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Casts new light on of the 'official' French nineteenth-century narrative by examining how historians and philosophers conceived of the country's past.
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. 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. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre. A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.
A Companion to Enlightenment Historiography provides a survey of the most important historians and historiographical debates in the long eighteenth century, examining these debates’ stylistic, philosophical and political significance. The chapters, many of which were specially commissioned for this volume, offer a mixture of accessible introduction and original interpretive argument; they will thus appeal both to the scholar of the period and the more general reader. Part I considers Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Herder and Vico. Part II explores wider themes of national and thematic context: English, Scottish, French and German Enlightenment historians are discussed, as are the concepts of historical progress, secularism, the origins of historicism and the deployments of Greek and Roman antiquity within 18th century historiography. Contributors are Robert Mankin, Simon Kow, Jeffrey Smitten, Rebecca Kingston, Síofra Pierse, Bertrand Binoche, Donald Phillip Verene, Ulrich Muhlack, David Allan, Noelle Gallagher, François-Emmanuël Boucher, Sandra Rudnick Luft, Sophie Bourgault, C. Akça Ataç, and Robert Sparling.
“Constitution” is a rich term in Western political culture, encompassing political and juridical doctrine as well as government practices through the ages. This volume examines “constitutional moments” in history, those occasions or episodes when significant steps were taken in the definition or redefinition of polities. Their actors were writers or politicians, rulers or ruled, who found inspiration in a distant past or instead looked towards a future to be drawn anew. This book sheds light on such moments from Ancient Greece to the present day, mostly in Europe but also in the Ottoman world and the Americas, thereby uncovering a revealing variety of constitutional thinking and action throughout history. Contributors are: Jon Arrieta, Niall Bond, Luc Brisson, Peter Cholakov, Nora Chonowski, Angela De Benedictis, F. Sinem Eryilmaz, Hakon Evju, Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, Javier Fernández Sebastián, Merieke Gebhardt, Xavier Gil, Mark J. Hill, Ferenc Hörcher, Jaska Kainulainen, Thomas Lorman, Adriana Luna-Fabritius, Ere Nokkala, Brian Kjaer Olesen, András Pap, Nikola Regent, Alberto Mariano Rodríguez Martínez, Pablo Sánchez León, José Reis Santos, and Ersin Yildiz.
This edited collection explores the histories of trade, a peculiar literary genre that emerged in the context of the historiographical and cultural changes promoted by the histoire philosophique movement. It marked a discontinuity with erudition and antiquarianism, and interacted critically with universal history. By comparing and linking the histories of individual peoples within a common historical process, this genre enriched the reflection on civilisation that emerged during the long eighteenth century. Those who looked to the past wanted to understand the political constitutions and manners most appropriate to commerce, and grasp the recurring mechanisms underlying economic development....
Contrary to widely held assumptions, the early modern revival of ps-Longinus' On the Sublime did not begin with the adaptation published by Boileau in 1674; it was not connected solely with the Greek editions that began to appear from 1554; nor was its impact limited to rhetoric and literature. Manuscript copies began to circulate in Quattrocento Italy, but very few have been studied. Neither have the ways the sublime was used, in rhetoric and literature, but also in the arts, architecture and the theatre been studied in any systematic way. The present volume is a first attempt to chart the early modern translations of Peri hupsous, both in the literal sense of the history of its dissemination by means of editions, versions and translations in Latin and vernacular languages, but also in the figurative sense of its uses and transformations in the visual arts in the period from the first early modern editions of Longinus until its popularization by Boileau. Contributors include Francis Goyet, Hana Gründler, Lydia Hamlett, Sigrid de Jong, Helen Langdon, Bram Van Oostveldt, Eugenio Refini, Paul Smith, and Dietmar Till.
In this volume, George Hoffmann presents a study of Protestant satirical texts in sixteenth-century France and their role in French literature and history, examining how France became a culturally Protestant country while remaining confessionally Catholic.
Beyond the political elites and the scribes, among the anonymous and unranked, the Jerusalem Temple provided the necessary social cohesion for Judaism and the Jewish people. It acted not only as edifice but also as system of thought, with its categories of pure and impure, of sacred and profane, extending beyond the sanctuary to the Land of Israel, from the sacrificial altar to the daily tables. The Temple was already an idea more than a reality in the Dead Sea Scrollls, and it came to an end in 70 CE. Yet even beyond this end, when Rabbinic Judaism takes shape, there remains the 'Thinking of the Temple'.
Republicanism and imperialism are typically understood to be located at opposite ends of the political spectrum. In Imperial Republics, Edward G. Andrew challenges the supposed incompatibility of these theories with regard to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revolutions in England, the United States, and France. Many scholars have noted the influence of the Roman state on the ideology of republican revolutionaries, especially in the model it provided for transforming subordinate subjects into autonomous citizens. Andrew finds an equally important parallel between Rome's expansionary dynamic — in contrast to that of Athens, Sparta, or Carthage — and the imperial rivalries that emerged between the United States, France, and England in the age of revolutions. Imperial Republics is a sophisticated, wide-ranging examination of the intellectual origins of republican movements, and explains why revolutionaries felt the need to 'don the toga' in laying the foundation for their own uprisings.
Cicero has played a pivotal role in shaping Western culture. His public persona, his self-portrait as model of Roman prose, philosopher, and statesman, has exerted a durable and profound impact on the educational system and the formation of the ruling class over the centuries. Joining up with recent studies on the reception of Cicero, this volume approaches the figure of Cicero from a ‘biographical’, more than ‘philological’, perspective and considers the multiple ways by which different ages reacted to Cicero and created their ‘Ciceros’. From Cicero’s lifetime to our times, it focuses on how the image of Cicero was revisited and reworked by intellectuals and men of culture, wh...