On Counterrevolution

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-75
Author(s):  
Friedemann Pestel
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Political Strategies ◽  
Case Examples ◽  
Political Program ◽  
The Status ◽  
French Case ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Political Objective

After 1789, counterrevolution emerged as revolution’s first counterconcept in French political discourse. While scholars of the French Revolution commonly associate counterrevolution with a backward-oriented political program, often with the restoration of the ancien régime, this article challenges such a retrograde understanding. Drawing on a broad corpus of sources, it emphasizes the flexible and pluralistic meanings of counterrevolution during the 1790s. Rather than designating a political objective, counterrevolution first of all focused on the process of combating the revolution as such, which allowed for different political strategies and aimed beyond a return to the status quo ante. By discussing, next to the French case, examples from the Haitian Revolution, Britain, Germany, and Switzerland, this article also highlights the transnational dimension of the debate on counterrevolution. It concludes with a plea for rethinking counterrevolution as revolution’s asymmetric other in a more relational rather than dichotomous perspective.

Saying No to the Status Quo

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Status Quo ◽  
Racial Minorities ◽  
New Era ◽  
Political Program ◽  
The Status ◽  
Key Participants

This chapter explores the 1995 race for the AFL-CIO presidency, which witnessed the first contested election in the Federation’s forty-year history. These were extraordinary and divisive events, and the chapter brings them to life through access to interviews with key participants, including both Tom Donahue and John Sweeney, who faced off for the presidency after Lane Kirkland was challenged by the Sweeney-led reformers and resigned. New written records are also mined here, including the AFL-CIO’s Papers and Donahue’s private papers. Sweeney ultimately proved victorious, winning by promising to commit far more resources to organizing, to overhaul the Federation’s political program, and to connect the AFL-CIO more clearly to grassroots workers, particularly women and racial minorities. While acrimonious and divisive, the 1995 race launched a new era in the Federation’s history.

scholarly journals Žižekian ideas in critical reflection

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Wall
Keyword(s):  
Design Methodology ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Case Examples ◽  
New Ways Of Working ◽  
The Status ◽  
Key Indicators ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how deeper psychosocial structures can be examined utilising a contemporary provocative theory within workplace reflection to generate more radical insights and innovation. Design/methodology/approach This paper outlines a provocative theory and then presents case examples of how deeper structures can be examined at the micro, meso and macro levels. Findings Deeper psychosocial structures are the forces that keep the status quo firmly in place, but deeper examination of these structures enable radical insights and therefore the possibility of innovation. Research limitations/implications Deep psychosocial structures shape and constitute daily action, and so work-based and practitioner researchers can be tricked into thinking they have identified new ways of working, but may be demonstrating the same workplace behaviours/outcomes. Workplace behaviours, including emotional responses to apparent change, are key indicators of deeper structures. Practical implications Ideas and processes for examining deeper structures can be integrated into daily reflective practices by individuals, within organisational processes, and wider, system processes. However, because deeper structures can appear in different forms, we can be tricked into reproducing old structures. Social implications Examining deeper structures increases the possibilities for more radical insights into workplace structures, and therefore, how to potentially mobilise innovations which may better serve people and planet. Originality/value This paper is the first to examine the work of Slavoj Žižek in the context of work-based learning.

Reenacting the Pamphlet War in an Age of Turmoil

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-92
Author(s):  
Richard Johnston
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Air Force ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Air Force Academy ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Living Culture ◽  
Us Air Force ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status

Published in 1790, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France triggered a pamphlet war whose major players included Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and the artist James Gillray. The debate that ensued about the French Revolution, which Percy Shelley called “the master theme of the epoch in which we live,” was fundamentally a debate between past and present, between tradition and the needs of a living culture, and between the status quo and innovation. This essay describes an attempt by the author to reenact the Pamphlet War at the US Air Force Academy to help cadets negotiate these tensions at their institution and, in doing so, participate in the work of Romanticism. The essay also suggests ways Romanticists could harness the Pamphlet War to engage political and cultural debates in our own age of upheaval and turmoil. Finally, it offers the Pamphlet War as a vehicle for debating the state of the field and the work of the Romantic classroom itself.

Emotion and Political Change

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Eustace
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
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.

“An Observance of Silence to the Events”

2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-70
Author(s):  
Shelby Johnson
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Caribbean History ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Wanderer ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract Juliet Granville, the protagonist of Frances Burney’s novel The Wanderer (1814), enters the novel fleeing the French Revolution and disguised in blackface. This article argues that Juliet’s act of racial counterfeiting implicitly gestures toward the Haitian Revolution without naming that historical touchstone and emblematizes a theory of trace histories that Burney articulates in the novel’s dedication. There, she sketches an agonistic vision of history through what she calls “traces,” where events “though already historical, have left traces” that have been “handed down . . . from generation to generation” and tarry in the present. Burney frames the trace as an afterlife of an event that cannot be quite integrated into the broader scope of “history” as such but which leaves behind profound formal remainders. Burney’s dedication thus theorizes how to read Romantic-era novels for those fragments of form, and Juliet’s disguise replots erasures of Caribbean history as a problem of reading.

Missverhältnisse. Nietzsche und die Sklaverei

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67
Author(s):  
Iris Därmann
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract Like Hegel, Marx and Engels, Nietzsche has made the Haitian Revolution “unthinkable” (Michel-Rolph Trouillot). He provokes his readers by justifying slavery in the ancient and in the modern world. In order to indicate the problematic dimension of Nietzsche’s cultural legitimation of slavery it is necessary to situate his ideas in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. Furthermore, we need to ask whether his anti-democratic statements regarding the French Revolution could be understood as a “hyper-democratic” commitment to a “coming democracy” (Jacques Derrida) that resists slavery. I raise the question whether Nietzsche, in this context, considers the possibility of overcoming the institution of slavery in modern Europe.

