Understanding Is Not Enough

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
Emilia A. Tajsin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
John Locke ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Social Revolution ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
Main Ideas

John Locke was one of the first empiricists of the age of modernity who created a masterpiece on systematic gnoseology, and the first Enlightener whose ideas on ethics, law, and politics, preceded and made possible the 18th century and the Great French Revolution, and inspired the key wordings in the American Declaration of Independence. The slogan “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” influenced the course of history becoming the banner “Freedom, Equality, Fraternity” for all revolutionary movements. However, “Possessions” as part of Locke’s slogan is treated and criticized very frequently and on different grounds. The main questions are: Is reason enough for enlightening, and, could property be the fourth slogan of a social revolution? This paper is meant to be a synopsis of Locke’s main ideas, showing their utmost importance for the contemporary world, as well as examining the latest changes in the role performed by the present-day media, now acting as the new means for enlightening.

Neoclassicism and Religious Art in 18th-Century Europe

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Palmer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
French Academy ◽  
Nicolas Poussin ◽  
Virtuous Behavior

The term “Neoclassicism” refers to an era when a large number of artists and scholars across Europe in the 18th century took inspiration from the history and material remains of classical antiquity, which was defined as ancient Greece and Rome. While Neoclassicism is often considered a stylistic trend, artists worked across stylistic categories, yet they were all part of a broad milieu that responded to profound societal changes by seeking out classical precedents for questions posed by Enlightenment thinkers. These questions included the purpose of religion in society, where philosophers including John Locke (1632–1704) and François-Marie Arouet Voltaire (1694–1778) theorized new spiritual modes to examine human existence. Many religious painters of the 18th century studied at the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture established in Paris in 1648 under royal sponsorship that dictated taste, and these artists were championed for their ability to depict grand expressions of human emotion learned from antiquity and from classicizing Renaissance and Baroque artists, including French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), who popularized the Roman concept of exempla virtutis. Jean- Baptiste Colbert, the First Minister to King Louis XIV and Vice-Protector of the Academy, promoted this grand classicizing Baroque style as the elevated style of the aristocracy, which laid the foundation for Neoclassicism. For French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–1784), art could provide pleasure, but a superior artwork provided a visual beauty that inspired virtuous behavior; thus, while not all art served a religious function, artworks often showed examples of virtue. For example, Diderot, who reported on the biennial exhibitions sponsored by the Academy in Paris, praised Jacques-Louis David’s (1748–1825) Oath of the Horatii (1784, Louvre Museum, Paris), a depiction of a 7th-century bce Roman legend, for its demonstration of patriotic sacrifice. Many of these moralizing narratives drew upon stories from classical antiquity, learned by artists trained at the French Academy in Rome (established in 1666) during a period of study sometimes called the Grand Tour. Neoclassical art was also shaped by the intense cultural questioning that arose with the French Revolution, and it found fertile ground during the Industrial Revolution. Religious art had a complicated historical development in the 18th century given the dramatic changes that disrupted religious institutions and church patronage in favor of secular patrons and new subjects. Nonetheless, the moralizing tendencies of Neoclassicism and the academic favoring of historical painting continued to provide a place for religious art and architecture throughout the 18th century, much of which deserves further study.

scholarly journals Race and Politics in the United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-179
Author(s):  
Howard A. Palley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Race And Politics ◽  
Inalienable Rights

Abstract The Declaration of Independence asserts that “All men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Nevertheless, the United States, at its foundation has been faced with the contradiction of initially supporting chattel slavery --- a form of slavery that treated black slaves from Africa purely as a commercial commodity. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom had some discomfort with slavery, were slaveholders who both utilized slaves as a commodity. Article 1 of our Constitution initially treated black slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning representation in order to increase Southern representation in Congress. So initially the Constitution’s commitment to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” did not include the enslaved black population. This essay contends that the residue of this initial dilemma still affects our politics --- in a significant manner.

