The Present Position of Representative Democracy

1932 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 629-641
Author(s):  
Harold J. Laski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Present Position ◽  
Dynamic Nature ◽  
Universal Suffrage ◽  
Post War ◽  
Looking Back

The problem of representative democracy has been altered in a final way by the events of the post-war years. It is improbable that any one will again defend its superiority over alternative forms of government in the terms which would have satisfied either Jefferson or Jeremy Bentham. It is obvious that any view which places confidence in the power of universal suffrage and representative institutions, unaided and of themselves, to secure a permanently well-ordered commonwealth is seriously under-estimating the complexity of the issue. Such a view not only gravely exaggerates the power of reason over interest in society; it also misconceives the dynamic nature of the purpose which representative democracy is seeking to secure.Looking back now, at a generation's distance, upon the success of representative democracy in the nineteenth century, it is plain that this was due to the coincidence of quite special conditions.

Lasting Political Structures

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isser Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
Military Conscription ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Post War ◽  
Administrative Structures ◽  
Looking Back

This chapter uses the 1940s—the Resistance, the Liberation, the post-war moment—as a vantage point for looking back at the French Revolution’s projects of representative democracy, decentralization, and recentralization. Among other things it considers the initial re-division of the national territory, changing administrative structures, the uses of elections, the strictures against political parties, and the permutations on these matters across successive post-revolutionary regimes. A final section offers a more conventional chronological account, from 1789 onward, of one of the Revolution’s most consequential innovations: systematic military conscription.

‘A Party for Owners or a Party for Earners?’ How far did the British Conservative Party Really Change After 1945?

1987 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 49-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ramsden
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
Characteristic Mode ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Electoral Defeat ◽  
Post War ◽  
Looking Back

THE period spent in opposition between 1945 and 1951 has generally been thought of as a key to the understanding of the activities of the post-war British Conservative Party. Autobiographies of the Party leaders of the time began to appear at the end of the Fifties, already looking back to a period in which the Conservatives had decisively changed their approach. So for example, Lord Woolton's Memoirs reviewed not only a term as Party Chairman which had been a highlight of his own crowded career, but also his sharing in a major act of transformation, a transformation that had led on to Conservative success since 1951: ‘the change was revolutionary’. Other key figures in the organisation reached similar conclusions as their own accounts appeared: David Maxwell-Fyfe argued that the new Party rules which he had drawn up had not only decisively widened the political base of British Conservatism, but that events since had confirmed the importance of the change. R. A. Butler's account of The Art of the Possible argued in 1971 that ‘the overwhelming electoral defeat of 1945 shook the Conservative Party out of its lethargy and impelled it to re-think its philosophy and re-form its ranks with a thoroughness unmatched for a century’. The effect was to bring both the policies of the Party and ‘their characteristic mode of expression’, as he puts it, ‘up to date’. As recently as 1978, Reginald Maudling—a key figure behind the scenes in 1945–51 as a speechwriter from Eden and Churchill and as the organising secretary of the committee which produced the Industrial Charter of 1947—reached much the same view: ‘We were at that time developing a new economic policy for the Conservative Party … It marked a substantially different approach for post-war Conservative philosophy.

The Marais

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Reader
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Andre Malraux ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City ◽  
The Middle Ages

This book explores the history and the vicissitudes of one of Paris’s most extraordinary areas, the Marais. Centrally located on the Right Bank, this neighbourhood was from the Middle Ages through to the eighteenth century the most fashionable in the city, headquarters of the nobility who endowed it with resplendent architecture. The Court’s move to Versailles and the Revolution of 1789 led to the quartier’s decline, so that in the nineteenth century and the earlier part of the twentieth it was in parlous shape, its fine buildings run down and often severely overcrowded. It escaped wholesale destruction in the post-War frenzy of modernization largely thanks to André Malraux, who as Culture Minister fostered the restoration of the area. Malraux’s efforts were, however, not immune from criticism, sometimes seen as a form of socio-economic cleansing with concomitant fossilization, and thus emblematic of the problems faced by a city which has always been torn between the preservation of its past and the need to adapt to social and historical change. The book focuses particularly on literary, cinematic and other artistic reproductions of the quartier, of which it attempts to provide a comprehensive overview, and foregrounds particularly its importance as home to and base of two highly significant minorities – the Jewish and the gay communities.

The Theology of the Scottish Protestant Missionary Movement

2019 ◽  
pp. 51-63
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Entire Life ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Missionary Movement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Post War

In any survey of influential British missionary thinkers, Scottish names would occupy a prominent place. The Scottish contribution was not confined to those who served with the missions of the Presbyterian churches: some influential Scottish missionaries served with English societies, and some were not even Presbyterians. Nevertheless, five generalizations can be offered: (1) Scots Presbyterians opted to do mission through ecclesiastical structures, rather than through voluntary societies. (2) Scottish Presbyterian missions aimed to bring the entire life of Christian communities under the rule of Christ. (3) Scottish missionaries tended to insist that education was integral to the missionary task. (4) Scottish missionaries trained in the early nineteenth century drew deeply from the Scottish Enlightenment. (5) From the late nineteenth century, Scottish (like English) missionary theology was affected by philosophical idealism, though the mid-twentieth-century ascendancy of Barthianism may have helped to sustain the Scottish missionary movement in the turbulent post-war environment.

scholarly journals Survey Essay 1. Periodizing and Historicizing German Afro-Americanophilia: From Antebellum to Postwar (1850-1965)

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Moritz Ege ◽  
Andrew Wright Hurley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Black Germans ◽  
Power Differentials ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War

In this first essay, we delve into significant moments in the history (and pre-history) of twentieth century Afro-Americanophilia in Germany. We establish a periodisation stretching from the nineteenth century until the mid-1960s (from which point our second essay will continue), and take in the pre-colonial, the colonial, the Weimar, the Nazi; and the post-war eras.  We draw out some of the particularly significant moments, ruptures, and continuities within that time frame. We also identify some of the salient ways scholars have interpreted ‘Afro-Americanophilia’ during the period.  Focusing on a variety of practices of appropriation, communicative media, actors and forms of agency, power differentials, and sociocultural contexts, we discuss positive images of and affirmative approaches to black people in German culture and in its imaginaries. We attend to who was active in Afro-Americanophilia, in what ways, and what the effects of that agency were. Our main focus is on white German Afro-Americanophiles, but—without attempting to write a history of African Americans, black people in Germany, or Black Germans— we also inquire into the ways that the latter reacted to, suffered under the expectations levied upon them, or were able to engage with the demand for ‘black cultural traffic.’  

James Mill's ‘The History of British India’ and Utilitarianism as a Rhetoric of Reform

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Majeed
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural identities, with which both political languages were preoccupied.

scholarly journals An Overview of Public History in Italy: No Longer A Field Without a Name

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Serge Noiret
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Public History ◽  
Public Archaeology ◽  
Italian Association ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Post War ◽  
New Millennium

AbstractThis article traces the origins and development of public history in Italy, a field not anymore without this name today. Public history in Italy has its roots in historical institutions born in the nineteenth century and in the post WW2 first Italian Republic. The concept of “public use of history” (1993), the important role played by memory issues in post-war society, local and national identity issues, the birth of public archaeology (2015) before public history, the emergence of history festivals in the new millennium are all important moments shaping the history of the field and described in this essay. The foundation of the “Italian Association of Public History” (AIPH) in 2016/2017, and the promotion of an Italian Public History Manifesto (2018) together with the creation of Public History masters in universities, are all concrete signs of a vital development of the field in the Peninsula.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document