Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders

Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders PDF Author: Don Herzog
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069122837X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
Conservatism was born as an anguished attack on democracy. So argues Don Herzog in this arrestingly detailed exploration of England's responses to the French Revolution. Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders ushers the reader into the politically lurid world of Regency England. Deftly weaving social and intellectual history, Herzog brings to life the social practices of the Enlightenment. In circulating libraries and Sunday schools, deferential subjects developed an avid taste for reading; in coffeehouses, alehouses, and debating societies, they boldly dared to argue about politics. Such conservatives as Edmund Burke gaped with horror, fearing that what radicals applauded as the rise of rationality was really popular stupidity or worse. Subjects, insisted conservatives, ought to defer to tradition--and be comforted by illusions. Urging that abstract political theories are manifest in everyday life, Herzog unflinchingly explores the unsavory emotions that maintained and threatened social hierarchy. Conservatives dished out an unrelenting diet of contempt. But Herzog refuses to pretend that the day's radicals were saints. Radicals, he shows, invested in contempt as enthusiastically as did conservatives. Hairdressers became newly contemptible, even a cultural obsession. Women, workers, Jews, and blacks were all abused by their presumed superiors. Yet some of the lowly subjects Burke had the temerity to brand a swinish multitude fought back. How were England's humble subjects transformed into proud citizens? And just how successful was the transformation? At once history and political theory, absorbing and disquieting, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders challenges our own commitments to and anxieties about democracy.

Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders

Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders PDF Author: Don Herzog
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069122837X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Get Book Here

Book Description
Conservatism was born as an anguished attack on democracy. So argues Don Herzog in this arrestingly detailed exploration of England's responses to the French Revolution. Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders ushers the reader into the politically lurid world of Regency England. Deftly weaving social and intellectual history, Herzog brings to life the social practices of the Enlightenment. In circulating libraries and Sunday schools, deferential subjects developed an avid taste for reading; in coffeehouses, alehouses, and debating societies, they boldly dared to argue about politics. Such conservatives as Edmund Burke gaped with horror, fearing that what radicals applauded as the rise of rationality was really popular stupidity or worse. Subjects, insisted conservatives, ought to defer to tradition--and be comforted by illusions. Urging that abstract political theories are manifest in everyday life, Herzog unflinchingly explores the unsavory emotions that maintained and threatened social hierarchy. Conservatives dished out an unrelenting diet of contempt. But Herzog refuses to pretend that the day's radicals were saints. Radicals, he shows, invested in contempt as enthusiastically as did conservatives. Hairdressers became newly contemptible, even a cultural obsession. Women, workers, Jews, and blacks were all abused by their presumed superiors. Yet some of the lowly subjects Burke had the temerity to brand a swinish multitude fought back. How were England's humble subjects transformed into proud citizens? And just how successful was the transformation? At once history and political theory, absorbing and disquieting, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders challenges our own commitments to and anxieties about democracy.

The Unfamiliar Shelley

The Unfamiliar Shelley PDF Author: Timothy Webb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351880780
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Stimulated by new editions of Shelley's writings and the evidence of notebooks, the editors have assembled an outstanding group of international Shelley scholars to work through the implications of recent advances in scholarship. With particular attention to texts that have been neglected or underestimated, the contributors consider many important aspects of Shelley's prolific and remarkably diverse output, including the verse letter, plays, prose essays, satire, pamphlets, political verse, romance, prefaces, translations from the Greek, prose style, artistic representations, fragments and early writings. Revaluations of Shelley's youthful works, often criticized for their over-exuberance, pay dividends as they reveal Shelley's early maturation as a writer and also shed light on his later achievement. Taken as a whole, the collection makes evident that Shelley's reputation has been based largely on surprisingly imperfect and incomplete edited publications, driven by Victorian taste and culture. A writer very different from the one we thought we knew emerges from these essays, which are sure to inspire more reappraisals of Shelley's work.

