Author: Joan S. Bennett
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674766976
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Milton's Great Poems--Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes--are here examined in the light of his lifelong commitment to the English revolutionary cause. The poems, Joan Bennett shows, reflect the issues Milton had dealt with in theological and public policy debate, foreign diplomacy, and propaganda; moreover, they work innovatively with these issues, reaching in epic and tragedy answers that his pamphlets and tracts of the past twenty years had only partially achieved. The central issue is the nature and possibility of human freedom, or "Christian liberty." Related questions are the nature of human rationality, the meaning of law, of history, of individuality, of society, and--everywhere--the problem of evil. The book offers a revisionist position in the history of ideas, arguing that Renaissance Christian humanism in England descended not from Tudor to Stuart Anglicanism but from Tudor Anglicanism to revolutionary Puritanism. Close readings are offered of texts by Richard Hooker, Milton, and a range of writers before and during the revolutionary period. Not only theological and political positions but also political actions taken by the authors are compared. Milton's poems are studied in the light of these analyses. The concept of "radical Christian humanism" moves current Milton criticism beyond the competing conceptions of Milton as the poet of democratic liberalism and the prophet of revolutionary absolutism. Milton's radical Christian humanism was built upon pre-modern conceptions and experiences of reason that are not alien to our time. It stemmed from, and resulted in, a religious commitment to political process which his poems embody and illuminate.
Author: Randy E. Barnett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691159734
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
The U.S. Constitution found in school textbooks and under glass in Washington is not the one enforced today by the Supreme Court. In Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy Barnett argues that since the nation's founding, but especially since the 1930s, the courts have been cutting holes in the original Constitution and its amendments to eliminate the parts that protect liberty from the power of government. From the Commerce Clause, to the Necessary and Proper Clause, to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, to the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has rendered each of these provisions toothless. In the process, the written Constitution has been lost. Barnett establishes the original meaning of these lost clauses and offers a practical way to restore them to their central role in constraining government: adopting a "presumption of liberty" to give the benefit of the doubt to citizens when laws restrict their rightful exercises of liberty. He also provides a new, realistic and philosophically rigorous theory of constitutional legitimacy that justifies both interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning and, where that meaning is vague or open-ended, construing it so as to better protect the rights retained by the people. As clearly argued as it is insightful and provocative, Restoring the Lost Constitution forcefully disputes the conventional wisdom, posing a powerful challenge to which others must now respond. This updated edition features an afterword with further reflections on individual popular sovereignty, originalist interpretation, judicial engagement, and the gravitational force that original meaning has exerted on the Supreme Court in several recent cases.
Author: Warren Schmaus
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822986280
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207
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Book Description
French philosopher Charles Renouvier played an influential role in reviving philosophy in France after it was proscribed during the Second Empire. Drawn to the ideals of the French Revolution, Renouvier came to recognize that the free will and civil liberties he supported were essential to the pursuit of science, contrary to the ideologies of positivists and socialists who would restrict liberty in the name of science. He struggled against monarchy and religious authority in the period up through 1848 and defended a liberal, secular form of political organization at a critical turning point in French history, the beginning of the Third Republic. As Warren Schmaus argues, Renouvier’s work provides an example of one way in which philosophy of science can succeed in bringing about change in political life—by critiquing political ideologies that falsely claim absolute certainty on religious, scientific, or any other grounds. Liberty and the Pursuit of Knowledge explores the understudied relationship between Renouvier’s philosophy of science and his political philosophy, shedding new light on the significance of his thought for the history of philosophy.
Author: Benjamin Constant
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 30
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Book Description
This is an essay by Benjamin Constant. In this essay, Constant contrasted two views on freedom: one held by "the Ancients," particularly those in Classical Greece, and the other by members of modern societies. He investigates the dangers of attempting to impose ancient liberty in a modern context, as well as the risks associated with each type of liberty. The danger of ancient liberty was that men, preoccupied with securing their share of social power, might place too little value on individual rights and pleasures. The danger of modern liberty is that we will give up our right to participate in political power too easily, absorbed in the enjoyment of our independence and the pursuit of our particular interests." Constant believes that the two types of liberty must eventually be combined.
Author: George H. McLoone
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838754030
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
John Milton's vocation was that of a great poet, but he stood on the field of ecclesiastical and political controversy throughout his writing career. Milton's Poetry of Independence examines patterns of ecclesiological and affective imagery in five poems by Milton. The book shows how Milton's ecclesiastical nonconformity, his Puritan Independency, had important uses in his poetic art.
Author: Stanley Eugene Fish
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107003059
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
Stanley Fish's finest published work is brought together here with brand new material on Milton and on other authors and topics in early modern literature. Lucid, provocative, direct and inimitable, this book is required reading for anyone teaching or studying Milton and early modern literary studies.
Author: Barbara K. Lewalski
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470776846
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 816
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Book Description
Providing a close examination of Milton's wide-ranging prose and poetry at each stage of his life, Barbara Lewalski reveals a rather different Milton from that in earlier accounts. Provides a close analysis of each of Milton's prose and poetry works. Reveals how Milton was the first writer to self consciously construct himself as an 'author'. Focuses on the development of Milton's ideas and his art.
Author: Lee Morrissey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009197126
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
Upending conventional scholarship on Milton and modernity, Lee Morrissey recasts Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes as narrating three alternative responses to a world in upheaval: adjustment, avoidance and antagonism. Through incisive engagement with narrative, form, and genre, Morrissey shows how each work, considered specifically as a fiction, grapples with the vicissitudes of a modern world characterised more by paradoxes, ambiguities, subversions and shifting temporalities than by any rigid historical periodization. The interpretations made possible by this book are as invaluable as they are counterintuitive, opening new definitions and stimulating avenues of research for Milton students and specialists, as well as for those working in the broader field of early modern studies. Morrissey invites us to rethink where Milton stands in relation to the greatest products of modernity, and in particular to that most modern of genres, the novel.
Author: Jefferson Powell
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822313144
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Locates the origins of constitutional law in the Enlightenment attempt to control the violence of the state by subjecting power to reason, then shows its evolution into a tradition of rational inquiry embodied in a community of lawyers and judges. Continues with discussion of how the tradition's 19th-century presuppositions about the autonomy and rationality of constitutional argument have been undermined in the 20th century. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Robert Thomas Fallon
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271071559
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
In Divided Empire, Robert T. Fallon examines the influence of John Milton's political experience on his great poems: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. This study is a natural sequel to Fallon's previous book, Milton in Government, which examined Milton's decade of service as Secretary for Foreign Languages to the English Republic. Milton's works are crowded with political figures—kings, counselors, senators, soldiers, and envoys—all engaged in a comparable variety of public acts—debate, decree, diplomacy, and warfare—in a manner similar to those who exercised power on the world stage during his time in public office. Traditionally, scholars have cited this imagery for two purposes: first, to support studies of the poet's political allegiances as reflected in his prose and his life; and, second, to demonstrate that his works are sympathetic to certain ideological positions popular in present times. Fallon argues that Paradise Lost is not a political testament, however, and to read its lines as a critique of allegiances and ideologies outside the work is limit the range and scope of critical inquiry and to miss the larger purpose of the political imagery within the poem. That imagery, the author proposes, like that of all Milton's later works, serves to illuminate the spiritual message, a vision of the human soul caught up in the struggle between vast metaphysical forces of good and evil. Fallon seeks to enlarge the range of critical inquiry by assessing the influence of personal and historical events upon art, asking, as he puts it, "not what the poetry says about the events, but what the events say about the poetry." Divided Empire probes, not Milton's judgment on his sources, but the use he made of them.
