Early-Nineteenth-Century Reactions to Benthamism

Controversial Subject ◽

IN 1965 a very distinguished Bentham scholar read a paper to this society on Bentham and the French Revolution. During the period dealt with by that paper Bentham became an honorary citizen of France (largely through his friendship with Brissot), but he remained little known either in Britain or on the Continent. Thirty years later, he was world-famous. In 1825 members of the Colombian Congress in Bogot were quoting Bentham at each other much as eighteenth-century Englishmen had quoted Cicero in the House of Commons; and among the leaders of the Decembrist mutiny of the same year in St Petersburg were men who confessed to having been influenced by Bentham's works. In 1829 a weekly newspaper was appearing at Boston, Massachusetts, which carried his phrase the greatest happiness of the greatest number as its motto, while a journal called L'Utilitaire was being published at Geneva to propagate his ideas. This paper will not tackle the large and controversial subject of the extent and significance of Bentham's influence. It will address itself to questions that are more limited, though they have some bearing on the larger topic. These questions are: how did those outside the circle of his followers react to his ideas, and what attempts were made to challenge or refute them?

Afterword

10.1093/oso/9780198812425.003.0015 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Mark Philp

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Audience Reception ◽

The Past ◽

Chronological Change ◽

Key Issues ◽

Political Interpretation ◽

This expansive afterword reflects upon the whole volume’s arguments and contents. The focus is upon the concept of the miscellaneous: an eighteenth-century mode of organization and appreciation of culture, increasingly contested in the early nineteenth century. The author discusses issues of patriotism and audience reception, arguing for a more nuanced appreciation of the dynamics of political loyalism and dissent in Britain in the period following the French Revolution. Questions of identity and identification are seen as crucial, and as being formed at least in part within theatrical spaces. The author considers the difficult political interpretation of affective tropes such as humour and sentimentality, deftly relating them to the key issues of the day, while also paying attention to chronological change, and the need to recover ways of seeing and feeling that have been lost over the past two centuries.

German Neo-Pietism and the Formation of National Identity

Church History ◽

10.1017/s0009640719000544 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 88 (1) ◽

pp. 87-119

Author(s):

Doron Avraham

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

National Identity ◽

French Revolution ◽

Political Authority ◽

Religious Devotion ◽

Alternative Meaning ◽

Christian Conservatives ◽

Prevailing View

In the early nineteenth century, a neo-Pietist circle of awakened Protestants emerged in Prussia and other German lands. Disturbed by the consequences of the French Revolution, the ensuing reforms and the rising national movement, these neo-Pietists—among them noble estate owners, theologians, and other scholars—tried to introduce an alternative meaning for the alliance between state and religion. Drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pietist traditions, neo-Pietists fused their keen religious devotion with newly constructed conservative ideals, thus rehabilitating the legitimacy of political authority while investing the people's confession with additional meaning. At the same time, and through the same pietistic source of inspiration, conservative neo-Pietists forged their own understanding of national identity: its origins, values, and implications. In this regard, and against the prevailing view of the antagonist stance taken by Christian conservatives toward nationalism in the first half on the nineteenth century, this article argues for the consolidation of certain concepts of German national identity within Christian conservatism.

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

Modern Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0026749x00010295 ◽

1990 ◽

Vol 24 (2) ◽

pp. 209-224 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

J. Majeed

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Cultural Identities ◽

Jeremy Bentham ◽

British India ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

History Of ◽

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.

Making Terrorism Thinkable: The Philosophy of the Act and Its European Reception

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199858569.013.008 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Klaus Ries

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Strong Influence ◽

The State ◽

Johann Gottlieb Fichte ◽

State Terror ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

Mikhail Bakunin ◽

This chapter challenges the widespread assumption that terrorist ideology was invented in the mid-nineteenth century by such figures as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. Instead, the chapter argues, the foundations of terrorism were laid at the end of the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his disciples, who in turn exerted a strong influence on later radical thinkers. In showing how the intellectual reverberations of the French Revolution gave rise to anarchist ideology as well as acts of terrorism in Germany, the chapter traces a link between the state terror of the French Revolution and the emergence of insurgent terrorism.

The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Ensemblance ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454193.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 112-139

Author(s):

Luis de Miranda

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Similar Model ◽

French Society ◽

National System ◽

Nation States ◽

Nineteenth Century France ◽

The Military

After 1800, esprit de corps was often nationally manufactured, and Napoleon was its first engineer. French society became a reflection of the military. This chapter shows how the Bonapartists succeeded in building a national system of rewards and interdependent privileged corps in which ‘esprit de corps’ was encouraged according to a military model of general agonism. The transformation of the organisation of labour, of the army, and of education after the French Revolution is narrated. This chapter is essential to understand not only today’s France, but also most nation-states, functioning more or less under a similar model. The author also analyses the decline of labour communities and their form of belonging since the eighteenth century. The Revolutiondiscredited the esprit de corporation, and capitalist merchants were often thankful for the republican defence of more competitive and less-regulated entrepreneurship.

