Aesthetic Liberalism

Tact ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 41-58
Author(s):  
David Russell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Form ◽  
Charles Lamb

This chapter aims to resituate John Stuart Mill's early essays on aesthetics and poetry within the tradition of the tactful essayists studied in the other chapters of this book. As much as those of Charles Lamb, Mill's early essays are experiments, at once in both aesthetic and social form. Moreover, one can propose that the young Mill's aesthetic liberalism did survive: only not so much in the development of the discipline of political theory as in the nineteenth-century literary essay. The chapter looks closely at the tension between Mill's aesthetic and his argumentative liberalisms. It considers how and why the latter won out over the former during the course of his career.

Feminist Political Theory without Apology: Anna Doyle Wheeler, William Thompson, and the Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women

Hypatia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 827-851
Author(s):  
Jim Jose
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Original Formulation ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Twenty First Century

Anna Doyle Wheeler was a nineteenth‐century, Irish‐born socialist and feminist. She and another Irish‐born socialist and feminist, William Thompson, produced a book‐length critique in 1825, Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women: Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery: In Reply to a Paragraph of Mr. Mill's Celebrated “Article on Government,” to refute the claims of liberal philosopher James Mill in 1820 that women did not need to be enfranchised. In so doing the Appeal undermined the philosophical credibility of Mill's liberal utilitarianism. The Appeal exposed the hypocrisy of the language of contract (whether social, sexual, or marriage) by showing that men's freedom and claims to rights presupposed the unfreedom and sexual subjugation of women. The article argues that the Appeal was an original formulation of feminist political theory that still retains its relevance in the twenty‐first century.

Liberal Imperialism

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Liberal Imperialism

This chapter argues that liberalism is intrinsically imperialist and that we should understand the attractions of liberal imperialism, even as it cautions against succumbing to that attraction. Liberal imperialism, or liberal interventionism, is the doctrine that a state with the capacity to force liberal political institutions and social aspirations upon nonliberal states and societies is justified in so doing. Contrary to the orthodoxy in political theory, there is nothing odd about the notion that we can force an individual or a society to be free. The chapter considers two actual cases of liberal imperialism, one relating to the East India Company and the other to World War II, and one nineteenth-century text: John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty. It also examines the consequentialist-liberalism defense of intervention and how it overlaps with arguments for intervention based on human rights.

The Spirit of His Age

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uttara Natarajan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Individual Personality ◽  
Charles Lamb

This essay treats Walter Pater's engagement with two key Romantic precursors, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. Hazlitt's influence is on Pater's characteristic genre, the verbal portrait that delineates a historical and cultural moment, as it manifests itself in an individual personality. Lamb's importance to Pater, on the other hand, is as paradigm or type: the man himself, as much as his writing. For Pater, Lamb's value is especially in his antiquarianism (an extraordinary, intimate relationship with the past), which is, at the same time and paradoxically, the indicator of modernity. The combination of past and present that Pater posits in Lamb captures the modern consciousness first described in The Renaissance (1873); equally, Lamb also embodies Pater's “reserve,” the ruling tenet of Appreciations (1889). Lamb's centrality to Pater's particular concerns and critical positions, illuminating in itself, also indicates a continuity from Pater's earliest to his later writings. Further, by uncovering the close and direct connections between Hazlitt, Lamb, and Pater, this essay establishes an identifiable line of succession in the practitioners of an important, but still largely neglected, prose genre of the nineteenth century.

The British Way in Warfare Revisited

1983 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hew Strachan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political History ◽  
Military History ◽  
Dual Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
Military Academies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The One

In the last fifteen years military history in Britain has gained considerably in respectability, both in the country at large and in academic circles specifically. But it still has problems of identity. On the one hand, military history can at last find itself judged as part of ‘total history’. But, on the other, its origins as the staple fodder of nineteenth-century military academies have bequeathed it a strong didactic flavour which has proved hard to shed. Military history and strategic theory do not yet stand in the same relationship to each other as, say, political history and political theory. Perhaps because in Britain there is still too little independent informed analysis of defence, military history can be employed in a dual role. The ‘lessons of history’ are stronger here than in any other area. However impeccable the motives of military historians, their work is too often used as a prescription for the future rather than as a study of the past.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charles Lamb

