‘The Prince of Sceptics’ and ‘The Prince of Historians’: Hume’s Influence and Image in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

Late Eighteenth ◽

Political Conservatism ◽

Problematic Issue ◽

Edinburgh Review ◽

The Subject ◽

This chapter deals with the reception of Hume in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. The subject of the contemporary and early nineteenth century receptions of Hume’s writings has already been addressed by James Fieser’s series of Early Responses to Hume. The problematic issue of the relationship between Hume as a philosopher and historian, however, is insufficiently addressed. The lack of a sustained analysis of the relationship between Hume’s philosophy and politics might be the result of the continued influence exerted by John Stuart Mill’s evaluation that Hume’s philosophical scepticism leads him to political conservatism. Through detailed analysis of British pamphlets and periodicals (such as The Edinburgh Review, The Quarterly Review, and The Annual Register) published at the turn of the eighteenth century, this chapter argues that Mill’s evaluation was not widely accepted among the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers and reviewers. Some radicals (Mary Wollstonecraft, Jeremy Bentham, the young James Mackintosh) left positive comments regarding Hume’s supposed liberal and anti-religious attitude in his History. Interestingly, some Romantics such as Coleridge suspected that Hume, as ‘infidel’ writer, was responsible for the French Revolution along with the philosophes.

Suffering in Art

10.1093/oso/9780198802228.003.0010 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Ritchie Robertson

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

Words And Images ◽

Ritchie Robertson situates Lessing’s text within debates over the proper depiction of extreme suffering in art, focusing on Goethe’s essay on the Laocoon group (1798), as well as other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works on the representation of pain. The issue of suffering in art was of utmost significance to Goethe’s ideology of the classical, Robertson explains; more than that, the themes introduced in Lessing’s essay—above all, its concerns with how suffering can be depicted in words and images—proved pivotal within Goethe’s prescriptions about the relationship between idealism and individuality (or ‘the characteristic’) in art. As part of a larger campaign against what he called ‘naturalism’ in art, Goethe argued that the ancients did not share the false notion that art must imitate nature. For Goethe, responding to Lessing, the power of the Laocoon group lay precisely in its depiction of bodily suffering as something not just beautiful, but also anmutig (‘sensuously pleasing’).

In the Theater of Counterrevolution: Loyalist Association and Conservative Opinion in the 1790s

Journal of British Studies ◽

10.1086/341151 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 41 (3) ◽

pp. 291-328 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Kevin Gilmartin

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Free Expression ◽

Political Repression ◽

Political Expression ◽

Civic Activism ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

History Of ◽

Negative Role

Conservative movements have generally played a negative role in accounts of the history of political expression in Britain during the period of the French Revolution. Where E. P. Thompson and others on the Left tended to identify radicalism with the disenfranchised and with a struggle for the rights of free expression and public assembly, conservative activists have been associated with state campaigns of political repression and legal interference. Indeed, conservatism in this period is typically conceived in negative terms, as antiradicalism or counterrevolution. If this has been the view of hostile commentators, it is consistent with a more sympathetic mythology that sees nothing novel about the conservative principles that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. They represent an establishment response to alien challenges. Even where conservatives set about mobilizing the resources of print, opinion, and assembly in a constructive fashion, the reputation for interference has endured. John Reeves's Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers is a useful case in point, since it managed in its brief but enterprising history to combine fierce anti-Jacobinism with the later eighteenth century's rising tide of voluntary civic activism. The association came together at the Crown and Anchor Tavern when a group of self-professed “private men” decided “to form ourselves into an Association” and announced their intentions through the major London newspapers in November and December of 1792. The original committee then called on others “to make similar exertions in their respective neighbourhoods,” forming energetic local associations that would be linked by regular correspondence with the central London committee. In this way, the loyalist movement grew with astonishing speed.

Romantic Periodicals in the Twenty-First Century

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474448123.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

First Century ◽

British Romanticism ◽

Periodical Studies ◽

Digital Resources ◽

Literary Periodicals ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

The Subject ◽

Twenty First Century

While the twenty-first century has brought a wealth of new digital resources for researching late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century serials, the subfield of Romantic periodical studies has remained largely inchoate. This collection sets out to begin tackling this problem, offering a basic groundwork for a branch of periodical studies that is distinctive to the concerns, contexts and media of Britain’s Romantic age. Featuring eleven chapters by leading experts on the subject, it showcases the range of methodological, conceptual and literary-historical insights to be drawn from just one of the era’s landmark literary periodicals, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Drawing in particular on the trove of newly digitised content, specific essays model how careful analyses of the incisive and often inflammatory commentary, criticism and original literature from Blackwood’s first two decades (1817–37) might inform and expand many of the most vibrant contemporary discussions surrounding British Romanticism.

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 ◽

The French Revolution

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.

Gothic Aesthetics

The Edinburgh Companion to Fin de Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474408912.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Andrew Smith

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Fin De Siecle ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Sensation Fiction ◽

Spiritual World ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

Fin De Siècle ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

This chapter examines the relationship between late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gothic, the sensation fiction of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, fin-de-siècle gothic works and modernism. It argues that in the late nineteenth century a distinctive, but implicit, gothic aesthetic developed which was characterised by a concern with divided selves, fragmented narratives and science. It also shows that this aesthetic was distinguished by optimistic narratives about adaptability and the presence of a mystical or spiritual world.

