scholarly journals National or people’s sovereignty?

Author(s):  
Fazil Zeynalov

In the article the author provides a comparative analysis of these two notions. He explains through the examples that owing to the historical context during the French Revolution, the gradual process of transforming the bearer of the sovereignty has started, and shift of power from the king to the collective unit has caused several disputes and discussions of theoretical nature. The collective unit, called the people or the nation, began to play the role of carrier of sovereignty, acting at the same time as the source of supreme power. Belonging of sovereignty to the people or the nation is manifested in the forms how the power presented to their representatives. Each of these forms has its own theoretical peculiarities. However, in the wake of historic developments the manifestation of one or another form of sovereignty practically loses its relevance. Regardless of the forms of expression of belonging of sovereignty to the people or the nation, sovereignty displays various and progressive elements of these concepts (renunciation of imperative mandate in favor of representative mandate, sovereignty is exercised through representatives rather than delegates)

Author(s):  
Matthew Rendle

This book provides the first detailed account of the role of revolutionary justice in the early Soviet state. Law has often been dismissed by historians as either unimportant after the October Revolution amid the violence and chaos of civil war or even, in the absence of written codes and independent judges, little more than another means of violence. This is particularly true of the most revolutionary aspect of the new justice system, revolutionary tribunals—courts inspired by the French Revolution and established to target counter-revolutionary enemies. This book paints a more complex picture. The Bolsheviks invested a great deal of effort and scarce resources into building an extensive system of tribunals that spread across the country, including into the military and the transport network. At their peak, hundreds of tribunals heard hundreds of thousands of cases every year. Not all ended in harsh sentences: some were dismissed through lack of evidence; others given a wide range of sentences; others still suspended sentences; and instances of early release and amnesty were common. This book, therefore, argues that law played a distinct and multifaceted role for the Bolsheviks. Tribunals stood at the intersection between law and violence, offering various advantages to the Bolsheviks, not least strengthening state control, providing a more effective means of educating the population on counter-revolution, and enabling a more flexible approach to the state’s enemies. All of this adds to our understanding of the early Soviet state and, ultimately, of how the Bolsheviks held on to power.


2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL PRINTY

This article examines Charles Villers'sEssay on the Spirit and Influence of Luther's Reformation(1804) in its intellectual and historical context. Exiled from France after 1792, Villers intervened in important French and German debates about the relationship of religion, history, and philosophy. The article shows how he took up a German Protestant discussion on the meaning of the Reformation that had been underway from the 1770s through the end of the century, including efforts by Kantians to seize the mantle of Protestantism for themselves. Villers's essay capitalized on a broad interest in the question of Protestantism and its meaning for modern freedom around 1800. Revisiting the formation of the narrative of Protestantism and progress reveals that it was not a logical progression from Protestant theology or religion but rather part of a specific ideological and social struggle in the wake of the French Revolution and the collapse of the Old Regime.


2002 ◽  
pp. 58-67
Author(s):  
Leonid Kondratyk

Olger Hippolyt Bochkovsky (1884-1939) is a prominent Ukrainian sociologist, publicist and political figure. The most important area of his studies is the process of creation in which he distinguishes between two stages - ethnogenesis and natiogenesis. The ethnogenetic process, according to O. Bochkovsky, lasted until the Great French Revolution. Its main result is the formation of the people as - ethnographic raw materials. Let us dwell on this in more detail.


2000 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
María del Mar Asensio Aróstegui

Set in the historical context of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is an outstanding example of the kind of fiction that Elizabeth Wesseling (1991: vii) calls postmodernist historical novels, that is, "novelistic adaptations of historical material". Besides, being profoundly self-reflexive, the novel also falls under Linda Hutcheon's (1988) category of historiographic metafiction. The present paper focuses on Winterson's political choice of two representatives of historically silenced groups, a soldier and a woman, who use two apparently opposed narrative modes, the historical and the fantastic, to tell a story that both exposes history as a discursive construct and provides an alternative fantastic discourse for the representation of feminine desire.


Author(s):  
David Weir ◽  
Jane Desmarais

This article examines the confluence of cuisine and the culture of decadence by first describing the difficulty of identifying any type of food as inherently “decadent” in physiological terms. After acknowledging that the meaning of “decadence” depends on moral, social, and aesthetic contexts, the article focuses on the dissemination of aristocratic tastes in food following the French Revolution, when chefs who had formerly cooked for nobility opened their own restaurants; on the development of the idea of the gourmand subsequent to the publication of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût (The Physiology of Taste, 1825); on Charles Baudelaire’s decadent response to Brillat-Savarin in Les Paradis Artificiels (Artificial Paradises, 1860); on the role of Roman history in the development of popular conceptions of decadent cuisine; and on J.-K. Huysmans’s surprisingly limited interest in “decadent dining” in À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), despite his use of elaborate food metaphors to describe the literature of decadence.


