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Comedy is how we cope with the absurdity of life. The person who cannot step back and see how ludicrous are most of the things we encounter in life is the person who gets mired and engulfed in them. Comedy lets us step back and see the whole picture. It reminds us of what is really important which certainly includes laughing and laughing often. These four comedies each take on several situations but exaggerate them until they become enlarged and laughable. To each are added an unusual use of standard theatrical tradition. A writer of one play becomes involved with his own characters. Another play actually moves backwards in time. Another comedy is actually two separate plays that come together while another claims to be a musical but has no singing whatsoever. Come along for the fun and laughter and lighten your burdens for a while.
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From Subject to Citizen offers an original account of the Second Empire (1852-1870) as a turning point in modern French political culture: a period in which thinkers of all political persuasions combined forces to create the participatory democracy alive in France today. Here Sudhir Hazareesingh probes beyond well-known features of the Second Empire, its centralized government and authoritarianism, and reveals the political, social, and cultural advances that enabled publicists to engage an increasingly educated public on issues of political order and good citizenship. He portrays the 1860s in particular as a remarkably intellectual decade during which Bonapartists, legitimists, liberals, an...
Liberal democracies are under constant threat in the twenty-first century, and there is growing scepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive together. In Democracy Tamed, Gianna Englert argues that the dilemmas facing liberal democracy are not unique to our present moment, but have existed since the birth of liberal political thought in nineteenth-century France. Combining political theory and intellectual history, Democracy Tamed tells the story of how the earliest liberals deployed their "new democracy" to combat universal suffrage. But it also reveals how later liberals would appropriate their predecessors' antidemocratic arguments to safeguard liberal democracies as we have come to know them.
This intellectual history study locates the philosophy of history of Pierre-Simon Ballanche (1776-1847) within the intellectual, religious, and social life of Restoration and July Monarchy France, and argues for the recognition of Ballanche as an important contributor to that milieu. Its four parts blend the topical and evolutionary approaches, analyzing dominant themes as they are developed across Ballanche's works, and charts Ballanche's complex relation of dependence and independence to the various intellectual currents of the period. This study clarifies the thought of a notoriously obscure thinker, illuminates the intellectual history of early nineteenth-century France, and demonstrates how Ballanche's project for religio-social regeneration effected a crucial step in the historical-mindedness of the Romantic period.
My France focuses on some of the most intriguing aspects of French life: politics, myths, personalities, public problems, actions, and conflicts. The topics Weber treats range from sports to religion, and include comments on folklore, national socialism, antisemitism, and famous Frenchmen.
The past fifteen years in France have seen a remarkable flourishing of new work in political philosophy. This anthology brings into English for the first time essays by some of the best young French political thinkers writing today, including Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, Luc Ferry, and Alain Renaut. The central theme of these essays is liberal democracy: its nature, its development, its problems, its fundamental legitimacy. Although these themes are familiar to American and British readers, the French approach to them--which is profoundly historical and rooted in the tradition of continental philosophy--is quite different from our customary one. Included in this collection is a series of r...
The Gaullist regime in France has aroused much interest in the nature of French politics. This stimulating analysis of the conservative faction in France, revised by the author to include the government of General de Gaulle, should be of interest not only to students of that country's history and politics but also to general readers who would understand France's political tradition and where de Gaulle fits into it. This work is translated from the second and revised edition of La Droite en France: de le Première Restauration á la Ve République, published in Paris in 1963.