Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Anne Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Early Years ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
Century Thought

Although much of Coleridge’s life and his best critical and creative powers were devoted to the attempt to develop a philosophical system, he is less well known as a philosopher than as a romantic poet. This is partly because many of his writings remained unpublished until recent years; they now shed new light on the extent of his knowledge of intellectual history, and on the significance of his philosophical synthesis. As a young man, Coleridge was attracted by the materialist philosophies and theories of human nature which had become part of the Enlightenment’s ‘Science of Man’. These coincided with his support for the drive towards progress and human brotherhood which he thought inspired the French Revolution. At Cambridge (1791–4) religious doubt accompanied his radical politics and he turned from orthodox Christianity to Unitarianism. Gradually, however, he became dissatisfied with the ‘mechanistic’ reductive principles of British eighteenth-century thought. His visit to Germany (1798–9) and his subsequent study of German ideas convinced him that here was a spectrum of philosophical insights which was more adequate to the whole of human nature; one through which ‘head and heart’ might be reconciled. Coleridge’s work reflects his experience of a world subject to violent revolutionary upheavals and his sense of widespread intellectual and moral confusion. Becoming convinced in the early years of the nineteenth century of both the intellectual and spiritual value of Christianity, he sought to re-establish a unity between religious faith and experience and critical philosophy. His ‘ideal Realism’ reconciled elements of Greek and German philosophy with reinterpretations of Judaeo-Christian themes and doctrines, and with the moral lessons he believed history provided. Any sound philosophy must, he insisted, do justice to every aspect of human nature. He declared that he was not concerned to be ‘original’ but to provide a new synthesis, and boldly claimed to have been the first to have ‘attempted to reduce all knowledges into harmony’; although his copious notes intended for an Opus Maximum, the ‘Logosophia’, were never organized into publishable form.

Liberty, Property and Popular Politics

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
The University

Few scholars can claim to have shaped the historical study of the long eighteenth century more profoundly than Professor H. T. Dickinson, who, until his retirement in 2006, held the Sir Richard Lodge Chair of British History at the University of Edinburgh. This volume, based on contributions from Dickinson's students, friends and colleagues from around the world, offers a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century Britain and provides a tribute to a remarkable scholarly career. Dickinson's work and career provides the ideal lens through which to take a detailed snapshot of current research in a number of areas. The book includes contributions from scholars working in intellectual history, political and parliamentary history, ecclesiastical and naval history; discussions of major themes such as Jacobitism, the French Revolution, popular radicalism and conservatism; and essays on prominent individuals in English and Scottish history, including Edmund Burke, Thomas Muir, Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence. The result is a uniquely rich and detailed collection with an impressive breadth of coverage.

The Archaeology of the French Revolution

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Professional Discipline ◽  
The People ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

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.

Paine, Thomas (1737–1809)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Political System ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Revolutionary Politics

Thomas Paine, born in Norfolk, England, spent his early years as an undistinguished artisan and later excise officer. In 1774 he emigrated to America and settled in Philadelphia where he became a journalist and essayist. His Common Sense (1776) and sixteen essays on The Crisis (1776–83) were stunning examples of political propaganda and theorizing. In the late 1780s, in Europe, Paine wrote The Rights of Man (1791–2) and attacked the English political system. During the French Revolution he was a Girondin in the French Convention and wrote The Age of Reason (1794, 1796), savagely criticizing Christianity. He died in New York in 1809, an important figure in the sweep of the revolutionary politics in America, England, and France at the end of the eighteenth century.