Narrative

Transoceanic America ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198840893.003.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 23-46

Author(s):

Michelle Burnham

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Travel Narratives ◽

Short Term ◽

Publication History ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

History Of ◽

The Relationship ◽

Shared Narrative

This chapter reviews the publication history of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century genre of Pacific travel narratives, and examines its narrative features. During this period, ships moved with increasing regularity on incredibly risky voyages between the world’s oceans. At the same time, novels came to dominate the literary world of fiction. These developments are related by their shared narrative dynamics, especially in the relationship between narrative suspense and numerical speculation, between words and numbers. The short-term risks and losses that attended these voyages were offset by their long-term profits, as the pleasure of accumulation concealed but also depended on the horrors of violence.

BOURGEOIS MODERNITY VERSUS THE HISTORICAL ARISTOCRACY IN CHRISTOPH MEINERS'S POLITICAL THOUGHT

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x18000456 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 62 (4) ◽

pp. 943-966 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

MORGAN GOLF-FRENCH

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Roman Empire ◽

French Revolution ◽

Political Thought ◽

Holy Roman Empire ◽

Radical Critique ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

Bourgeois Modernity

AbstractChristoph Meiners (1747–1810), a major historian and philosopher of the German late Enlightenment, has received increasing recognition as a significant thinker in the emergence of nineteenth-century racial theories. The scholarly focus on Meiners's hierarchical view of race and its legacy has led to the classification of his broaderoeuvreas conservative, or even reactionary. By examining hisGeschichte der Ungleichheit der Stände unter den vornehmsten europäischen Völkern(1792), written in response to the French Revolution and the contemporary circumstances of the Holy Roman Empire, this article sheds new light on his work, as well as on an under-researched line of thought in the 1790s. Rather than a conservative or reactionary work, this text is a radical critique of the German aristocracy that ultimately recommends the abolition of most significant aristocratic privileges and the overhaul of its membership in favour of the bourgeoisie. This article presents not only a more complex understanding of Christoph Meiners's ideas, but also calls for a reappraisal of the categories applied to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century intellectuals both in Germany and in Europe more broadly.

V. N. Karazin, the Gentry, and Kharkov University

Slavic Review ◽

10.2307/2493224 ◽

1969 ◽

Vol 28 (2) ◽

pp. 209-220

Author(s):

James T. Flynn

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Public Figure ◽

Imperial Russia ◽

The Subject ◽

The Relationship ◽

Do So ◽

Public Career

It is easy to ignore the career of Vasilii Nazarevich Karazin, and, indeed, most treatments of imperial Russia do so. When Karazin is mentioned, he is usually described as a rather ridiculous figure, the putative “Marquis Posa“ of Alexander I who had a spectacularly short public career, or simply as that “harebrained Ukrainian.“ Yet Karazin is hardly unknown; he is almost universally credited with being the founder of Kharkov University and is the subject of a number of works that picture him as an able, active public figure. The purpose of the present paper, however, is not to argue Karazin's importance or to decide whether or not he was “harebrained” but to explore his role in the foundation of Kharkov University as a useful case study of the relationship between the autocracy and the gentry in the early nineteenth century.

The Politics of Time

Contributions to the History of Concepts ◽

10.3167/choc.2014.090102 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 24-49 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Theo Jung

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Case Studies ◽

Political Discourse ◽

Language Use ◽

The Other ◽

Pragmatic Analysis ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

The One ◽

This article traces the uses of zeitgeist in early nineteenth-century European political discourse. To explain the concept's explosive takeoff in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, two perspectives are combined. On the one hand, the concept is shown to be a key element in the new, “temporalized” discourses of cultural reflection emerging during this time. On the other, its pragmatic value as a linguistic tool in concrete political constellations is outlined on the basis of case studies from French, British, and German political discourse. Developing this two-sided perspective, the article sheds light on an important aspect of early nineteenth-century political discourse while also pointing to some general considerations concerning the relationship between the semantic and pragmatic analysis of historical language use.

Freedom and liberty: the influence of the ideology of the polish uprising of 1830 on Russian philosophy and literature

Науково-теоретичний альманах Грані ◽

10.15421/172116 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 24 (2) ◽

pp. 74-84

Author(s):

Tetiana Murha

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

National Identities ◽

Russian Philosophy ◽

Philosophy And Literature ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

History Of ◽

Political Principles ◽

The French Revolution

The relevance of the topic is due to the history of the concept of freedom in the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian thesauri in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Because the concept of "freedom" is important in shaping the national identities of these Slavic peoples.The aim of the article was to consider the causes of metamorphoses that occurred in the use of words and changes in the connotations of the concept of "freedom". It is determined that the development of philosophical ideas about freedom in Russia in the early nineteenth century is influenced by two contradictory tendencies: nihilistic-deterministic and religious-libertarian. It is studied that in the Soviet official philosophy and ideology the concept of "freedom" acquires ritual-official and rational-determinist meaning ("freedom as a known necessity"). In contrast, "freedom" is replaced by the concept of "freedom", which has acquired positive connotations. At the same time, the identification of "freedom" with "arbitrariness" in recent years has been a source of Russian anti-liberal discourse.Conclusions. The concept of "freedom" in literature, official documents and philosophical considerations originally had two verbal reflections "liberty" and "freedom". And the first of them actually dominated until the early nineteenth century. Its meanings were related to the influence of Polish political principles and the Ukrainian Orthodox tradition, which was spread by graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium (Academy). At the same time, it was gradually supplanted by another word, "liberty," especially under the influence of the reaction to the events and slogans of the French Revolution.