scholarly journals Den sentimentala romanen och kampen om medborgarskap: Rousseaus Julie och Staëls Delphine

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 22
Author(s):  
Kristina Fjelkestam

<p>The sentimental novel and the struggle for citizenship: Rousseau&rsquo;s <em>Julie </em>and Sta&euml;l&rsquo;s<em> Delphine</em></p><p>The tragic fates of a great number of women in sentimental novels of the eighteenth century can be viewed against the background of classic liberal theory. They provide examples of how individual freedom and restraint in the name of common good can be reconciled. Faced with the impossible choice between a life guided by the principle of love and that of virtue, women often choose self-sacrifice as a means of preserving a sense of individuality in the face of the demands of public universality. The epistolary novels, <em>Julie ou La Nouvelle H&eacute;lo&iuml;se </em>(1761) of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the <em>Delphine </em>(1802) of Germaine de Sta&euml;l, present two rather different treatments of this problem. Rousseau&rsquo;s Julie is a woman whose unquenchable desire transforms her into a prototype of female unreliability not worthy of societal recognition. Sta&euml;l&rsquo;s Delphine, in turn, unmasks a ruthless and unprincipled society which prohibits her from becoming its full-fledged member.</p>

Author(s):  
Ekaterina Pravilova

“Property rights” and “Russia” do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership. This book refutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, the book shows the emergence of the new practices of owning “public things” in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good. The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects—rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics—should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation. Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, the book looks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing “the public” through the reform of property rights.


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

This chapter investigates changes in mentalities after the Black Death, comparing practices never before analysed in this context—funerary and labour laws and processions to calm God’s anger. While processions were rare or conflictual as in Catania and Messina in 1348, these rituals during later plagues bound communities together in the face of disaster. The chapter then turns to another trend yet to be noticed by historians. Among the multitude of saints and blessed ones canonized from 1348 to the eighteenth century, the Church was deeply reluctant to honour, even name, any of the thousands who sacrificed their lives to succour plague victims, physically or spiritually, especially in 1348: the Church recognized no Black Death martyrs. By the sixteenth century, however, city-wide processions and other communal rituals bound communities together with charity for the poor, works of art, and charitable displays of thanksgiving to long-dead holy men and women.


1980 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul F. Paskoff

An increase in labor productivity and a reduction of fuel consumption rates were two notable and closely related achievements of the management of Hopewell Forge, an ironworks in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Significantly, these economies were realized in the face of technological stasis through learning by doing. The analysis of this accomplishment is cast in the larger context of the performance of the iron industry before and after 1800.


Author(s):  
Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo

Migration is a shared condition of all humanity. We have all been strangers in a strange land. All humanity lives today as a result of migration, by themselves or their ancestors. Migration is a matter sometimes of choice, often of need, and always an inalienable right. All helpless people deserve to be helped. Offering such help is a commandment and a blessing shared among all religions. Accordingly, as Pope Francis reminds us, our duties to migrants include “to welcome”, “to protect”, “to promote”, and “to integrate.” National borders are not a result of primary natural law, as aren’t private property and clothes, “because nature did not give [humans] clothes, but art invented them”. National borders depend on social, political and geographical factors. Therefore, faced with current waves of mass migration, in order to establish practices that respond to the common good we need to be guided by three levels of responsibility. The first principle being that “in case of need all things are common”, because “every man is my brother”. This principle is relative to existence or subsistence and conditions other related issues (such as accommodation, food, housing, security, etc.). Secondly, as part of the fundamental rights of people, legal guarantees of primary rights that foster an “organic participation” in the economic and social life of the nation. Access to these economic and social goods, including education and employment, will allow people to develop their own abilities. Thirdly, a deeper sense of integration, reflecting responsibilities related to protecting, examining and developing the values that underpin the deep, stable, unity of a society— and, more fundamentally, create a horizon of public peace, understood as St. Augustine’s "tranquility in order". In particular, with regards to the aforementioned context, policies on migration should be guided by prudence, but prudence must never mean exclusion. On the contrary, governments should evaluate, “with wisdom and foresight, the extent to which their country is in a position, without prejudice to the common good of citizens, to offer a decent life to migrants, especially those truly in need of protection. Strangely enough, the response of most governments in the face of this phenomenon only seems to value the third principle, completely disregarding the first two.