The Life and Corespondence of the Right Honble Henry Addington

The Life and Corespondence of the Right Honble Henry Addington PDF Author: George Pellew
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description


The Life and Correspondence of the Right Honble Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth

The Life and Correspondence of the Right Honble Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth PDF Author: Henry Addington Sidmouth
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description


The Life and Correspondence of the Right Hon. Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth

The Life and Correspondence of the Right Hon. Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth PDF Author: George PELLEW (Hon.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 522

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Book Description


The Life and Correspondence of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth

The Life and Correspondence of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth PDF Author: Geo Pellew
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description


The Divine Right of Capital

The Divine Right of Capital PDF Author: Marjorie Kelly
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 160994545X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Why “wealth bias” is a holdover from a pre-democratic past—and how to restore a healthier balance of power: “Thought-provoking . . . well-documented and readable.” —Library Journal Wealth inequality, corporate welfare, and industrial pollution are symptoms—the fevers and chills of the economy. The underlying illness, says Business Ethics magazine founder Marjorie Kelly, is shareholder primacy: the corporate drive to make profits for shareholders no matter who pays the cost. In The Divine Right of Capital, Kelly argues that focusing on the interests of stockholders to the exclusion of everyone else’s interests is a form of discrimination based on property or wealth. She shows how this bias is held by our institutional structures, much as they once held biases against African Americans and women. The Divine Right of Capital exposes six aristocratic principles that corporations are built on, principles that we would never accept in our modern democratic society but which we accept unquestioningly in our economy. Wealth bias is a holdover from our pre-democratic past. It has enabled shareholders to become a kind of economic aristocracy. Kelly shows how to design more equitable alternatives—new property rights, new forms of corporate governance, new ways of looking at corporate performance—that build on both free-market and democratic principles. We think of shareholder primacy as the natural law of the free market, much as our forebears thought of monarchy as the most natural form of government. But in The Divine Right of Capital, Kelly brilliantly demonstrates that it is no more “natural” than any other human creation. People designed this system and people can change it. We need a change of mind as profound as that of the American Revolution—and this book provides practical guidance to help employees and communities change corporate governance and unfetter the genius of the free market.

Hannah More

Hannah More PDF Author: Anne Stott
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199245321
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
This is the first substantial biography of More for 50 years and the first to make extensive use of her unpublished correspondence.

Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Sara L. Crosby
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319964631
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This book investigates how popular American literature and film transformed the poisonous woman from a misogynist figure used to exclude women and minorities from political power into a feminist hero used to justify the expansion of their public roles. Sara Crosby locates the origins of this metamorphosis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Harriet Beecher Stowe applied an alternative medical discourse to revise the poisonous Cassy into a doctor. The newly “medicalized” poisoner then served as a focal point for two competing narratives that envisioned the American nation as a multi-racial, egalitarian democracy or as a white and male supremacist ethno-state. Crosby tracks this battle from the heroic healers created by Stowe, Mary Webb, Oscar Micheaux, and Louisia May Alcott to the even more monstrous poisoners or “vampires” imagined by E. D. E. N. Southworth, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theda Bara, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and D. W. Griffith.

The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate

The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate PDF Author: Daniel I. O’Neill
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271034866
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Many modern conservatives and feminists trace the roots of their ideologies, respectively, to Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), and a proper understanding of these two thinkers is therefore important as a framework for political debates today. According to Daniel O’Neill, Burke is misconstrued if viewed as mainly providing a warning about the dangers of attempting to turn utopian visions into political reality, while Wollstonecraft is far more than just a proponent of extending the public sphere rights of man to include women. Rather, at the heart of their differences lies a dispute over democracy as a force tending toward savagery (Burke) or toward civilization (Wollstonecraft). Their debate over the meaning of the French Revolution is the place where these differences are elucidated, but the real key to understanding what this debate is about is its relation to the intellectual tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose language of politics provided the discursive framework within and against which Burke and Wollstonecraft developed their own unique ideas about what was involved in the civilizing process.