Green and Sidgwick

2021 ◽  
pp. 440-481
Author(s):  
John Skorupski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Final Section ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Absolute Idealism ◽  
Henry Sidgwick ◽  
Late Modern

The end of the nineteenth century saw a rethinking of German idealism led by Thomas Hill Green, and a refinement of utilitarianism by Henry Sidgwick. This chapter examines their restatements of the two great late modern syntheses: absolute idealism and utilitarian liberalism. For both, the crisis of religion was fundamental. In Green’s case this meant a return to absolute idealism, with religion at its core, and a new application to the politics of liberalism. In Sidgwick’s case it led to an implicit nihilism. Sidgwick’s analysis of normative ‘intuition’ is discussed, his thesis of the dualism of practical reason is examined, and it is pointed out that on his own penetrating account of normative warrant, neither egoism nor utilitarianism is warranted. The final section of the chapter reconsiders the role of sentiment, will, and reason as bases of impartiality.

J.S. Mill and the Problem of Party

1981 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce L. Kinzer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Life ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Party Government ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Responsible Government ◽  
Henry Sidgwick ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Normal Feature

Although party was a considerably more limited force in the British political system between the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Second Reform Act than it had been either during the thirties and early forties or in the later decades of the nineteenth century, it was nonetheless a significant fact of English political life throughout the Victorian period. Few students of nineteenth-century British politics, however, would look to J.S. Mill, perhaps the most influential political thinker of his time, for insights into the role of party. The consensus has been that very little of a positive nature can be said about Mill and party. InThe Elements of Politics, Henry Sidgwick observes that “Mill… hardly seems to contemplate a dual organisation of parties as a normal feature of representative institutions.” A.H. Birch asserts, in hisRepresentative and Responsible Government, that Mill “simply ignored the existence of political parties.” Dennis Thompson's study of the structure of Mill's political thought devotes some three pages to Mill's attitude towards party government, the author concluding that he was hostile to it and did not consider it necessary “for effective, stable democracy.” Indeed, Mill's major political treatise,Considerations on Representative Government, says remarkably little about parties, and where they are referred to no constructive influence is imputed to them. His discussion of Thomas Hare's plan of personal or proportional representation, for example, makes clear that one of its numerous virtues is the security it provides for insuring the representation not of “two great parties alone” but of every significant “minority in the whole nation.”

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY IN VICTORIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT: T. H. GREEN, HERBERT SPENCER, AND HENRY SIDGWICK

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
DUNCAN BELL ◽  
CASPER SYLVEST
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Society ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Liberal Internationalism ◽  
Intellectual Elite ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Henry Sidgwick ◽  
Liberal Ideology ◽  
Fundamental Distinction

In the second half of the nineteenth century, British liberal ideology contained an open-ended vision of international order. The vision usually included a notion of an incipient or immanent international society composed of civilized nations. The fundamental distinction between civilized and barbarian nations meant that while this perceived society was international, in no sense was it global. In this essay we outline some of the broader characteristics of the internationalist outlook that many liberals shared and specifically discuss the claims about international society that they articulated. Liberal internationalism was a broad church and many (but not all) of its fundamental assumptions about the nature and direction of international progress and the importance of civilization were shared by large swathes of the intellectual elite. These assumptions are analysed by exploring the conceptions of international society found in three of the most influential thinkers of the time, T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer and Henry Sidgwick. Finally, the essay turns to the limitations of this vision of international society, especially in the context of the role of empire.

Interior Decoration

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Gossling
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the role of interior decoration in decadent culture by examining the relationship of decadent lives to decadent writing. The interiors described in decadent fiction often take inspiration from real houses and apartments; those fictional descriptions, in turn, sometimes inspire the decoration of actual homes. The article begins with a discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Furniture,” and then considers the “museum houses” of the Goncourt brothers and Robert de Montesquiou. These real spaces were the ne plus ultra of artistic living in the nineteenth century and influenced the decoration of the interiors in J.-K. Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884). The final section considers the legacy of decadent design in interior decoration by examining Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale degli Italiani (Shrine of Italian victories), the hillside estate where the writer lived from 1922 until his death in 1938, and the “dictator chic” aesthetic evident in the design choices of Donald Trump and his rich, famous, and authoritarian contemporaries.

scholarly journals Kant's Practical Postulates and the Limits of the Critical System

2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 187-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Critical Philosophy ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Critical System ◽  
Philosophical System ◽  
Separate Treatment

The topic that I wish to consider is the significance, both systematic and historical, for Kant's system as a whole, of the postulates of pure practical reason, more specifically, of the two theological postulates concerning the existence of God and personal immortality which form the basis of Kant's moral theology. My discussion will focus on the problems of Kant's moral theology in the eyes of his early contemporaries, for whom it constituted a crux in Kant's project. Different views were taken by Kant's contemporaries of what exactly these problems signified regarding the future of Critical philosophy. For the thinkers I will be looking at here, the miscarriage of the moral theology constituted a fatal fault in the Kantian project. For the German Idealists, the moral theology instead provided a vital clue as to how the Kantian system could be transformed into a more radical idealism, while confirming that it needed to be. The role of the practical postulates in the development of German Idealism demands a separate treatment; what I will argue here is simply that the practical postulates do indeed represent a point at which Kant's philosophical system displays a deep and interesting tension, in light of which both historical responses are prima facie intelligible.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Images ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Advocacy Role ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.

Andrew Lang and Scottish Historiography: Taking on Tradition

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catriona M. M. Macdonald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
European Context ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
University Setting ◽  
Andrew Lang

The career and posthumous reputation of Andrew Lang (1844–1912) call into question Scottish historiographical conventions of the era following the death of Sir Walter Scott which foreground the apparent triumph of scientific methods over Romance and the professionalisation of the discipline within a university setting. Taking issue with the premise of notions relating to the Strange Death of Scottish History in the mid-nineteenth century, it is proposed that perceptions of Scottish historiographical exceptionalism in a European context and presumptions of Scottish inferiorism stand in need of re-assessment. By offering alternative readings of the reformation, by uncoupling unionism from whiggism, by reaffirming the role of Romance in ‘serious’ Scottish history, and by disrupting distinctions between whig and Jacobite, the historical works and the surviving personal papers of Andrew Lang cast doubt on many conventional grand narratives and the paradigms conventionally used to make sense of Scottish historiography.

Pater's Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Similar Operation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.

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