Scurvy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Lamb
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
History Of

Scurvy, a disease often associated with long stretches of maritime travel, generated sensations exceeding the standard of what was normal. Eyes dazzled, skin was morbidly sensitive, emotions veered between disgust and delight. This book presents an intellectual history of scurvy to tell the story of the disease that its victims couldn't because they found their illness too terrible and, in some cases, too exciting. The book traces the cultural impact of scurvy during the eighteenth-century age of geographical and scientific discovery. It explains the medical knowledge surrounding scurvy and the debates about its cause, prevention, and attempted cures. The book vividly describes the phenomenon and experience of “scorbutic nostalgia”, in which victims imagined mirages of food, water, or home, and then wept when such pleasures proved impossible to consume or reach. It argues that a culture of scurvy arose in the colony of Australia, which was prey to the disease in its early years, and identifies a literature of scurvy in the works of such figures as Herman Melville, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Francis Bacon, and Jonathan Swift. The book shows how the journeys of discovery in the eighteenth century not only ventured outward to the ends of the earth, but were also an inward voyage into the realms of sensation and passion.

FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE TERROR: NEW GENEALOGIES

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-162
Author(s):  
ANNELIEN DE DIJN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Prolific Author ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

Dan Edelstein is a prolific author. In less than two years he has produced not one but two books. His first, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution, was published by The University of Chicago Press in October 2009. Its Irish twin, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy, appeared with the same press in the fall of 2010. Each of these books deals with a much-studied subject—respectively the Terror and the Enlightenment—the kind of subject, in other words, about which even the most recent literature alone can fill entire libraries. Yet in both cases, Edelstein manages to make a contribution of startling originality and importance. It is clear that this literary scholar—Edelstein is a professor of French and Italian at Stanford University—is one of the most important new voices in the field of eighteenth-century French intellectual history. In this review, I will start by discussing both of his books separately. I will then conclude with some reflections on what Edelstein's work contributes to our understanding of eighteenth-century intellectual history when read as a whole.

Rights After the Revolutions

2019 ◽  
pp. 338-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Civil Liberty ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Model State ◽  
Short Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

The period of the French Revolution was famous for erecting an entirely new system of government and social mores on the basis of a declaration of the rights of man and the citizen. Everything changed in France, over a remarkably short period of time, leading to an especially intense debate about what a society founded on equal rights for all ought to look like. This chapter examines two of the systems expounded, derived from the political philosophies of Thomas Paine and Emmanuel Sièyes. The chapter examines the shock with which opponents such as Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon greeted rights-based politics, and what happened when the new worlds of peace and prosperity promised by Paine and Sièyes descended into chaos and poverty. Around the turn of the eighteenth century the chapter charts a turn away from France and towards Britain as a possible model state for rights compatible with order and with civil liberty; in this turn the history of Scotland, and the existence of brilliant Scottish philosophers played a prominent role, being proof that Britain was not an empire run for the benefit of a mercantile class based in London, but was rather a cosmopolitan empire whose peripheries benefitted as much as the metropole. Republican voices still dedicated to the kinds of transformative natural jurisprudence promised in the early years of the French Revolution, shouted from the sidelines that if Britain was now the model state for humanity, then all of the reform projects of the eighteenth century had altogether failed.

scholarly journals Revolutionary Contexts for the Quest

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 35-80
Author(s):  
Jonathan C.P. Birch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Henry More

This article contributes to a new perspective on the historical Jesus in early modern intellectual history. This perspective looks beyond German and academic scholarship, and takes account of a plurality of religious, social, and political contexts. Having outlined avenues of research which are consistent with this approach, I focus on radicalised socio-political contexts for the emergence of ‘history’ as a category of analysis for Jesus. Two contexts will be discussed: the late eighteenth century, with reference to Joseph Priestley, Baron d’Holbach, and their associations with the French Revolution; and the interregnum period in seventeenth-century Britain, with reference to early Quaker controversies and the apologetic work of Henry More. I identify ideas about Jesus in those contexts which have echoed in subsequent scholarship, while challenging the notion that there is a compelling association between sympathetic historical conceptions of Jesus (as opposed to theological) and a tendency towards radical and revolutionary politics.

