Enlightenment Political Philosophy

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
The Political ◽  
Small States ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Radical Enlightenment ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Made In

Toleration, secularization, and an associated critique of confessional religion might have served previous generations as organizing themes for an account of political philosophy during the Enlightenment. Two prominent attempts have been made in recent years to bring clarity to the political philosophies of the enlightenment era. The first is Jonathan Israel's assertion of a radical enlightenment critical of state and clerical authority, and of social hierarchies, which he traces from rebellions such as the Fronde in France (1648–1653), the Masaniello revolt in Naples (1647), and the civil wars in England, Scotland, and Ireland between 1638 and 1660, up to their culmination in the French Revolution (1789–1799). A sense of the contrasting scholarly perception of enlightenment political philosophy is evident by comparing Israel's views with those of John Robertson's The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (2005). This article explores Enlightenment political philosophy and discusses the absolute monarchy of France, political philosophy in Britain and in Europe's small states, and philosophies of despotism.

Coleridge's “ideal Realism”: an alternative to the “doctors of the Absolute”?

1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Mary Anne Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
First Time

A few months ago I read Peter Nicholson's The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists for the first time. In the index I found more than a hundred references to Hegel and only one to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, as many of the latter's writings, published for the first time in recent years, become generally accessible there is an increasing sense that he has been unfairly deprived of his due status as a philosopher. This is partly, no doubt, the syndrome of the prophet in his own country and partly the inevitable consequence of much of his later work remaining unpublished until recent years. Coleridge himself, with what some would take to be confirmation of an over-sensitivity to criticism, felt the neglect of his work went deeper and betrayed an anti-philosophical trait in British character. Despite his close reading of the work of many of his German contemporaries it seems that he did not read more than sixtyone pages of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik. His margin notes to this work are, on the whole, negative in their criticism. However, despite significant disagreements, there is much common ground in theme, argument and conclusion between his many drafts of the ‘Logosophia’, his intended magnum opus, and Hegel's system.

Rethinking Kant as a public intellectual

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-108
Author(s):  
Sofie Møller
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Political ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past

In Kant’s Politics in Context, Reidar Maliks offers a compelling account of Kant’s political philosophy as part of a public debate on rights, citizenship, and revolution in the wake of the French Revolution. Maliks argues that Kant’s political thought was developed as a moderate middle ground between radical and conservative political interpretations of his moral philosophy. The book’s central thesis is that the key to understanding Kant’s legal and political thought lies in the public debate among Kant’s followers and that in this debate we find the political challenges which Kant’s political philosophy is designed to solve. Kant’s Politics in Context raises crucial questions about how to understand political thinkers of the past and is proof that our understanding of the past will remain fragmented if we limit our studies to the great men of the established canon.

A Constituição de 1822 uma Filosofia Política Intempestiva

1998 ◽  
Vol 6 (11) ◽  
pp. 39-47
Author(s):  
Viriato Soromenho-Marques ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Restoration Age ◽  
Portuguese Society ◽  
The French Revolution

In this paper the philosophical foundations of the first Portuguese Constitution are submitted to critical analysis. Drafted in the aftermath of the 1820 Revolution, the Constitution of 1822 is deeply determined by contradictory tensions and forces. We may see in it the trace of the freedom trends developed in the Enlightenment period and led to practical terms in the dramatic battleground of the French Revolution. Nevertheless, the Portuguese Constitution of 1822 reflect also the energetic resistance from the conservative sectors and values of the Portuguese society and also the coming influence of the Restoration Age political philosophy, aimed to fight the rationalistic paradigm of natural right constitutional theories.

The Scholastic and Conciliar Roots of Samuel Rutherford’s Political Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 208-226
Author(s):  
Simon J. G. Burton
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Way

Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex remains a source of perennial fascination for historians of political thought. Written in 1644 in the heat of the Civil Wars it constitutes an intellectual and theological justification of the entire Covenanting movement and a landmark in the development of Protestant political theory. Rutherford’s argument in the Lex Rex was deeply indebted to scholastic and Conciliarist sources, and this chapter examines the way he deployed these, especially the political philosophy of John Mair and Jacques Almain, in order to construct a covenantal model of kingship undergirded by an interwoven framework of individual and communal rights. In doing so it shows the ongoing influence of the Conciliarist tradition on Scottish political discourse and also highlights unexpected connections between Rutherford’s Covenanting and his Augustinian and Scotistic theology of grace and freedom.

