Secular Foundations of the Liberal State in Victorian Britain

Secular Foundations of the Liberal State in Victorian Britain PDF Author: William C. Lubenow
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783277971
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Examines the entanglement of secularity and liberality in the foundation of the modern state in Britain. "Modern" Britain emerged from the outcome of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The rather standard Whig account of the long nineteenth century is one of growing stability, progress and improvement. And yet nothing was preordained or inevitable about the period's stability. Ruling elites felt the constant anxieties of revolutionary terrorism. As Lubenow argues, it was a period of disorganization seeking organization. The great nineteenth-century reform acts against religious monopoly were aspects of this process of political organization. While religion did not disappear, these political actions gradually changed the constitutional position of religion. As a result, a political vacuum was created which was then filled by a secular "clerisy". These "fit and proper persons", educated in the reformed universities, qualified by success in competitive examinations, began to fill positions in the Civil Service and in the professions. The effect was to replace the eighteenth-century system of confessional loyalties with a liberal political culture based on merit. Lubenow's latest study examines the work of these intertwining nineteenth-century secular-liberal processes. Steeped deeply in archival research, this book considers biographical characteristics such as education, political connections and social associations, but it is equally conceptually guided by categories such as liberalism and secularism. It fills an important gap in the political history of nineteenth-century British liberalism by taking up the question of entanglement of secularity and liberality in the foundation of the modern state.

Music and Victorian Liberalism

Music and Victorian Liberalism PDF Author: Sarah Collins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108480055
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Examines the interaction between music and liberal discourses in Victorian Britain, revealing the close interdependence of political and aesthetic practices.

Australia's Secular Foundations

Australia's Secular Foundations PDF Author: Malcolm Wood
Publisher: Australian Scholarly Publishing
ISBN: 1925333329
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Explaining how Australia’s secular society derives from its colonial past, this book examines: • the environmental and social context that encouraged godlessness, including the convict system, the bush, materialism and cultural development; • religious practice and sectarianism; • the state’s policy of denominational even-handedness to ensure social harmony; • the challenges to faith that science and critical biblical scholarship posed; and • churchmen’s attempts to foist a moral code on society, and their ambivalent attitudes to society’s poor and distressed.

Religious Commitment and Secular Reason

Religious Commitment and Secular Reason PDF Author: Robert Audi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139449338
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Many religious people are alarmed about features of the current age - violence in the media, a pervasive hedonism, a marginalization of religion, and widespread abortion. These concerns influence politics, but just as there should be a separation between church and state, so should there be a balance between religious commitments and secular arguments calling for social reforms. Robert Audi offers a principle of secular rationale, which does not exclude religious grounds for action but which rules out restricting freedom except on grounds that any rational citizen would accept. The book describes the essential commitments of free democracy, explains how religious and secular moral considerations can be integrated to facilitate co-operation in a world of religious pluralism, and proposes ideals of civic virtue that express the mutual respect on which democracy depends. Audi offers a balanced and sophisticated treatment of the relations between religion and politics in a modern, secular society.

'Only Connect'

'Only Connect' PDF Author: William C. Lubenow
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783270462
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
In nineteenth-century Britain, learned societies and clubs became contested sites in which a new kind of identity was created: the charisma and persona of the scholar, of the intellectual.

Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain

Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain PDF Author: Simon Gunn
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520289536
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In this wide-ranging volume, leading scholars across several disciplines--history, literature, sociology, and cultural studies--investigate the nature of liberalism and modernity in imperial Britain since the eighteenth century. They show how Britain's liberal version of modernity (of capitalism, democracy, and imperialism) was the product of a peculiar set of historical circumstances that continues to haunt our neoliberal present.

The Transnationality of the Secular

The Transnationality of the Secular PDF Author: Clemens Six
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004447962
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
To what extent was the evolution of secularism in South and Southeast Asia between the end of the First World War and decolonisation after 1945 a result of transimperial and transnational patterns? To capture the diversity of twentieth-century secularisms, Clemens Six explores similarities resulting from translocal networks of ideas and practices since 1918. Six approaches these networks via a framework of global intellectual history, the history of transnational social networks, and the global history of non-state institutions. Empirically, he illustrates his argument with three case studies: the reception of Atatürk’s reforms across Asia and the Middle East; translocal women’s circles in the interwar period; and private US foundations after 1945.

Social Equality in Education

Social Equality in Education PDF Author: Ann Margaret Doyle
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319947214
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This book explores the development of education in France and England from the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War II. The author uses social equality as a framework to compare and contrast the educational systems of both countries and to emphasise the distinctive ideological legacies at the heart of both systems. The author analyses how the French Revolution prompted the emergence of an egalitarian ideology in education that in turn was crucial for propagating the values of equality, patriotism and unity. In tandem, the volume discusses the equally dramatic consequences of the Industrial Revolution for English society: while England led the world by 1800 in trade, commerce and industry, a strict form of liberalism and minimal state intervention impeded the reduction of educational inequality. This pioneering book will be of interest to students and scholars of educational equality as well as the history of education in France and England.

Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815-1914

Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815-1914 PDF Author: William C. Lubenow
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843835592
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Public life in Great Britain underwent a major transformation after the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and the passage of the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, which eliminated the requirement that men in public positions swear to uphold the doctrines of the Anglican Church. According to Lubenow (Stockton College), these legislative changes initiated a fundamental reallocation of power, opening many careers to men of talent and educational qualifications, including those whose perspectives and intellectual dispositions led them to question the validity of uniform religious dogma. Lubenow identifies members of the Benson, Strachey, Balfour, Lyttelton, and Sitwell families among the "Men of Letters" who epitomized the 19th century's new secular meritocracy, noting that when religious uniformity was removed as a requirement for positions in the public sphere, religion became more important, if more fluid, in the lives of such Britons. Thus, men of intellectual merit, rather than only those from the more conservative landowning or military traditions, were able to rise in politics, civil service, the clergy, the professions, and the universities, taking their liberal values regarding liberty, moral cultivation, and philosophy into the wider public sphere. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty. Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty. Reviewed by E. J. Jenkins.

God and Progress

God and Progress PDF Author: Joshua Bennett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192574760
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Exploring the rich relationship between historical thought and religious debate in Victorian culture, God and Progress offers a unique and authoritative account of intellectual change in nineteenth-century Britain. The volume recovers a twofold process in which the growth of progressive ideas of history transformed British Protestant traditions, as religious debate, in turn, profoundly shaped Victorian ideas of history. It adopts a remarkably wide contextual perspective, embracing believers and unbelievers, Anglicans and nonconformists, and writers from different parts of the British Isles, fully situating British debates in relation to their European and especially German Idealist surroundings. The Victorian intellectual mainstream came to terms with religious diversity, changing ethical sensibilities, and new kinds of knowledge by encouraging providential, spiritualized, and developmental understandings of human time. A secular counter-culture simultaneously disturbed this complex consensus, grounding progress in appeals to scientific advances and the retreat of metaphysics. God and Progress thus explores the ways in which divisions within British liberalism were fundamentally related to differences over the past, present, and future of religion. It also demonstrates that religious debate powered the process by which historicism acquired cultural authority in Victorian national life, and later began to lose it. The study reconstructs the ways in which theological dynamics, often relegated to the margins of nineteenth-century British intellectual history, effectively forged its leading patterns.