Swift and Bolingbroke on Faction

1970 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pat Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Key Words ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
The Revolution

The text for this essay comes from Sir Lewis Namier. “One has to steep oneself in the political life of a period,” so the decree reads, “before one can safely speak, or be sure of understanding, its language.” This article is an attempt to supply, not a complete grammar of Augustan politics, but a minor lexicographical entry. Historians sometimes talk as though the most urgent need were for an advanced glossary. The assumption behind this essay is that a more elementary gradus is required. The two key words under review, “party” and “faction,” have always occupied neighbouring berths in the British synonymy. Unfortunately, in the eighteenth-century vocabulary of politics, they became overlapping concepts. Or rather — this is the trouble — they sometimes merged, partially or completely; sometimes they did not; and sometimes they were even employed as antonymous terms. Examples of all these contrary applications are found in the work of Swift and Bolingbroke. As with other lexicographical enquiries, then, usage and abusage must be considered, as well as the simple dictionary definition of these terms.IEdmund Burke is still, in some quarters, valued more highly as a prophet than as a political thinker. His forecasts of the likely course of the Revolution have brought him a reputation for the occult among those who hold his moral views in little esteem, even though he may be regarded, most unfairly, as a sorcerer's apprentice who was engulfed by his own charmed vision.

The French Revolution Controversy

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The rights of man ‘arrived’ in England, in the sense of beginning to circulate in public discourse and becoming a topic on which people staked out positions, during the final decade of the eighteenth century. The context was debate over the significance of the French Revolution for England (the ‘Revolution controversy’). This chapter initiates discussion of the contested meaning of the rights of man in that debate, examining contributions by Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. A vision of the rights of man emerges as the rights of the living to control the political community of which those latter are a part.

Reflections on the Revolution in France

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund Burke
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Edmund Burke was the dominant political thinker of the last quarter of the eighteenth century in England. His reputation depends less on his role as a practising politician than on his ability to set contemporary problems within a wider context of political theory. Above all, he commented on change. He tried to teach lessons about how change should be managed, what limits should not be transgressed, and what should be reverently preserved. Burke’s generation was much in need of advice on these matters. The Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, and catastrophically, the French Revolution presented challenges of terrible proportions. They could promise paradise or threaten anarchy. Burke was acutely aware of how high the stakes were. The Reflections on the Revolution in France was a dire warning of the consequences that would follow the mismanagement of change.

III. Edmund Burke and the Origins of the Theory of Nationality

1926 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. B. C. Cobban
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Theorist ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Revolution

While there seems no end to the polemics of nationalism, a critical analysis is far to seek; for which reason an account of the beginnings of the theory of nationality in the eighteenth century may be of value to the political theorist as well as of interest to the historian. We may say of its beginnings, because although nationality as a fact is in England and some other countries of Western Europe a heritage of the Middle Ages, as a theory it is much more recent in origin. In Shaw's Saint Joan, Pierre Cauchon, discussing with Warwick the popular uprising in France under the Maid, says, “If I were to give it a name I should call it—nationalism.” Mr Shaw's Bishop is nearly four centuries in advance of his age. It was not till the nineteenth century that men in general began “to call it nationalism,” and under the guidance of such as Wordsworth and Mazzini to understand in some degree what they implied when they did so. The Revolutionary upheaval and the Napoleonic dominion were necessary to rouse the nations to self-consciousness. But these events, though they may partially account for the fact, do not altogether elucidate the theory of nationality. For its veritable beginnings we must look earlier. It is a significant fact in considering the causation of the nationalistic movement that the first and possibly still the wisest of the theorists of nationality had developed his ideas long before the Revolution.

Introduction and Overview

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Prewitt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Classification Scheme ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Racial Classification ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Definition Of

This introductory chapter discusses how there was a racial classification scheme in America's first census (1790), as there was in the next twenty-two censuses, up until the present. Though the classification was altered in response to the political and intellectual fashions of the day, the underlying definition of America's racial hierarchy never escaped its origins in the eighteenth-century. Even the enormous changing of the racial landscape in the civil rights era failed to challenge a dysfunctional classification, though it did bend it to new purposes. Nor has the demographic upheaval of the present time led to much fresh thinking about how to measure America. The chapter contends that twenty-first-century statistics should not be governed by race thinking that is two and a half centuries out of date.

From Servant of the King to ‘Idol of the Nation’

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Swann
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
The Revolution

The absolute monarchy was a personal monarchy and during the reign of Louis XIV, the king established a tradition that the king should act as his ‘own first minister’, coordinating the work of his ministerial servants. In the course of the eighteenth century that tradition was undermined by a series of social, administrative, and cultural changes to such an extent that by the 1780s ministers were increasingly behaving as independent political figures, courting public opinion and claiming to act in the name of public welfare or even the nation. By examining these changes, this chapter argues that the political culture of the absolute monarchy was in constant transition and that the failure of Louis XVI, in particular, to manage its effects was one of the principal causes of his loss of authority in the period preceding the Revolution of 1789.

ALEXANDER GEDDES AT THE LIMITS OF THE CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK GOLDIE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Catholic Priest ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
French Republicanism ◽  
The Revolution ◽  
Episcopal Authority

ABSTRACTIn the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) pressed Catholicism and the Enlightenment to the limits of their tolerance. A Catholic priest, he fled the censure of his Scottish superiors and settled in England, where he became a spokesman for the Catholic laity in their controversies with the hierarchy, and mingled in radical Protestant circles among the ‘Rational Dissenters’. In three domains, he appalled his contemporaries. First, Geddes prepared a new version of the Bible, which threatened to undermine the integrity of revelation, and offered mythopoeic accounts of the Old Testament that influenced Blake and Coleridge. Second, he embraced ‘ecclesiastical democracy’, denouncing papal and episcopal authority and proclaiming British Catholics to be ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’. Third, he applauded French republicanism, and adhered to the Revolution long after Edmund Burke had rendered such enthusiasm hazardous. Geddes was an extreme exponent of the Catholic Enlightenment, yet equally he was representative of several characteristic strands of eighteenth-century Catholicism, which would be obliterated in the ultramontane revanche of the following century.

The Poles as an Integrating and Disintegrating Factor

1967 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henryk Wereszycki
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

The question of whether the Poles were an integrating or a disintegrating factor within the Habsburg monarchy has yet to be fully studied by Polish historians. Up to now they have concerned themselves mainly with the part played by the Austrian empire in the history of the Polish nation after the eighteenth century partitions and have overlooked the role of the Poles in the Austrian empire. They have concentrated their attention on the fate of the territories of the historic Polish state which fell under Habsburg rule and have studied the social, cultural, and political transformations which affected Galicia during the century and a half of Austrian domination. Polish historians have even studied the contributions made by former Habsburg subjects to the reconstruction of the Polish state after the dissolution of the monarchy, but they have rarely discussed the part which the Poles took in the political life of the multinational empire.

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