Anarchism

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marshall Shatz
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
The Enlightenment

Anarchism rejects the state as an inherently despotic institution that must be abolished in order for human nature to flower. This does not mean the absence of social order, however, for anarchism also contains a positive vision of the kind of community it expects to arise when political authority is eliminated. Although it shares liberalism's commitment to individual autonomy and Marxism's commitment to social justice, anarchism claims that it can implement those principles more fully and effectively without utilizing the mechanism of the state. Anarchism as a secular political philosophy originated as a product of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and anarchist thought was the cumulative product of a number of different individuals in different countries who elaborated its basic principles. This article examines the views of several thinkers on anarchism, including William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, and Prince Peter Kropotkin. It also considers the link between anarchism and terrorism.

scholarly journals Between the old and the new : Friedrich Gentz, 1764-1832

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ardis Travis Eakin
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Political Impact ◽  
Revolutionary Ideology ◽  
The 19Th Century

This dissertation reviews the life and political impact of Friedrich Gentz, who was born in Breslau, Prussia, in 1764, and died in Vienna, Austria, in 1832. Though remembered today as only a second- (or even third)- tier statesman alongside such luminaries of his day as Napoleon, Metternich, Wellington, and others, Gentz was nonetheless of importance in the shifting tides of late 18th and early 19th-century politics in Europe. The German translator of Edmund Burke, he was instrumental in bringing the conservative thinker's ideas into the conversations of Central Europe, while his writings against first the French Revolution, then Napoleon, marked him as one of the leading opponents of revolutionary ideology, and led the French emperor to dub him "that miserable scribe." But Gentz was important even beyond his anti-revolutionary polemics. As a product of the Enlightenment, he had some sympathy with the forces of modernity, and his career reflected the struggle to combine an openness to reform with hostility to revolution. In his later collaboration with Metternich to forge what became known as the Restoration, we can see just how much the post-Napoleonic conservative order in Europe was built upon a specific vision, one that rejected the quasi-feudal patterns of the ancien regime just as firmly as it did the democratic radicalism of its own day. Though it ultimately did not last, Gentz's work is clearly visible in the political contours of the 19th century. From the Enlightenment salons of Berlin to the dazzling Congress of Vienna and beyond, Between the Old and the New traces the eventful career of one of the most interesting men of letters in Revolutionary-era Europe.

Being and Freedom

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Skorupski
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Late Modern ◽  
The French Revolution

Being and Freedom is an account of ethics in Europe from the French Revolution: a phase of philosophical ethics whose influence ran far beyond philosophy, eventually dominating politics and religion in the West. Developments came from France, Germany, and Britain. This book is currently the only study that treats them together as a Europe-wide phenomenon. The first chapter covers the philosophical conflict at the heart of the French Revolution, between the individualism of the Enlightenment and two very different forms of holistic ethics: the old regime’s ethic of service and the radical-democracy of the Rousseauian left. Responses analysing modern freedom and democracy came from a series of French liberal thinkers. In Germany the reaction was to two revolutions seen as inaugurating modernity—the political revolution in France and the philosophical revolution of Kant. Here the fate of religion was critical; with it the metaphysics of being and freedom. The story is traced from Kant to Hegel’s idealist version of ethical holism. In Britain, Enlightenment naturalism remained the prevailing framework. It took different forms: ‘common sense’ and the theory of the sentiments in Scotland, utilitarianism in England. From these elements came a synthesis of European themes by John Stuart Mill—comparable in range but opposed to that of Hegel. This period’s ethical ideas remain the core of late modern ethics and the contested ground on which ethical disagreements take place today. The final chapter is a retrospective and assessment.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Kirill Chepurin ◽  
Alex Dubilet
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Theological Debate ◽  
Modern Condition ◽  
General Thrust

This chapter advances an innovative framework of political theology in general and its intersection with the German Idealist concepts and archives in particular, arguing for the indispensability of the latter for understanding the Christian-modern condition. The general thrust of this framework is to put into question the legitimacy of the Christian-modern world and its authorities, whether secular or religious. As such, it may be said to reactivate a Gnostic perspective within the political-theological debate, one that refuses the world and its modalities of justification and transcendence. At stake is not only the decoupling of immanence from its equation with the secular world and ungrounding modern forms of sovereignty, but also the subversion of modernity’s (no less than Christianity’s) self-legitimating conceptual narratives. Based on this framework, this essay 1) reconfigures German Idealism as the first speculative attempt to think the (genealogical and conceptual) entanglement of modernity and Christianity in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; 2) reconsiders German Idealist conceptions of nothingness, the world, and the absolute as caught between the delegitimating and the theodical tendencies, with special emphasis on the problematics of nihilism and history; and 3) provides an overview of the volume’s contents and interventions.

Liberty, Virtue, and Republicanism: 1776–1787

1977 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Agresto
Keyword(s):  
Civic Virtue ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
The Political ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Absolute Necessity ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Modern Republicanism ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Revolution

In recent years two ideas concerning America's republicanism have gained fairly general currency. First, there is now a growing recognition that a shift in understanding occurred in the decade after the revolution over the nature of republicanism and the political, social, and moral prerequisites necessary for establishing such a government. In particular, the notion of the absolute necessity of “virtue” or “public spiritedness” as the operative principle of republicanism became, for most American political thinkers, not only problematic but nearly indefensible. Second, there is a growing body of literature, journalistic and popular as well as scholarly, calling upon us to reopen the question of civic virtue and to reexamine anew its connection with republican health. After briefly reviewing the theoretical and practical connections made in the revolutionary era between virtue and self-government, this article will attempt to trace the causes for the early declension of the necessity of virtue in America's understanding of the foundations of republicanism. This accomplished, concerned citizens might then be able to evaluate more carefully the contemporary rediscovery of the links between moral character and modern republicanism by contemporary scholars and public men.

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.

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