Fuller’s books about England’s religious past helped to stimulate an outpouring of historical writing. Peter Heylyn wrote about some of the same subjects as Fuller, and so did Gilbert Burnet, Edward Stillingfleet, John Strype, and Jeremy Collier. Burnet, who looked for models for his history of the English Reformation, was sarcastic about Fuller, partly because of the latter’s “odd way of writing.” Fuller’s work was not highly regarded in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge deeply admired him for his insights and praised him for his writing. Several nineteenth-century historians defended his work. His reputation has remained uncertain, despite fresh assessments in recent years. Coleridge was remarkably apt in his viewpoint. Fuller saw the broader significance of the events he described and was one of the most sensible scholars and writers of his time.

Natives, Religion, and Race in Colonial America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
The Other ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
Over Time

Although racial lines eventually hardened on both sides, in the opening decades of colonization European and native ideas about differences between themselves and the other were fluid and dynamic, changing on the ground in response to local developments and experiences. Over time, perceived differences were understood to be rooted in more than just environment and culture. In the eighteenth century, bodily differences became the basis for a wider range of deeper, more innate distinctions that, by the nineteenth century, hardened into what we might now understand to be racialized differences in the modern sense. Despite several centuries of dispossession, disease, warfare, and enslavement at the hands of Europeans, native peoples in the Americans almost universally believed the opposite to be true. The more indigenous Americans were exposed to Europeans, the more they believed in the vitality and superiority of their own cultures.

Combatting Bias in the Criminal Courts of France, 1870s-1913

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-168
Author(s):  
James Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Chief Justice ◽  
Jury Verdicts ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
A Charge

Abstract In nineteenth-century France, liberals assumed that a conservative judiciary was frequently biased in favour of the prosecution, and socialists assumed that juries were dominated by the upper classes and too unrepresentative of the population to render justice equitably. Agitation by the left to combat these perceived biases led to the adoption of two key reforms of the fin de siècle. One was the abolition in 1881 of the résumé, or summing-up of the case by the chief justice of the cour d’assises (felony court). Liberals thought this reform was necessary because judges allegedly often used the résumé to persuade jurors in favour of conviction, a charge repeated by modern historians. The other reform, beginning at about the same time, was to make jury composition more democratic. By 1880, newly empowered liberals (at least in Paris) had begun to reduce the proportion of wealthy men on jury lists. This was followed in 1908 by the implementation of a circular issued by the Minister of Justice ordering the jury commissions to inscribe working-class men on the annual jury lists. However, a quantitative analysis of jury verdicts suggests that the reforms of the early 1880s and 1908 had only modest impacts on jury verdicts. Ideas and attitudes seem to have been more important. This has implications regarding two key controversies among modern jurists: the extent to which judges influence jurors and the extent to which the characteristics of jurors influence their verdicts.

Ironic Reprise in Galdós' Novels

PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monroe Z. Hafter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
The Other ◽  
Separate Study ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Spanish Novel ◽  
Artistic Representation ◽  
The Rich

A recent article of Leon Livingstone rightly calls attention to the importance of Pérez Galdós' assimilation of Cervantine irony as a forerunner of the concern of modern Spanish novelists about the autonomy of their characters. The unreality of rationalism, which Livingstone holds to be the germ of El amigo Manso, the imagination's capacity to create reality at the heart of Misericordia, lead to the even bolder experiments in the artistic representation of reality undertaken by Unamuno, Azorín, Valle-Inclán, and Pérez de Ayala. Anomalous for his time yet so pervasive in his work is Galdós' employment of “interior duplication” that a separate study would contribute to our fuller understanding of his art as well as to our measure of the advances in the Spanish novel of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The present essay focuses on Galdós' developing skill with internal repetitions from La Fontana de Oro (publ. 1870), through the rich complexities of the novels written between 1886–89, to their almost stylized simplicity in El abuelo (1897). Always related to Cervantine irony, the variety of verbal echoes, the mirroring of one character in another, the unconscious illumination each may offer the other, underscore the increasingly intimate wedding of form and matter with which Galdós came to unfold his narratives.

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