Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The French Idea of History
Maistre emerges from this deeply learned book as the crucial bridge between the Enlightenment and the historicized thought of the nineteenth century.
Joseph de Maistre and his European Readers
Following the publication of Isaiah Berlin's essay on Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), the Savoyard philosopher has been known primarily in the English-speaking world as a precursor of fascism. The essays in this volume challenge this view. Disclosing the inaccuracies and limitations of Berlin's account, they illustrate Maistre's colossally diverse European posterity. Far from an inflexible ideologist, Maistre was a versatile and deeply modern thinker who attracted interpreters across the political spectrum. Through the centuries, Maistre's passionate Europeanism has contributed to his popularity from Madrid to Moscow. And in our times, when religion is re-asserting itself as a source of public reason, his theorization of the encounter between tradition and modernity is lending his work ever more urgent relevance. Cover illustration by Matthieu Manche
Analysing Darkness and Light: Dystopias and Beyond
The book situates itself in the fields of philosophy, political theory, aesthetics and theories of art, linking its discussions of fictional dystopias to debates on ongoing crises. It asks: Are dystopias a useful tool for imagining ways out of sombre situations or do they prevent us from engaging in transformative action? The book consists of a thorough introduction and three major sections: 1. Dystopias of Meaninglessness, 2. Techno-Euphoria vs. Terror of Technology, and 3. Dystopias Come True? The individual chapters discuss, among other things, liberalism and conservatism, “luxury communism”, pandemics, technology-induced anxiety, empty speech, ethics, film, literature, architecture and music.
Historicising the French Revolution
Three decades ago, François Furet famously announced that the French Revolution was over. Napoleon's armies ceased to march around Europe long ago, and Louis XVIII even returned to occupy the throne of his guillotined brother. And yet the Revolutionâ (TM)s memory continues to hold sway over imaginations and cultures around the world. This sway is felt particularly strongly by those who are interested in history: for the French Revolution not only altered the course of history radically, but became the fountainhead of historicism and the origin of the historical mentality. The sixteen essays collected in this volume investigate the Revolutionâ (TM)s intellectual and material legacies. From popular culture to education and politics, from France and Ireland to Poland and Turkey, from 1789 to the present day, leading historians expose, alongside graduate students, the myriad ways in which the Revolution changed humanityâ (TM)s possible futures, its history, and the idea of history. They attest to how the Revolution has had a continuing global significance, and is still shaping the world today.
Cosmopolitan Conservatisms
This volume presents a fresh picture of the historical development of “conservatism” from the late 17th to the early 20th century. The book explores the broader geographies and transnational dimensions of conservatism and counterrevolution. The contributions show how counterrevolutionary concepts did not emerge in isolation, but resulted from the interplay between ideas, media, networks, and institutions. Like 19th-century liberalism and socialism, conservatism was the product of traveling ideas and people. This study describes how exile, mobility, and international sociability shaped counterrevolutionary identities. The volume presents case studies on the intersection of political philo...
The Holy Alliance
A major new account of the post-Napoleonic Holy Alliance and the promise it held for liberals The Holy Alliance is now most familiar as a label for conspiratorial reaction. In this book, Isaac Nakhimovsky reveals the Enlightenment origins of this post-Napoleonic initiative, explaining why it was embraced at first by many contemporary liberals as the birth of a federal Europe and the dawning of a peaceful and prosperous age of global progress. Examining how the Holy Alliance could figure as both an idea of progress and an emblem of reaction, Nakhimovsky offers a novel vantage point on the history of federative alternatives to the nation state. The result is a clearer understanding of the recu...
From Bayle to the Batavian Revolution
This book is an attempt to assess the part played by philosophy in the eighteenth-century Dutch Enlightenment. Following Bayle’s death and the demise of the radical Enlightenment, Dutch philosophers soon embraced Newtonianism and by the second half of the century Wolffianism also started to spread among Dutch academics. Once the Republic started to crumble, Dutch enlightened discourse took a political turn, but with the exception of Frans Hemsterhuis, who chose to ignore the political crisis, it failed to produce original philosophers. By the end of the century, the majority of Dutch philosophers typically refused to embrace Kant’s transcendental project as well as his cosmopolitanism. Instead, early nineteenth-century Dutch professors of philosophy preferred to cultivate their joint admiration for the Ancients.
A Road to Nowhere
Matthew W. Slaboch examines the work of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Oswald Spengler, Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and American historians Henry Adams and Christopher Lasch—rare skeptics of the idea of progress who have much to offer political theory, a field dominated by historical optimists.
The Terror of Natural Right
"Natural right - the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are "natural" in origin - is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. But during the French Revolution, this tradition was interpreted to justify the most repressive actions of the violent period known as the Terror." "In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the "enemy of the human race" - an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities - to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. But the significance of the natural right di...
Lamennais: A Believer's Revolutionary Politics
Lamennais: A Believer’s Revolutionary Politics, edited by Richard A Lebrun, offers English translations (by Lebrun and Jerry Ryan) of the most influential and controversial writings of Félicité de Lamennais, a French priest who began his career as a Traditionalist, became the founder of Liberal Catholicism in the early 1830s, and then left the Church after his ideas were condemned by Rome. Sylvain Milbach’s comprehensive Introduction and Annotations place these writings in the context of the author’s intellectual history and the political, religious, and intellectual situation in France in the first half of the 19th century. Lamennais challenged traditional religious, political, and social thinking, leaving a fiercely debated reputation. The writings translated here allow 21st-century readers to judge him for themselves.
