Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence

Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence PDF Author: Richard Lebrun
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773522886
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence leading Maistre scholars offer interpretations of his thought and make available in English recent French scholarship on his life and work. They provide a portrait of Maistre as a significant thinker in numerous fields, upsetting the image of him as a backward-looking "reactionary," a reinterpretation furthered by contemporary interest in Counter-Enlightenment thought in general.

Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence

Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence PDF Author: Richard Lebrun
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773522886
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence leading Maistre scholars offer interpretations of his thought and make available in English recent French scholarship on his life and work. They provide a portrait of Maistre as a significant thinker in numerous fields, upsetting the image of him as a backward-looking "reactionary," a reinterpretation furthered by contemporary interest in Counter-Enlightenment thought in general.

Joseph de Maistre

Joseph de Maistre PDF Author: Richard Lebrun
Publisher: Kingston, Ont. : McGill-Queen's University Press
ISBN: 9780773506459
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Joseph de Maistre is the first full biography in English of one of the founders of conservatism, and the first to have benefited from access to the family archives. Richard Lebrun shows that understanding the dynamics of Maistre's political evolution contributes not only to our knowledge of Continental conservatism as it emerged from the crucible of the French Revolution but also to a better understanding of the roots of modem conservatism. Even in France, where his stature as a great stylist generally has been acknowledged, Maistre is often dismissed with a brief remark about his scandalous comments on bloodshed and war. Lebrun argues that this dismissal is unwarranted: study of Maistre's life and thought is worthwhile in itself and provides useful insights into the factors that encourage the formulation and acceptance of conservatism or reactionary ideologies. Lebrun shows how Maistre became a renowned defender of throne and altar by detailing the formative influences -the Savoyard roots, religious heritage, and predominant intellectual influences - of Maistre's experience before 1794. The Joseph de Maistre revealed here is a more complex figure than either the bloody-minded apologist for conservatism portrayed by his liberal critics or the steadfast Church Father of his traditional Roman Catholic admirers. Maistre was a scholarly magistrate in the tradition of Montesquieu, a man who had been open to the trends of his time but was profoundly shaken by the violence of the French Revolution. Appalled by the prospect of chaos, he used his rhetorical skills as a lawyer to defend monarchical institutions and traditional Catholicism. Lebrun argues that only with the opening of the family archives and the discoveries in recent studies are we able to appreciate Maistre's struggles to understand the upheavals of his time, his doubts and hesitations, and his reasons for taking the public positions he chose.

The Evangelical Counter-Enlightenment

The Evangelical Counter-Enlightenment PDF Author: William R. Everdell
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030697622
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
This contribution to the global history of ideas uses biographical profiles of 18th-century contemporaries to find what Salafist and Sufi Islam, Evangelical Protestant and Jansenist Catholic Christianity, and Hasidic Judaism have in common. Such figures include Muḥammad Ibn abd al-Waḥhab, Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Israel Ba’al Shem Tov. The book is a unique and comprehensive study of the conflicted relationship between the “evangelical” movements in all three Abrahamic religions and the ideas of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Centered on the 18th century, the book reaches back to the third century for precedents and context, and forward to the 21st for the legacy of these movements. This text appeals to students and researchers in many fields, including Philosophy and Religion, their histories, and World History, while also appealing to the interested lay reader.

Maistre: Considerations on France

Maistre: Considerations on France PDF Author: Joseph de Maistre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521466288
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Joseph de Maistre's Considerations on France is the best known French equivalent of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. This new edition of Richard Lebrun's 1974 translation is introduced by Isaiah Berlin, with a bibliography and chronology by the translator. Published in 1797, the work of the self-exiled Maistre presents a providential interpretation of the French Revolution and argues for a new alliance of throne and altar under a restored Bourbon monarchy. Although the Directory and then Napoleon delayed Maistre's influence within France until the Restoration, he is now acknowledged as the most eloquent spokesperson for continental conservatism. Considerations on France was a shrewd piece of propaganda, but, as Isaiah Berlin contends, by arguing his case in broad historical, philosophical and religious terms, Maistre raises issues of enduring importance.