Author(s):  
Aurelian Craiutu

This chapter examines political moderation in the writings of Jacques Necker, with particular emphasis on his views on constitutionalism. Necker occupies a special place in the history of political moderation. He defended the principles of constitutional monarchy successively against the king, the nobility, and the representatives of the people. Necker's works, composed at different stages of the French Revolution, articulated a political agenda revolving around the idea of moderation in opposition to arbitrary power and violence. The chapter first provides an overview of Necker's ideas before discussing his theoretical statements on reforming the Old Regime. It then explains Necker's trimming agenda and the consequences of immoderation before turning to the French constitution of 1791 and Necker's critique of the constitutions of 1795 and 1799. It also explores Necker's arguments regarding complex sovereignty, equality, and separation of powers.


Author(s):  
Étienne Balibar

This chapter attempts to clarify the questions raised by the relations between madness and justice, with reference to the heritage of the French Revolution. It also assesses the distinction between crime and madness and their respective treatments in public and private spheres. Indeed, what prompts current discussions on the function of the psychiatrist in the courtroom or on the role of judgments of civil capacity in the treatment of mental illness, is yet again the perspective offered by the reframing of the Penal Code (including the famous Article 64, which makes “insanity”—or, in the more recent version, “psychic or neuro-psychic disturbance”—into the principal operator of the nullification of a crime or a delict, either in its juridical reality or in its penal consequences).


Author(s):  
Daniel M. Stout

Chapter four looks at Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. By examining parallels between the novel and Robespierre’s political philosophy, this chapter argues that Dickens’s novel understands the French Revolution not as an event that gave individuals the right of self-governance but as the event that formalized a conception of citizenship in which individual persons stand as avatars for the national will. The Revolutionary Terror and the guillotine are thus seen as the logical consequence of a theory of the nation that prioritized the People over individual persons.


2021 ◽  
pp. 481-495
Author(s):  
Edward Kolla

Moments of infraction of international law can generate new law. These can also be important examples of contingency in the history of international law, if the process occurs as an unintended consequence of actors’ aims. The French Revolution was just such an instance. The transmission of sovereignty from the person of the king to the collective populace of France was a central feature of the Revolution. Unplanned by revolutionaries, the principle of popular sovereignty bled into international law and became a new justification for claims to territory—a precept which, by the twentieth century, came to be called national self-determination. This chapter explores how the will of the people became a force in international law, inadvertently from the perspective of revolutionaries, as a result of changing public opinion, claims of jurisprudential and moral legitimacy, and military force.


Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of both nationalism and archaeology as a professional discipline. The aim of this chapter is to show how this apparent coincidence was not accidental. This discussion will take us into uncharted territory. Despite the growing literature on archaeology and nationalism (Atkinson et al. 1996; Díaz-Andreu & Champion 1996a; Kohl & Fawcett 1995; Meskell 1998), the relationship between the two during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has yet to be explored. The analysis of how the past was appropriated during this era of the revolutions, which marked the dawn of nationalism, is not helped by the specialized literature available on nationalism, as little attention has been paid to these early years. Most authors dealing with nationalism focus their research on the mid to late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the ideas that emerged during the era of the revolutions bore fruit and the balance between civic and ethnic nationalism (i.e. between a nationalism based on individual rights and the sovereignty of the people within the nation and another built on the common history and culture of the members of the nation) definitively shifted towards the latter. The reluctance to scrutinize the first years of nationalism by experts in the field may be a result of unease in dealing with a phenomenon which some simply label as patriotism. The term nationalism was not often used at the time. The political scientist Tom Nairn (1975: 6) traced it back to the late 1790s in France (it was employed by Abbé Baruel in 1798). However, its use seems to have been far from common, to the extent that other scholars believed it appeared in 1812. In other European countries, such as England, ‘nationalism’ was first employed in 1836 (Huizinga 1972: 14). Despite this disregard for the term itself until several decades later, specialists in the Weld of nationalism consider the most common date of origin as the end of the eighteenth century with the French Revolution as the key event in its definition.


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