In Pursuit of Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Participatory Politics ◽  
Private Citizens ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Public Instruction ◽  
The French Revolution

In pursuit of politics offers a new interpretation of debates over education and politics in the early years of the French Revolution. Following these debates from the 1760s to the early years of the Republic (1792-94), and putting well-known works in dialogue with previously-neglected sources, it situates education at the center of revolutionary contests over citizenship, participatory politics, and representative government.Education was central to how people thought about what was possible, desirable, and achievable in eighteenth-century France. With that in mind, In pursuit of politics uses the debates over education as a window onto one of history’s most dramatic periods of political uncertainty and upheaval, anxiety and ambition. It weaves together debates taking place among Enlightenment writers, philosophes, royal and institutional administrators and, later, among revolutionary legislators, private citizens, political clubs, and provincial schoolmasters. This book explores the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, highlights the emergence of “public instruction” as a revolutionary pedagogy, and allows us to think in new ways about how the citizens and statesmen of eighteenth-century France tried to navigate modern politics at their tumultuous start.

Condorcet and the Viability of Democracy in Modern Republics, 1789–1794

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minchul Kim
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Stable State ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Constitutional Theory ◽  
Military Government ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Transition Mechanism ◽  
The French Revolution

Democracy was in the margins both as an idea and as a political force in the eighteenth century. Even in the 1790s, ‘democracy’ was hardly the defining notion of the revolutionaries’ political visions. The small states as much as the large states perceived democracy as an outmoded legacy of antiquity leading to anarchy and despotism, inapplicable not least because it was undesirable in the modern world in which commerce was a rising force. This article tells the story of how this changed, how the understanding of ‘democracy’ was transformed during the French Revolution to represent a viable transition mechanism to a state of widespread and durable liberty. To avoid a teleological approach in the process of this analysis, this article examines the works of Condorcet on modern democracy in the context of the predicaments of the eighteenth century and the French revolutionary decade: how to avert at the same time despotism, military government and popular anarchy; and how to establish a free and stable state on the basis of modern commercial society? The history of the French Revolution is hereby placed in dialogue with that of eighteenth-century political and intellectual history. The effect is that a fresh picture of the entirety of Condorcet’s political vision emerges as his idea of democracy is studied from the viewpoint of his historical sensitivity, political economy, constitutional theory and international thoughts. In the end, Condorcet was the thinker who most significantly and prominently contributed to the post-1789 emergence of the concept of ‘democracy’ – which had thitherto been considered as the political form inevitably leading to destructive anarchy and despotic Caesarism – as a viable pathway to stability and prosperity.

Ensemblance

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis de Miranda
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Strong Attachment

This book provides the first ever transnational and longue-durée intellectual history of a highly influential but largely understudied modern phrase: esprit de corps. A strong attachment and dedication among the members of a community of practice or a body politic, esprit de corps can be perceived as beneficial (collective élan) or detrimental (groupthink). As a polemical argumentative signifier, esprit de corps has played a significant role in the cultural and political history of the last 300 years: the idea was influential and debated during the European secularisation of education in the eighteenth-century, during the French Revolution, during the United States process of Independence, and the French Empire. It was praised by British colonialists, French sociologists, and during the World Wars. It was instrumental during the rise of administrative nation-states and the triumph of corporate capitalism. ‘Esprit de corps’ is today a keyword in nationalist and managerial discourses. Born in eighteenth-century France in military as well as political discourse, the phrase and its implications were over the centuries an important matter of debate for major thinkers and politicians: d’Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau, Lord Chesterfield, Bentham, the Founding Fathers, Sieyès, Mirabeau, British MPs, Napoleon, Hegel, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Waldeck-Rousseau, de Gaulle, Orwell, Bourdieu, Deleuze & Guattari, etc. For some of them, esprit de corps is the very engine of History. In the end, this book a cautionary analysis of past and current ideologies of ultra-unified human ensembles, a recurrent historical and theoretical fabulation the author calls ensemblance.

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