St Petersburg Dialogues

St Petersburg Dialogues PDF Author: Joseph de Maistre
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773563806
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Written and set on the banks of the Neva, St Petersburg Dialogues is a startlingly relevant analysis of the human prospect in the twenty-first century. As the literary critic George Steiner has remarked, "the age of the Gulag and of Auschwitz, of famine and ubiquitous torture ... nuclear threat, the ecological laying waste of our planet, the leap of endemic, possibly pandemic, illness out of the very matrix of libertarian progress" is exactly what Joseph de Maistre foretold. In the Dialogues Maistre addressed a number of topics that are discussed briefly or not at all in his other works already available in English. These include an apologetic for traditional Christian beliefs about providence, reflections on the social role of the public executioner and the "divinity" of war, a critique of John Locke's sensationalist psychology, meditations on prayer and sacrifice, and a mini-course on "illuminism." The literary form is that of the "philosophical conversation" – one that allowed Maistre to be deliberately provocative and to indulge his taste for paradox, a "methodical extravagance" that he judged particularly appropriate for the eighteenth-century salon. Translator and editor Richard Lebrun provides a full scholarly edition of this classic work, complete with an introduction, chronology, critical bibliography, and generous explanatory notes. The Dialogues will be of interest to scholars of literary history as well as the history of ideas.

Joseph de Maistre and His European Readers

Joseph de Maistre and His European Readers PDF Author: Carolina Armenteros
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004193944
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Long known solely as fascism’s precursor, Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) re-emerges in this volume as a versatile thinker with a colossally diverse posterity whose continuing relevance in Europe is ensured by his theorization of the encounter between tradition and modernity.

Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment

Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment PDF Author: Joseph Mali
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
ISBN: 9780871699350
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
As the essays in this collection make plain, Isaiah Berlin invented neither the term "Counter-Enlightenment" nor the concept. However, more than any other figure since the eighteenth century, Berlin appropriated the term, made it the heart of his own political thought, and imbued his interpretations of particular thinkers with its meanings and significance. His diverse treatment of writers at the margins of the Enlightenment, who themselves reflected upon what they took to be its central currents, were at once historical and philosophical. Berlin sought to show that our patterns of culture, manufactured by ourselves, must be explained differently from the ways in which we seek to fathom laws of nature. Many of the essays in this volume were prepared for the International Seminar in memory of Sir Isaiah Berlin, held at the School of History in Tel Aviv University during the academic year 1999-2000.

The French Idea of History

The French Idea of History PDF Author: Carolina Armenteros
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801462606
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
"A fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat... the champion of the hardest, narrowest, and most inflexible dogmatism... part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner." Thus did Émile Faguet describe Joseph-Marie de Maistre (1753–1821) in his 1899 history of nineteenth-century thought. This view of the influential thinker as a reactionary has, with little variation, held sway ever since. In The French Idea of History, Carolina Armenteros recovers a very different figure, one with a far more subtle understanding of, and response to, the events of his day. Maistre emerges from this deeply learned book as the crucial bridge between the Enlightenment and the historicized thought of the nineteenth century. Armenteros demonstrates that Maistre inaugurated a specifically French way of thinking about past, present, and future that held sway not only among conservative political theorists but also among intellectuals generally considered to belong to the left, particularly the Utopian Socialists. The historical rupture represented by the French Revolution compelled contemporaries to reflect on the nature and meaning of history. Some who remained religious during those years felt history with particular intensity, awakening suddenly to the fear that God might have abandoned humankind. This profound spiritual anxiety emerged in Maistre's work: under his pen, everything—knowledge, society, religion, government, the human body—had to be historicized and temporalized in order to be known. The imperative was to end history by uncovering its essence. Socialists, positivists, and traditionalists drew on Maistre's historical ideas to construct the collective good and design the future. The dream that history held the key to human renewal and the obliteration of violence faded after the 1848 revolutions, but it permanently changed French social, political, moral, and religious thought.

The New Inquisitions

The New Inquisitions PDF Author: Arthur Versluis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195306376
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
"In The New Inquisitions, Arthur Versluis conducts an investigation into the intellectual origins of totalitarianism. He traces totalitarianism's beginnings to the early and medieval Christian idea of heresy - the idea that there is one correct set of doctrines, and that dissent from them is a dangerous evil to be severely punished and eradicated by the Church. This idea would receive its fullest expression in the Catholic Inquisition. The organization and criminal proceedings of the Inquisition, Versluis believes, laid the foundation for later totalitarianism."--BOOK JACKET.

Counter-Enlightenments

Counter-Enlightenments PDF Author: Graeme Garrard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134662238
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
The Enlightenment and its legacy are still actively debated, with the Enlightenment acting as a key organizing concept in philosophy, social theory and the history of ideas. Counter-Enlightenments is the first full-length study to deal with the history and development of counter-enlightenment thought from its inception in the eighteenth century right through to the present. Engaging in a critical dialogue with Isaiah Berlin’s work, this book analyzes the concept of counter-enlightenment and some of the most important issues and problems it raises. Graeme Garrard explores the diverse forms of thought in this field, with a wide-ranging review of the principle figures of the past two hundred and fifty years, and an incisive assessment of the persuasiveness of the most common and important criticisms of the Enlightenment.