Turning Vanity Fair into The Cœlestial City: England’s Legal Narratives of the Body Politic from Bunyan to Thackeray

Pólemos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-145
Author(s):  
Matteo Nicolini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Legal Narratives ◽  
English Constitutional History

Abstract The article addresses the different narratives that characterize English constitutional history. It first examines the mainstream narrative, i. e., the retrospective reading of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional events dispensed by jurists and politicians in an attempt to pack the Establishment Constitution. It then focuses on the alternative legal narratives about the Constitution elaborated during the Civil War and the Restoration. Among them, it ascertains John Bunyan’s impact on the Establishment Constitution. Bunyan was a member of the New Model Army, a radical, and a Puritan who ended up in prison. Despite this background, he exerted a strong influence on Victorian society and on Thackeray’s representation of the body politic. As a consequence, Bunyan entered the political discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century when politicians started to reform English representative institutions, and therefore became part of the Establishment Constitution.

The Wasteland of William Blake

1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-204
Author(s):  
Frank O'Malley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Blake ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future

The question is: how can you put a prophet in his place when, by the very character of prophecy, he is eternally slipping out of place? William Blake was not an eighteenth century or nineteenth century mind or a typically modern mind at all. What I mean to say, right at the start, is that, although well aware of his time and of time altogether, he was not in tune with the main tendencies of his or our own time. Indeed time was a barrier he was forever crashing against. Blake's talent raved through the world into the fastnesses of die past and dramatically confronted the abysses of the future. His age did not confine him. As a poet he does not seem finally to have had real spiritual or artistic rinship with any of the rationalist or romantic writers of England. As a thinker he came to despise the inadequacy of the limited revolutionary effort of the political rebels of the Romantic Revolution. Blake's name is not to be seen mounted first with that of Paine or Godwin, of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron or Keats. With these he has, ultimately, little or nothing in common. At any rate, his voice and mood and impact are thoroughly different from the more publicly successful voices of the period of his life, older and younger generations alike.

scholarly journals Sorismo en el contexto del geunismo

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Sánchez-Seco López
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Efficient Markets ◽  
Efficient Markets Hypothesis ◽  
Economic Philosophy ◽  
The One ◽  
Regulatory Proposals ◽  
Economic Globalisation

En el contexto de una obra mucho más amplia y en ciernes, que propone como único sistema plenamente legítimo aquél cuyo cuerpo político viene constituido por la totalidad de habitantes del planeta, es conveniente traer a colación la filosofía política y económica de George Soros, porque aporta una visión muy diferente a la aplicada por los endiosados economistas que no supieron ver con antelación la Gran Recesión global en la que seguimos inmersos. La relación entre la realidad y el pensamiento es clave en el sorismo, como también lo es la distinción entre los diversos tipos de ciencias. La hipótesis de la eficiencia en los mercados también es cuestionada, junto con el concepto de equilibrio en economía, la incertidumbre y la falibilidad. También se acomete la crítica del fundamentalismo de mercado y a las propuestas regulatorias. Y todo en el contexto de una globalización económica poco política.Within the context of a much wider and developing piece proposing as only fully legitimate system the one the body politic of which is composed of the totality of inhabitants on the planet, it is convenient to bring to us the political and economic philosophy of George Soros for it adds a very different vision to that applied by the deified economists who could not in advance see the global Great Recession in which we keep on living. The relation between reality and thought is key within Sorism, as it is the distinction amongst the several kinds of sciences. The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is also put into question side by side with the concept of equilibrium in Economics, uncertainty, and fallibility. The critique of market fundamentalism is also implemented as well as the regulatory proposals. And all of it taking place within the context of a scarcely political but very economic globalisation.

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.

Introduction

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. C. Smout
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Political Scene ◽  
The Way

This book presents an overview of the first six decades of the Union of the Crowns. It also provides a picture of the uses to which judicial torture was put after 1660 and a summary of the straits in which Scotland found itself in the opening years of the eighteenth century. It then explores the problems which union posed to maritime lawyers of both nations, the dark reception that the Scots received in eighteenth-century England, and the way Enlightenment Scotland viewed the British unions. It examines the ambitions of Scottish élites in India, the frame for radical cooperation in the age of the Friends of the People and later, and the background for the sojourn of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in London. It finally outlined the Anglo-Scottish relations on the political scene in the nineteenth century. The parliamentary union did little in the short run for Anglo-Scottish relations. It is shown that Scots are indeed worried and worry a lot about Anglo-Scottish relations, but the English worried and worry about them hardly at all, except in times of exceptional crisis, as in 1638–54, 1703–7, 1745–7 and perhaps much later in the 1970s after oil had been discovered.