Author(s):  
Alison Morgan

The words ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ feature in forty-three poems in this collection, indicative of the centrality of this theme to the radical discourse of the day. In an era of almost unprecedented repression and the curtailment of rights, working people wished to rid themselves of their chains and reclaim their lost liberties, as a way of asserting English nationalism in the face of a ‘foreign’ monarchy. The twelve poems and songs in this section celebrate both the forthcoming return of liberty, presented as a goddess, and Henry Hunt as liberty’s human representative. The restoration of liberty as an end to slavery is a common trope within English radical discourse and poems often depict the radical patriot endeavouring to rescue his country from an imposed and unnatural tyranny and return it to its true state of liberty; however, this trope predates the era of revolution when such rhetoric was common currency and this section explores the prevalence of the theme of liberty in the mid-eighteenth century and the subsequent influence of William Collins and Thomas Gray on the poems in this collection. The introduction also seeks to explain the lack of references to the transatlantic slave trade in these poems at a time when the issue of rights was at the fore. It includes poems written by Samuel Bamford and the Spencean Robert Wedderburn.


Author(s):  
Matthew D. Lundberg

The epilogue briefly returns to the perennial debate between the just war and pacifist traditions of Christianity in the face of violence. The waste and destructive synergy of all violence, even reparative violence, suggests that the just war ethic attempts the absurd. Yet the just war wisdom of the Christian tradition insists that it is possible to find a productive logic in purposeful violence for the public common good. As the pacifist traditions make the gamble that it is not absurd to refuse the temptation of violence even in the face of aggression, and the just war tradition gambles that it is possible to restrain violence and direct it toward peace, these traditions should remain in conversation with one another and open to the possibility of glimpsing the witness of martyrdom in one another.


The Closet ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 114-147
Author(s):  
Danielle Bobker

This chapter points out, according to Anthony Hamilton and Jonathan Swift, how closets can still represent the highly circumscribed sociability associated with the face-to-face exchange of handwritten manuscripts. It talks about the hundreds of books that are designated as closets or cabinets that had been published in Britain by the end of the eighteenth century. As the authors and editors of these printed closets and cabinets nervously underscored their own close connections to courtly closets, prayer closets, and elite cabinets of curiosity, they implicitly positioned their readers as illegitimate intruders or spies. The chapter also reviews the complex dynamics of partial inclusion that are directly addressed in a particularly self-reflexive instance. It emphasizes that the one-way mode of visual intimacy channeled the excitement and social disorientation that accompanied the increasing accessibility of knowledge in the eighteenth century.


Author(s):  
David Martín Marcos

This paper analyzes the role of the duke of Medinaceli in face of the Spanish succession crisis. By rejecting historiographical attempts to include the duke within one or other dynastic party, the essay emphasizes instead his total loyalty to the united Spanish Monarchy. By doing so, the defense of the unity of the Monarchy attempted by Medinaceli is understood not only in a territorial viewpoint but as a safeguard of a distinctive political model: the so-called ‘aristomanzia’. Thanks to it, Spanish nobility had been traditionally able to control the King by way of the Council of State and the consensus of the Grandees, a practice threatened at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century and defended, but without success, by Medinaceli.This paper analyzes the role of the Duke of Medinaceli in the face of the Spanish succession crisis. By rejecting historiographical attempts to include the duke within a dynastic party, the essay emphasizes the idea of his loyalty to the Spanish Monarchy. In this way the defense of the unity of the Monarchy undertaken by Medinaceli is understood not only in a territorial viewpoint but as a pragmatic safeguard of a political model: the so-called ‘aristomanzia’. Thanks to it, the Spanish nobility had been traditionally able to control the King by way of the Council of State and the consensus of the Grandees, a practice that languished at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century and defended with no success by Medinaceli.


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