The Radicalism of the First Seminole War and Its Consequences

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Millett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Spanish Florida ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Vantage Points

“Re-thinking the First Seminole War” provides a major reconsideration of the First Seminole War from a number of vantage points. The essay argues that the conflict’s origins and course were shaped greatly by the actions of radical anti-slavery British officers (namely Edward Nicolls of the Royal Marines), freedom-seeking blacks, and their Indian allies. More specifically, the case is made that the key anti-American combatants in the conflict were hundreds of former slaves who had been recruited and radicalized by the British during the War of 1812 before being granted the status of full British subjects. Combining pre-existing notions of freedom and understanding of geopolitics, the former slaves embraced their British status while living at the so-called “Negro Fort” and then across the Florida peninsula after 1816. In turn, the racialized fears that were triggered within white Americans and their Creek allies by the First Seminole War were the final event that convinced the United States that it had to acquire Spanish Florida to protect the expanding slave frontier. In the process of making these arguments, the essay carefully considers: the anti-slavery thought of Edward Nicolls and its reception by the former slaves, questions of identity, race, and inclusion, the shadow of the Haitian Revolution, and the nature of American territorial expansion.

Improvement-directed versus Status Quo-directed Human Service Organizations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony L. Hemmelgarn ◽  
Charles Glisson
Keyword(s):  
Continuous Improvement ◽  
Human Service ◽  
Research Evidence ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Service Organizations ◽  
Case Examples ◽  
Formal Organizations ◽  
The Status ◽  
And Behaviors

This chapter explains that members of improvement-directed organizations are never satisfied with the status quo and never stop looking for more effective ways to serve their clients. The principle addresses the conflicting priority represented by individuals in formal organizations resisting change and clinging to established protocols, regardless of whether the existing protocols promote improvements in the well-being of clients. The chapter describes improvement-directed organizations, including their application of continuous improvement processes, norms that support ongoing improvement, and behaviors that drive innovation and ongoing growth and development. The chapter presents research evidence and case studies to illustrate how systems and processes, decisions, actions, and behaviors, as well as assumptions and beliefs, need to be addressed to create improvement-directed organizations. Specific case examples illustrate ARC’s application to build improvement-directed organizations.

The Sublime Turn Away from Empire: Wordsworth's Encounter with Colonial Slavery, 1802

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Kelly Persyn
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Eventual Death ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract "The Sublime Turn Away from Empire" argues that the Haitian Revolution—and Toussaint l'Ouverture's role in it—heavily influenced Wordsworth during his early years and that the1802 sonnet to Toussaint l'Ouverture epitomizes the poet's development of the "sublime turn." The Wordsworthian sublime, often interpreted in part as a reaction to the violence of the French Revolution, thus appears in this article as a reaction to the frightening and incomprehensible facts of colonial slavery and revolution—the very realities responsible for L'Ouverture's capture, imprisonment, and eventual death in France's Fort de Joux. In this context, the poet formulates his sublime turn as a turn away from the recognition of material slavery and bondage and toward an imaginative freedom nationed specifically English. In pursuing the argument, the article reviews the history of the Haitian Revolution together with the history of Wordsworth's poetic development from 1790 to 1802. In paying special attention to the 1802 sonnets, the article highlights Wordsworth's juxtaposition of French slavery and English liberty and draws on work by Laura Doyle and Alison Hickey to argue that Wordsworth's valorization of nature and nation has the effect of sublimating his own, and his reader's, recognition of empire and race. Ultimately, though Wordsworth speaks of l'Ouverture in a markedly admiring tone, he counsels him to submit to Napoleonic tyranny anyway—while taking comfort in the material sublime. The article explores this paradox and concludes by postulating that such a contradiction is characteristic of Romantic-era attitudes toward race and the sublime.

Port-au-Prince and the Collapse of French Imperial Authority, 1789–1793

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-84
Author(s):  
Jeremy D. Popkin
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Revolution Francaise ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Colonial Order

Abstract The establishment of the independent nation of Haiti in 1804 was made possible by the collapse of imperial authority early in the French Revolution. Events in the colony's capital, Port-au-Prince, had much to do with that collapse. Between the fall of 1789, when news of the storming of the Bastille reached Saint-Domingue, and the spring of 1793, when French revolutionary authorities recognized that their only hope of maintaining control of the colony was to ally themselves with its black and mixed-race populations against the remaining whites, Port-au-Prince was the most troubled of the island's urban centers and one of the most unstable sites in France's transatlantic empire. Understanding how Port-au-Prince went from a center of colonial authority to a locus of disorder where fatal wounds were inflicted on the colonial order is crucial to any explanation of the background to the Haitian Revolution. L'établissement de la nation indépendante d'Haïti en 1804 fut rendu possible par la faillite de l'autorité impériale pendant les premières années de la Révolution française. Les événements dans la capitale coloniale de Port-au-Prince ont joué un grand rôle en précipitant cette faillite. Entre l'automne de 1789, quand la nouvelle de la prise de la Bastille est arrivée à Saint-Domingue, et le printemps de 1793, quand les autorités révolutionnaires dans la colonie ont reconnu que leur seul espoir de la maintenir sous leur contrôle fut de s'allier avec les populations noires et de couleur contre les blancs, Port-au-Prince fut la ville la plus troublée de Saint-Domingue et l'un des sites les plus perturbés de tout l'Empire français. Une compréhension du processus qui a fait d'un centre d'autorité dans la colonie un foyer de désordre où des coups fatals furent portés contre l'ordre impérial est cruciale pour expliquer le succès de la Révolution haïtienne.

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