Jews and the Criminalization of Madness

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Grey Zone ◽  
Social Type ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Mental Pathology ◽  
Medical Process

Distinctions between delinquency and illness were ill-defined and problematic, as we have seen in the case of the masturbator Johann A. And it was precisely in this vague grey zone between the two that psychiatry was able to insert itself in defining a new mental pathology. The problem of deciphering the difference between delinquency/criminality and madness was further complicated and given a unique twist in the cases of Jewish patients, whose Jewishness (in the eyes of the asylum) was by definition a kind of criminality and immorality. Jewishness, in other words, represented a category of interpretation distinct from illness, one which, in turn, had become highly politicized in the debates about Jewish emancipation since the eighteenth century. Therefore, when race was used to interpret patient behavior, it constituted a form of thinking outside of the medical domain in the strictest sense. In this way, it was potentially at odds with the medical process, and could, as I will show in two case studies, function to prevent the asylum staff from seeing and treating patients as ill. This chapter thus examines the limits of the medicalization of deviancy— the points where, in contrast to the “illnesses” discussed heretofore (male masturbation, nymphomania, and religious madness), medicine pulled back, seeking explanations for the person in a framework outside of the terms of medicine. That extramedical framework drew from long-standing stereotypes of Jews as immoral and criminal; but it also had a more immediate source in a contemporary trope that united Jewishness and criminality in a social type: the jüdischer Gauner (Jewish crook). Such images of Jews had in turn become part of the political arsenal of those opposing Jewish emancipation on the grounds of an incorrigible Jewish “character.” My argument here runs counter to the few historical works on Jews and insanity, which, consistent with the medicalization thesis, have focused exclusively on the conflation of Jewishness and illness in medical theories. In part, this approach derives from their focus on the second half of the nineteenth century, where the conflation was indeed overwhelming, psychiatry and medicine (as well as other human sciences) having become saturated with racial and degeneration theories.

Outliving the Republic

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-100
Author(s):  
Brian Walters
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Republic

Chapter 4 examines claims in republican oratory and letters that the body politic was dead, dying, or would have died, if not for some timely intervention. To some degree, invocations of the republic’s death overlap with the images of wounding and disease explored in earlier chapters, to which at least a few are directly connected. The suggestion of urgency and permanence and the complex emotional resonances evoked by death, however, also often impart meanings of their own. References to the body politic’s demise are particularly common not only in invective but also in consolatory contexts, as Cicero’s letters to and from friends in the period of the civil wars (from 49 to 45 BCE) and Caesar’s dictatorship poignantly show. Common assumptions that Rome’s republic ought to have been undying lent further significance to statements about the political body’s death.

CHINAMPAAGRICULTURE, SURPLUS PRODUCTION, AND POLITICAL CHANGE AT XALTOCAN, MEXICO

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher T. Morehart
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Total Population ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Potential Productivity ◽  
Surplus Production ◽  
Full Production

AbstractThis article examines the productivity of agriculture at the Postclassic polity of Xaltocan, Mexico. Employing multiple lines of data (remote sensing, artifactual, ecofactual, chronological, demographic, historic, ethnographic, and environmental), it reconstructs the potential productivity of an integrated raised field,chinampasystem that surrounded the polity. This exercise reveals that the system was capable of producing a sizeable caloric surplus above the needs of the kingdom's estimated total population and the number of laborers necessary to maintain full production. To situate the processes related to agricultural production, the paper considers how farmers’ strategies were articulated with multiple institutions. Increased integration between political, social, and household institutions possibly fostered residents’ incorporation into the body politic and provided mechanisms to finance the political economy. Such integration and dependency fractured, however, when Xaltocan was conquered.

Révolte, Pouvoir, Religion: Les Hubbu du Fūta-Jalon (Guinée)

1988 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Botte
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
The Political ◽  
Islamic Revolution ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Eastern Province ◽  
Key Word ◽  
State Capital ◽  
Holy Man

In the middle of the nineteenth century, in Futa Jalon, the popular revolt of the Hubbu brutally revealed the underlying weaknesses of the most powerful state of its time in the region. A marabout of the Qādiriyya, Alfā Mamadu Dyuhe, took upon himself the leadership of the oppressed, the discontented, and the minority groups. The Hubbu survived for forty years, until exterminated by Samori in 1884, but the article concentrates on the movement from its inception in 1845 to the death of its founder in 1854, at the pinnacle of his success, in possession of the Futa state capital, Timbo. The Futa state, product of an Islamic revolution in the eighteenth century, had lost the fervour of its Fulbe founders in the endless contest for the position of Almamy between the rival lineages of Alfāyā and Soriyā. Based upon the jihād against paganism, upon the taxation of the conquered, and upon the slavery of more than half its population, it was rendered doubly oppressive by the political struggle for the rewards of power at all levels down to that of village headman, and doubly weak in consequence. The nomadic Fulbe, particularly angered by their treatment, were notably responsive to the preaching of Alfā Mamadu against the decadence and injustice of the rulers; so too were the Malinke of the eastern province of Fōduye-Haji. It was the breakdown of this large region into smaller and smaller chieftaincies, increasing the patronage of the reigning Almamy by multiplying the number of official predators, that created the special conditions for the Hubbu revolt. First the representations of Timbo, then the Alfāyā and the Soriyā themselves, were routed by the holy man and his increasingly numerous following. The religious leadership which had inspired the rising, however, faltered after Alfā Mamadu's death. The Hubbu, from hubb, ‘love’, the key word in the Arabic chant that bound them into a religious fraternity, failed to carry through their revolution, and instead became a community of refugees living by banditry. More important to their failure than the reform of the Futa state, undertaken by the Almamys at the insistence of their own clerics, was the fundamental inability of the movement, so characteristic of other popular revolts, to see the new society they wished to bring into existence as in any way different from the old. Slavery, for instance, was not abolished, despite the numbers of ex-slaves in the Hubbu ranks. Their failure was a failure of imagination.

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