National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914

National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914 PDF Author: Roberto Romani
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139432818
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
In a work of unusual ambition and rigorous comparison, Roberto Romani considers the concept of 'national character' in the intellectual histories of Britain and France. Perceptions of collective mentalities influenced a variety of political and economic debates, ranging from anti-absolutist polemic in eighteenth-century France to appraisals of socialism in Edwardian Britain. Romani argues that the eighteenth-century notion of 'national character', with its stress on climate and government, evolved into a concern with the virtues of 'public spirit' irrespective of national traits, in parallel with the establishment of representative institutions on the Continent. His discussion of contemporary thinkers includes Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Millar, Burke, Constant, de Staël and Tocqueville. After the mid-nineteenth century, the advent of social scientific approaches, including those of Spencer, Hobson and Durkheim, shifted the focus from the qualities required by political liberty to those needed to operate complex social systems, and to bear its psychological pressures.

National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914

National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914 PDF Author: Roberto Romani
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139432818
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
In a work of unusual ambition and rigorous comparison, Roberto Romani considers the concept of 'national character' in the intellectual histories of Britain and France. Perceptions of collective mentalities influenced a variety of political and economic debates, ranging from anti-absolutist polemic in eighteenth-century France to appraisals of socialism in Edwardian Britain. Romani argues that the eighteenth-century notion of 'national character', with its stress on climate and government, evolved into a concern with the virtues of 'public spirit' irrespective of national traits, in parallel with the establishment of representative institutions on the Continent. His discussion of contemporary thinkers includes Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Millar, Burke, Constant, de Staël and Tocqueville. After the mid-nineteenth century, the advent of social scientific approaches, including those of Spencer, Hobson and Durkheim, shifted the focus from the qualities required by political liberty to those needed to operate complex social systems, and to bear its psychological pressures.

National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750-1914

National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750-1914 PDF Author: Roberto Romani
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780511328909
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Romani considers a distinction between 'national character' as a static and stereotype-laden concept, and 'public spirit' as a notion suggesting the necessity of certain qualities to operate free institutions. Many major authors of the period 1750-1914 (like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Millar, Burke, Tocqueville, Spencer, Hobson and Durkheim) are considered.

Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830-1914

Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830-1914 PDF Author: Emily Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192520083
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Between 1830 and 1914 in Britain a dramatic modification of the reputation of Edmund Burke (1730-1797) occurred. Burke, an Irishman and Whig politician, is now most commonly known as the 'founder of modern conservatism' - an intellectual tradition which is also deeply connected to the identity of the British Conservative Party. The idea of 'Burkean conservatism' - a political philosophy which upholds 'the authority of tradition', the organic, historic conception of society, and the necessity of order, religion, and property - has been incredibly influential both in international academic analysis and in the wider political world. This is a highly significant intellectual construct, but its origins have not yet been understood. Emily Jones demonstrates, for the first time, that the transformation of Burke into the 'founder of conservatism' was in fact part of wider developments in British political, intellectual, and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing from a wide range of sources, including political texts, parliamentary speeches, histories, biographies, and educational curricula, Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism shows how and why Burke's reputation was transformed over a formative period of British history. In doing so, it bridges the significant gap between the history of political thought as conventionally understood and the history of the making of political traditions. The result is to demonstrate that, by 1914, Burke had been firmly established as a 'conservative' political philosopher and was admired and utilized by political Conservatives in Britain who identified themselves as his intellectual heirs. This was one essential component of a conscious re-working of C/conservatism which is still at work today.

The Shaping of French National Identity

The Shaping of French National Identity PDF Author: Matthew D'Auria
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107128099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
Casts new light on of the 'official' French nineteenth-century narrative by examining how historians and philosophers conceived of the country's past.

Visions of the Social

Visions of the Social PDF Author: Jean Terrier
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900420153X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Taking the example of France between the Enlightenment and the Second World War and focusing especially on the connection between social theories and political projects, this book provides an original analysis of French scholarly debates on the nature of society.

Composing the Citizen

Composing the Citizen PDF Author: Jann Pasler
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520943872
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 813

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Book Description
In a book that challenges modernist ideas about the value and role of music in Western society, Composing the Citizen demonstrates how music can help forge a nation. Deftly exploring the history of Third Republic France, Jann Pasler shows how French people from all classes and political persuasions looked to music to revitalize the country after the turbulent crises of 1871. Embraced not as a luxury but for its "public utility," music became an object of public policy as integral to modern life as power and water, a way to teach critical judgment and inspire national pride. It helped people to forget the past, voice conflicting aspirations, and imagine a shared future. Based on a dazzling survey of archival material, Pasler's rich interdisciplinary work looks beyond elites and the histories their agendas have dominated to open new windows onto the musical tastes and practices of amateurs as well as professionals. A fascinating history of the period emerges, one rooted in political realities and the productive tensions between the political and the aesthetic. Highly evocative and deeply humanistic, Composing the Citizen ignites broad debates about music's role in democracy and its meaning in our lives.

Character, Ethics and Economics

Character, Ethics and Economics PDF Author: Peter Cain
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351628658
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
This book is an examination of the concept of ‘character’ as a moral marker in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its main purpose is to investigate how the ‘character talk’ that helped to shape elite Britons’ sense of themselves was used at this time to convince audiences, both in Britain and in the places they had conquered, that empire could be morally as well as materially justified and was a great force for good in the world. A small group of radical thinkers questioned many of the arguments of the imperialists but found it difficult to escape entirely from the sense of moral superiority that marked the latter’s language.

The Politics of National Character

The Politics of National Character PDF Author: Balázs Trencsényi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136657223
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The book is a comparative analysis of the ideological constructions of national specificity in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Studying the growing infatuation with "national essence" it seeks to understand the radicalization of nationalism in East Central Europe in connection with the shift of the notions of historicity and temporality. Trencsényi provides a contextual analysis of the symbolic resources and available ideological references that were used for creating these discourses in the respective countries. While focusing on the interwar period when these conceptions became central to the political debate, he also reconstructs the long-term historical evolution of the discourse of ‘national characterology’. Through this prism the work offers a contextual reconstruction of the main debates of these elites on national identity from the mid-19th century until 1945. In the light of the three case studies, the volume contributes to discussions of the problem of modernism and anti-modernism in twentieth-century political thought, posing the question of the intellectual responsibility of intellectuals in constructing radical ideological frameworks. This book offers a broad intellectual panorama, discerning the common regional features as well as the considerable divergence between these three cases, while also placing them into a wider European intellectual framework of the emergence of radical nationalism.

Passions, Politics and the Limits of Society

Passions, Politics and the Limits of Society PDF Author: Heikki Haara
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110679868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
The 1st part of the volume engages with the theme of inclusion and exclusion in the history of ideas from different perspectives. The 2nd part of the volume discusses debates on natural law, human nature and political economy in early-modern Europe. Its contributions explore the sorts of political and moral visions that were relevant in post-Hobbesian moral philosophy and the development of economic thought.

The English Malady

The English Malady PDF Author: Glen Colburn
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443814857
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The eleven essays collected in The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions adopt perspectives from a variety of disciplines—history, sociology, music, theater, and literary studies—in order to examine manifestations of and writing about hysteria in Europe during the long eighteenth century. The collection demonstrates not only that hysteria was an important cultural metaphor for the Enlightenment—a fact sometimes obscured by scholarly emphasis on the study of hysteria as a nineteenth and early twentieth-century phenomenon—but also that the period’s writers sometimes considered hysteria a blessing as well as a curse. Implicit in the various arguments of this collection is the suggestion that hysteria might be considered an expression of early modern ambivalence about the emergence of modernity.