can be deciphered at two levels – that of the essence of art, and that of the actual theme the artist approaches. The mystical view on the essence of art, encountered from Orphic and Pythagorean thinkers to Heidegger and Gadamer, believes that art is a divine gift and the artist – a messenger of heavenly thoughts. But the issue of religious themes' presence in art arises especially since modern times, after the eighteenth century, when religion starts to be constantly and vehemently attacked (from the Enlightenment and the French or the Bolshevik Revolution to the “political correctness” nowadays). Art is no longer just the material transposition of a religious content; instead, religion itself becomes a theme in art, which allows artists to relate to it in different ways – from veneration to disapproval and blasphemy. However, there have always been artists to see art in its genuine meaning, in close connection with the religious sentiment. An case in point is the work of Bill Viola. In Romanian art, a good example is the art group Prolog, but also individual artists like Onisim Colta or Marin Gherasim, who understand art in its true spiritual sense of openness to the absolute.

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.

Enlightenment, Continental

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wokler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Individual Self ◽  
History Of Western Civilization

The Enlightenment is frequently portrayed as a campaign on behalf of freedom and reason as against dogmatic faith and its sectarian and barbarous consequences in the history of Western civilization. Many commentators who subscribe to this view find the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitan opposition to priestly theology to be dangerously intolerant itself, too committed to uniform ideals of individual self-reliance without regard to community or diversity, or to recasting human nature in the light of science. Modern debates about the nature of the Enlightenment have their roots in eighteenth-century controversies about the arts and sciences and about ideas of progress and reason and the political consequences of promoting them. Even when they shared common objectives, eighteenth-century philosophers were seldom in agreement on substantive issues in epistemology or politics. If they were united at all, it was by virtue only of their collective scepticism in rejecting the universalist pretensions of uncritical theology and in expressing humanitarian revulsion at crimes committed in the name of sacred truth.

Hellenism in the Enlightenment

2009 ◽  
pp. 165-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Cartledge
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
European History ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

This article moves past the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and, in particular, to the French Revolution, which crystallized an important, if not fully understood, moment in the history of Hellenism. It shows how the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the inspiration for so many of the French revolutionaries, were simultaneously proto-democratic and pro-Spartan. In this respect, Rousseau marks a complex breakthrough in the political traditions of Hellenism, which were, for much of European history until the eighteenth century, anti-democratic and pro-Spartan.

scholarly journals Preobražaji ustavnog prava na početku dvadeset prvog veka

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-31
Author(s):  
Bertrand Gicquel
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Constitutional Courts ◽  
Majoritarian Democracy ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Subject

The text analyzes the transformations of constitutional law as a university subject and legal field in France and Europe. It begins with the Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century. However, the evolution of the subject was rather checkered: due to its political nature, constitutional law was abolished and reinstated, depending on the political climate. There was neither a linear development nor consistant content as a university subject. It was first studied as institutional law, but then fell under the auspices of political science, only to be positivized after the establishment of constitutional courts. The term constitution also underwent transformation, no longer confined to merely organizing governance, but ordering all of society. While the field of application of the constitution expanded, it was undermined by strengthening individualism and communitarism. Predicaments also arose regarding the possibility of existence of a constitution without or outside the state, specifically in the context of the European Union. Finally, the text notes that the ideological use of the term democracy obscures the fact that majoritarian democracy might possibly be obsolete, and that other forms of legitimacy are gaining in significance.

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