scholarly journals Political Ideals and Loyalties of Some Russian Writers of the Early 1760s

Slavic Review ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 560-575
Author(s):  
Walter Gleason
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Political Criticism ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Western European ◽  
Political Principles

During the initial years of her reign, Catherine II had to contend with political criticism and expectation of reform among nobles such as Denis Fonvizin and Ippolit Bogdanovich. Many Soviet scholars, particularly Makogonenko, Gukovskii and Pigarev, argue that the political writings of these critics can be interpreted as the initial evidence of a “constitutional” movement in Russia similar to those of mid-seventeenth century England and late eighteenth century France. The goal was to force Catherine to share political power by accepting “fundamental laws” or a “constitution.” Convinced of the need for such reforms, Fonvizin, Bogdanovich, and several other lesser known writers tried unsuccessfully in 1762 to win Catherine's approval of their projects. Failing to gain Catherine's support, the nobles became her political opponents —consistently and insistently advocating their political principles. This interpretation is valuable for its focus on the question of sovereignty and the individual's relation to the ruler as well as appealing for its attempt to integrate Russian events into a broader, European framework. Yet Soviet historians do not adequately specify and evaluate the theoretical origins of this “constitutional“ opposition. General references to contemporary European thinkers (British, French or German political philosophers) obscure their differences and assume the transfer of western European political ideas into Russia intact and unaltered in content or understanding. It is necessary, therefore, to investigate carefully the theoretical origins of the Russian writers' political ideals, their own version of these ideals, and the implications these opinions had for the writers' relationship to the ruler during the early 1760s.

Calabria 1783

2018 ◽  
pp. 176-187
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Caridi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Technical Knowledge ◽  
Working Hypothesis ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Orthogonal Grid ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Dual Domain

This chapter considers the reconstruction operations that were carried out in Calabria following the earthquake of the late-eighteenth century. The author connects the physical and ideological role played by the orthogonal grid within the scope of this urban process to Foucault's concept of the device. Such a working hypothesis makes it possible to highlight the dual-domain in which lies political power, on one hand, and technical knowledge, on the other. This is a duplicity that is not resolved in the supremacy of either one domain or the other but, rather, in their huddle in a dialectical node: the political power that avails itself of the technical knowledge to reinforce itself and the technical knowledge that takes advantage of the political power to legitimise itself.

The ichneumon fly and the equilibration of British natural economies in the eighteenth century

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 639-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHEILA WILLE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Evil ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Wealth ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Inherent Stability

AbstractThe parasitic ichneumon fly, discovered by European natural philosophers in the seventeenth century, remained largely unstudied until it captured the attention of Enlightenment-era natural historians. Although this sudden surge of interest has been explained as an effort to understand the natural ‘evil’ of parasitism, the heyday of ichneumon studies was actually inspired by the political and agricultural context of late eighteenth-century Britain. British naturalists were captivated by this insect for reasons both philosophical and practical. In the providentially self-equilibrating qualities of ‘natural’ ichneumon economies, they saw solutions to political problems of famine, dearth, national wealth, governance and excess population, in addition to finding reassurance that Enlightened confidence in nature's inherent stability and fruitfulness was not unfounded.

The Invention of National Legal History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Rückert
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Scientific Basis ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Critical Method

The chapter undertakes the first European overview up to the present and a comparison of the main European variations with its significant differences and communalities. European legal history is a product of special historiographies. The decisive contexts were the legal humanism and the monarchical state-nationalism of the seventeenth century. Legal history now was understood as task of legitimation, integration, and differentiation. The scientific basis was a new critical method. In the late eighteenth century the task became a modern national drive and was concentrated on state and folk. At the same time the genre was widened in nearly all branches of law. The three pioneers and model cases, namely Hermann Conring (1643) with K.F. Eichhorn (1808), Claude Fleury (about 1670), and Matthew Hale (about 1670), are analysed intensively.

The Time of the Trap Door

Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 54-86
Author(s):  
David Wills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Trap Door ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter offers an examination of the refining of the instant of execution that takes place with the introduction of trap door gallows in the seventeenth century and, more spectacularly and explicitly, in the late eighteenth century with the French Revolution and the guillotine. The death penalty is thereby distinguished from torture and a post-Enlightenment conception of punishment is introduced, lasting to the present. But the guillotine is bloody, and that underscores a complex visuality of the death penalty that also obtains during the same time period, playing out across diverse genres such as the execution sermon, political and scientific discourses relating to the guillotine, Supreme Court descriptions of crimes, and practices of an entity such as the Islamic State. What develops concurrent with the guillotine—yet remains constant through all those examples--is a form of realist photographic visuality.

