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This book on the pre-history of democratization shows how and why more modern attitudes to democracy started to emerge in the late eighteenth century. Focusing on the language of parliamentarians, the author reconstructs and compares debates on the political role and representation of the people in Britain and Sweden. His analysis demonstrates not only the persistence of the classical, pejorative, conception of democracy but also the gradual re-evaluation of the notion prior to the French Revolution. The author analyses the clash between British and French conceptions of democracy as well as the first definitions of the sovereignty of Parliament as the sovereignty of the people. Furthermore, by placing parliamentary discourse in the context of public debates, he reveals the previously ignored role that parliaments played in redefining the most crucial concepts in Western political theory.
This volume analyses the societal legacy of Lutheranism in Finland in broad terms. It contributes to the recent renewed interest in the history of religion in Finland and the Nordic countries by bringing together researchers in history, political science, economics, social psychology, education, linguistics, media studies, and theology to examine the mutual relationship between Lutheranism and society in Finland. The two main foci are (i) the historical effects of the Reformation and its aftermath on societal structures and on national identity, values, linguistic culture, education, and the economy, and (ii) the adaptation of the church – and its theology – to changes in the geo-politic...
The fourth volume in Brill’s series A New History of the Sermon, this study examines the sermon during the ‘long’ eighteenth century – the era between Bossuet and Schleiermacher. It offers a broad outline of the history of preaching in this period, an overview of the research over the past three decades, and suggestions for new approaches to the subject. Thematically, the book includes chapters on such topics as the theology of the eighteenth-century sermon, preachers' instructions, the sermon in daily life, delivery as a means of reaching congregations, and audience reception of preaching. It also pays ample attention to the three important religious and intellectual currents of the long eighteenth century: (Neo-)classicism, Pietism, and the Enlightenment. Contributors are Alexander Bitzel, Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, O.C. Edwards, Joris van Eijnatten, Sabine Holtz, Pasi Ihalainen, Herman Roodenburg, Jonathan Strom, and Thomas Worcester
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Why are citizens in some countries more willing to pay taxes than in other countries? This book examines the history of the relationship between citizens and their states in five countries, (Sweden, Britain, Italy, Romania, and the United States), and demonstrates how and why people in in some countries have come to trust the government with their money while in other countries they do not. The book explores the evolution of this relationship in detail, in each case showing how some governments developed the fiscal and technical capacity to tax their citizens fairly and deliver public services efficiently. In short, how and why some countries became more trustworthy than others. The volume concludes by examining the implications of these five cases for developing countries today and the lessons that can be learned.
Examines sermons preached at national thanksgiving celebrations to show in detail what it meant to be properly British in the period.
The book charts an extraordinary period in Danish history: the "Press Freedom Period" of 1770-73, in which King Christian 7's physician J.F. Struensee introduced a series of radical enlightenment reforms beginning with the total abolishment of censorship. The book investigates the sudden avalanche of pamphlets and debates, initiating the modern public sphere of Denmark-Norway. Publications show a surprising variety, from serious political, economic, and philosophical treatises over criticism, polemics, ridicule, entertainment, and to spin campaigns, obscenities, libel, threats. A successful coup against Struensee led to his subsequent public execution in Copenhagen, and the latter half of th...
Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extolling the virtues of homelands threatened by globalised elites and mass migration. This study seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundamental differences between the writings of the older counter-revolutionary Europeanists and their self-appointed successors and detractors in the twenty-first century. In the decades around 1800, the era of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary authors from all over Europe defended Euro...
Many historians consider the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648, to mark a watershed in European international relations. It is generally agreed that Westphalia brought to an end more than a century of religious conflicts and marked the beginning of a new era in which secular power politics was the prime motivating factor in international relations and warfare. The purpose of this volume is to question this assumption and reconceptualise the relationship between war, foreign policy and religion during the period 1648 to 1713. Some of the contributions to the volume directly challenge the idea that religion ceased to play a role in war and foreign policy. Others co...
A radical reappraisal of the character of moral and political theory in early modern England.
Dress helps us fashion identity, history, community, and place. Dress has been harnessed as a metaphor for both progress and stability, the exotic and the utopian, oppression and freedom, belonging and resistance. Dressing with Purpose examines three Scandinavian dress traditions—Swedish folkdräkt, Norwegian bunad, and Sámi gákti—and traces their development during two centuries of social and political change across northern Europe. By the 20th century, many in Sweden worried about the ravages of industrialization, urbanization, and emigration on traditional ways of life. Norway was gripped in a struggle for national independence. Indigenous Sámi communities—artificially divided by...