Author: Mary Efrosini Gregory
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433109393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Freedom in French Enlightenment Thought examines how five eighteenth-century French theorists - Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Condorcet - kindled the flame of freedom in America and France. Each thinker laid down a building block that would eventually inspire the language in constitutions around the world. They held that citizens have certain inalienable rights that are dictated by natural law and endowed to all by our Creator; that these rights include equality before the law, justice, safety and security of persons and property, and freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion. Montesquieu recommended three separate branches of government that function independently of each other. Diderot held that there is no true sovereign, except the nation; that there is no true legislator, except the people. Rousseau advised that the individual will must be subordinate to the general will and private interest to that of the community: he warned against legislators who act from their own financial interests and enact laws to aggrandize themselves. Voltaire believed that selfishness, greed, and the desire for luxury are not only part of human nature, but that they compel people to achieve, trade with others, search, explore, and invent: the passions are the engine that makes capitalism run and that stimulate all human endeavor. Condorcet, a champion of civil rights, boldly proclaimed equality for women, blacks, and the poor. The philosophes held that free and universal public education will permit more citizens to participate in the progress of the arts and sciences and will improve the standard of living among all strata of society. An unrestrained press permits citizens to make informed decisions. Their polemics have indeed changed the face of the world.
Author: Ioanna Tourkochoriti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316517632
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
A comparison of French and American approaches to freedom of expression, with reference to the historical, social and philosophical contexts.
Author: Lester G. Crocker
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421433885
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 539
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Book Description
Originally published in 1959. This book examines the French Enlightenment by analyzing critical thought in eighteenth-centruy France. It examines the philosophes' views on evil, free will and determinism, and human nature. This is an interesting group to look at, according to Crocker, because French Enlightenment thinkers straddled two vastly different time periods.
Author: Immanuel Kant
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
Author: Hedy Law
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 178327560X
Category : Enlightenment
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
How did composers and performers use the lost art of pantomime to explore and promote the Enlightenment ideals of free expression?
Author: Susan Dunn
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780571199891
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
What the two great modern revolutions can teach us about democracy today The American and French revolutions presented the world with two very different visions of democracy. Although both professed similar Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, and justice and set similar political agendas, there were also fundamental differences. The French sought a complete break with a thousand years of history; the Americans were content to preserve many aspects of their English heritage. Why did the two revolutions follow such different trajectories? And what lessons do they offer us about democracy today? In lucid narrative style, Dunn captures the personalities and lives of the great figures of both revolutions, and shows how their stories added up to make two very different events.
Author: Ted Gott
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780724103553
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
This panoramic volume tells the story of French art, culture and life from the 1770s to the 1820s: the first French voyages of discovery to Australia, the stormy period of social change with the outbreak of the French Revolution, and the rise to power of the young Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife Josephine.
Author: Charles Walton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199710015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
In the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, French revolutionaries proclaimed the freedom of speech, religion, and opinion. Censorship was abolished, and France appeared to be on a path towards tolerance, pluralism, and civil liberties. A mere four years later, the country descended into a period of political terror, as thousands were arrested, tried, and executed for crimes of expression and opinion. In Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution, Charles Walton traces the origins of this reversal back to the Old Regime. He shows that while early advocates of press freedom sought to abolish pre-publication censorship, the majority still firmly believed injurious speech--or calumny--constituted a crime, even treason if it undermined the honor of sovereign authority or sacred collective values, such as religion and civic spirit. With the collapse of institutions responsible for regulating honor and morality in 1789, calumny proliferated, as did obsessions with it. Drawing on wide-ranging sources, from National Assembly debates to local police archives, Walton shows how struggles to set legal and moral limits on free speech led to the radicalization of politics, and eventually to the brutal liquidation of "calumniators" and fanatical efforts to rebuild society's moral foundation during the Terror of 1793-1794. With its emphasis on how revolutionaries drew upon cultural and political legacies of the Old Regime, this study sheds new light on the origins of the Terror and the French Revolution, as well as the history of free expression.
Author: Mary Efrosini Gregory
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433103735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
This book examines how eight eighteenth-century French theorists - Maillet, Montesquieu, La Mettrie, Buffon, Maupertuis, Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire - addressed evolutionism. Each thinker laid down a building block that would eventually open the door to the mutability of species and a departure from the long-held belief that the chain of beings is fixed. This book describes how the philosophes established a triune relationship among contemporary scientific discoveries, random creationism propelled by the motive and conscious properties of matter, and the notion of the chain of being, along with its corollaries, plenitude and continuity. Also addressed is the contemporary debate over whether apes could ever be taught to speak as well as the issue of race and the family of man.
Author: Charles de Secondat baron de Montesquieu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jurisprudence
Languages : en
Pages : 492
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Book Description