JEAN-LOUIS DELOLME AND THE POLITICAL SCIENCE OF THE ENGLISH EMPIRE

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
IAIN McDANIEL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Stability ◽  
British State ◽  
Constitutional Republic

ABSTRACTThis article aims to extend our understanding of eighteenth-century political science through a re-examination of the writings of Jean-Louis Delolme (1741–1806). Beginning with an account of Delolme's conception of a modern ‘science of politics’, the article demonstrates that Delolme's ambition to rest the study of politics on scientific foundations developed in the context of an evolving concern with the stability and durability of the English ‘empire’. Underlining Delolme's critique of traditional republican political science as well as the comparative science of politics set out in Montesquieu's The spirit of the laws, the article thus sheds light on the connection between eighteenth-century conceptions of political science and eighteenth-century analyses of the English constitution and the British state. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the resonance of Delolme's central ideas in late eighteenth-century debates, in Britain, America, and France, about the character and properties of the modern constitutional republic.

‘Opinion in Eighteenth-Century Thought: What did the Concept Purport to Explain?’

Utilitas ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-33
Author(s):  
J. A. W. Gunn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Political Vocabulary ◽  
Century Thought

We all ‘know’ that public opinion came to prominence in the political vocabulary of the late eighteenth century. It may be that this dates its rise a bit late, but it is not relevant to argue the matter here. My concern is rather that we be equally aware of the purposes for which people made use of the concept. Here I wish to consider various possible contexts for speaking or writing of public opinion, or ‘opinion’, as it was usually called prior to the mid-eighteenth century. It may be possible to define, more fully than heretofore, the work that the expression did in eighteenth-century thought. As contemporary students of public opinion have been learning, an answer to this question may not even be wholly irrelevant to the task of specifying the nature of public opinion in our own time.

Labor, Leisure, and the Yeoman in Coleridge's and Wordsworth's 1790s Writings

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Malachuk
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civic Virtue ◽  
The Political ◽  
Free Press ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Republican Theory

Abstract In the republican tradition, from Aristotle through James Harrington, leisure was essential to the cultivation of civic virtue; labor—associated with the oikos rather than the polis—was not. In the late eighteenth-century, however, some democratic republicans celebrated the yeoman, who cultivated civic virtue through both his leisure and his labor. As a union of ancient opposites, the yeoman was a compelling but politically unstable character in republican theory, as suggested in the work of Jefferson and Rousseau. The same is true of the yeoman in Coleridge's and Wordsworth's early writings. Both writers began the 1790s convinced that in the yeoman one found the political realization of both labor and leisure. By mid-decade, Wordsworth no longer believed this, emphasizing instead the moral—rather than civic—value of landed property (the site of labor and leisure). Coleridge, too, came to question the significance of landed property, but not the significance of civic virtue; instead, he investigated new means to realizing that political condition, including a free press and a clerisy.

Economía y comunidades indígenas: El efecto de la supresión del sistema de reparto de mercancías en la intendencia de México, 1786-1810

1989 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-219
Author(s):  
Margarita Menegus Bornemann
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Crises ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Agrarian Structure

The article examines the impact that the supression of the repartimiento de mercancías had on the intendancy of Mexico. It also compares the agrarian structure of the intendancy of Mexico with those of the Puebla-Tlaxacala and Oaxaca regions, areas which have been studied by other historians. It concludes with an analysis of the political and economic crises of the late eighteenth century.

scholarly journals Otherness and Self in Latvian Theatre: Changes at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Pauls Daija
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
The Hill

In the article, political and historical interpretations of the first play in Latvian, an adapted translation of Ludvig Holberg’s Jeppe of the Hill (1723, Latvian version 1790) are explored. Although the play has been often interpreted as a work of anti-alcohol propaganda, the article argues that the political motives of the play are no less important. Translated into Latvian during the time of the French revolution, the play mirrors the tense atmosphere of the revolutionary years and reflects changes in Latvian peasant identity. While translating, Baltic German pastor Alexander Johann Stender changed the play’s setting to the late eighteenth century Courland and added new details, emphasizing the social conflict of the play as an ethnic one. It has been argued in the article that since ‘class’ in the Baltics was divided along national lines, the difference between peasants and masters was also the difference between Latvians and Germans, so class and ethnicity merged. When the peasant and the nobleman switch places in the play, this symbolizes a change in the Latvian-German colonial relationship. The colonial interpretation allows for a characterisation of the protagonist as a desperate imitator – a colonial subject who loses his identity as a serf and is not able to form a new identity in any way other than by copying the colonialist op- pressor. But this mimicry turns into ridicule, hence the play acquires a political meaning as it implicitly shows the disastrous consequences of revolutionary pro- test. Therefore, the play can be read as a part of the discussions about the Baltic Enlightenment emancipation project and as a hidden debate on serfdom and the colonial framework of the Courland society

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