The Theological Revival in The French Reformed Church, 1830–1852

Church History ◽

10.2307/3163184 ◽

1968 ◽

Vol 37 (1) ◽

pp. 36-49

Author(s):

J. Lynn Osen

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

July Monarchy ◽

Second Republic ◽

Financial Position ◽

Reformed Church ◽

The French Reformed Church merged from the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon stengthened by government recognition and support but weakened by the ideological offensive of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Although it enjoyed a secure official and financial position, it had yet to reconcile itself intellectually with the contrasting currents of eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century romanticism. This process of assimilation and reconciliation took place after 1815 and culminated, during the July Monarchy and the Second Republic, in a theological awakening and renewal.

Hazlitt as a Shakespearean Critic

PMLA ◽

10.2307/458028 ◽

1932 ◽

Vol 47 (1) ◽

pp. 191-199 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Harry T. Baker

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

The Past ◽

William Hazlitt ◽

Political Views ◽

Literary Fame ◽

When William Hazlitt died, in 1830, his literary fame was obscured by his political views. The man who admired Napoleon and wrote a biography of him and who championed the radical creed of the French Revolution could hardly have been expected to be popular among Englishmen of the early nineteenth century. During the past twenty-five years, however, several volumes containing selections from his essays have been issued; and most editions of Shakespeare enrich themselves by quoting his opinions. His Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, printed in 1817, is still very much alive. Heine, in his volume Shakespeare's Mädchen und Frauen (1838), declared: “With the exception of William Hazlitt, England has given us no Shakespearean commentator of any consequence.” And this verdict, though decidedly exaggerated, gains new interest when we append the Teutonic explosion: “It takes the very heart out of me when I remember that Shakespeare is an Englishman, and belongs to the most repulsive race which God in his wrath ever created.”

Emotion and Political Change

10.5406/illinois/9780252038051.003.0009 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Nicole Eustace

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

American Revolution ◽

Political Change ◽

Haitian Revolution ◽

Nineteenth Century America ◽

Political Narratives ◽

The Haitian Revolution

This chapter examines how political history is reshaped by attention to the emotions. It explores how sentiment undergirded political identities and allegiances and how emotion shaped civic memory and consciousness in revolutionary and early-nineteenth-century America. From the American Revolution to the French Revolution to the Haitian Revolution, from the rise of eighteenth-century republicanism to the emergence of nineteenth-century nationalism, emotion proved pivotal to political change. Whether animating the spirit of freedom or sparking action on behalf of the nation, emotion was, by definition, central to patriotism in all its dynamic forms. In addition to this, the chapter also considers why emotions have been excluded from traditional political narratives.

Two Neoclassical Monuments in Modern France: The Panthéon and Arc de Triomphe

Cultures of Commemoration ◽

10.5871/bacad/9780197264669.003.0005 ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

AVNER BEN-AMOS

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

The Other ◽

Close Reading ◽

Fifth Republic ◽

Modern France ◽

The Right ◽

The Relationship ◽

The Panthéon and Arc de Triomphe are two neoclassical Parisian monuments that were created in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, respectively, and which have ever since been main sites of French official memory. However, they never had the same share of the stage: when one was prominent, the other was marginal, and vice versa. This chapter delineates the parallel histories of these monuments and analyses the relationship between them, from the French Revolution to the Fifth Republic. Although they are usually ascribed to different political camps – the Pantheon to the left and the Arc de Triomphe to the right – a close reading of the context of various commemorative acts that were performed inside and around these monuments shows that their identity was more complex.

Ninety Years Ago

Antiquity ◽

10.1017/s0003598x00020160 ◽

1949 ◽

Vol 23 (91) ◽

pp. 115-125 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Joan Evans

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Historical Societies ◽

Learned Societies ◽

The Many ◽

The French Revolution ◽

The Revolution

No one, so far as I know, has as yet made any particular study of the many local learned societies that were founded up and down France in the years after the French Revolution, and of their effect upon contemporary thought. These Sociétés d’Émulation differed from the local archaeological and historical societies of England in being more all-embracing ; they included in their scope pure literature, philosophy and science as well as the history and antiquities of the district, and often developed a philanthropic side as well. At the time of their foundation they were often of a free-thinking colour ; but as the balance of French life came to be restored after the Revolution this element was forgotten, and the more learned priests of the neighbourhood were often included among their members.These societies fostered a peculiar polymathic quality among those who regularly attended their frequent meetings. They were to a great extent self-supporting in the provision of papers and communications, and it would have been pure selfishness for any member with any claim to versatility to specialize too deeply. Their standards, too, were not those of the Metropolis, where a new professionalism was bringing higher and more exact criteria into every branch of knowledge and speculation. Rather, we can see in the Sociétés d’Émulation of the nineteenth century the continuance of the amateur spirit that in the eighteenth century had flourished in the aristocratic circles of Court and château : a spirit surviving in a less polished form among the lesser gentry of the provincial towns.