Elites, Elite Settlements, and Revolutionary Movements in Latin America, 1950–1980: Introduction

1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-574
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Social Revolution ◽  
Latin American Politics ◽  
Revolutionary Movements

Social revolutions as well as revolutionary movements have recently held great interest for both sociopolitical theorists and scholars of Latin American politics. Before we can proceed with any useful analysis, however, we must distinguish between these two related but not identical phenomena. Adapting Theda Skocpol’s approach, we can define social revolutions as “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by” mass-based revolts from below, sometimes in cross-class coalitions (Skocpol 1979: 4; Wickham-Crowley 1991:152). In the absence of such basic sociopolitical transformations, I will not speak of (social) revolution or of a revolutionary outcome, only about revolutionary movements, exertions, projects, and so forth. Studies of the failures and successes of twentieth-century Latin American revolutions have now joined the ongoing theoretical debate as to whether such outcomes occur due to society- or movement-centered processes or instead due to state- or regime-centered events (Wickham-Crowley 1992).

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
English Language ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Urban Planner ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Archives ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Second World

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (b. Neuruppin, 1781–d. Berlin, 1841) was a celebrated Prussian architect, theatre set designer, artist, furniture and object designer, urban planner, and civil servant. Born into modest yet respectable circumstances as the son of a deacon, Schinkel, by virtue of his talent and work ethic, rose in his own lifetime to become one of Prussia’s most celebrated cultural figures and its chief royal architect. He worked mostly in Berlin and its surrounding territories, including in some areas that are now part of Poland. His built works suffered heavy destruction during the Second World War, but important examples still survive or have been reconstructed, including the Altes Museum, the Friedrich-Werder Church, the Theatre (Schauspielhaus), and the New Guardhouse in Berlin, as well as the Charlottenhof and Glienicke Palaces in nearby Potsdam. His paintings, drawings, and personal archives can be found mostly in collections in and around Berlin, including at various departments of the Berlin State Museums. Recent debates have surrounded the potential reconstruction of Schinkel’s celebrated masterpiece, the Berlin Bauakademie (which was demolished in 1962), bringing a consciousness of Schinkel’s legacy to the fore in German public life once again. Despite his fame in Germany and his noted status as a reference-point for German avant-garde modernism, Schinkel’s work has remained under-explored in the English language (with some notable exceptions) due to difficulties accessing both his buildings and his archives in the years between the Second World War and German reunification. Since the 1990s, however, Schinkel’s international reputation has been steadily restored due to the efforts of a number of scholars and curators who have sought to disseminate his work more widely than ever before. Schinkel’s oeuvre is as eclectic as the tools and media he employed to realize it are versatile. They reveal traces of neoclassicism and the neogothic, French Enlightenment formalism, German Romanticism and Idealism, and 19th-century historicism. But at the same time, his work resists absolute categorization, by virtue of the fact that he lived and worked suspended between two epochs: he was born too late to be immersed in the worldview of the 18th-century Enlightenment and French Revolution, but nor did he live to see Germany’s development as a fully industrialized and unified nation. Occupying this ambiguous historical moment has given Schinkel’s work a versatility, a freedom, and an inquiring rigor that has assured its originality and enduring value.

Religious Art and Architecture in 18th-Century Europe

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean DeLouche
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Spiritual Power ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Art And Architecture

The 18th century was an era of transition for the arts and religion. Monarchs continued to commission religious art and architecture for a variety of reasons, including fulfillment of vows, expressions of faith and piety, and celebrations of dynastic power. The period saw simultaneous trends toward sumptuous decoration and sober display, as well as the rise of new artistic styles, including the Rococo, Neoclassicism, and the Gothic Revival. The Grand Tour brought many northern European Protestants to the seat of Catholicism. Protestant attitudes toward “popish” art softened in the 18th century, due in part to the increasing contact between Catholic and Protestant culture in Rome and to the perception that Catholicism was no longer a plausible threat. As the temporal and spiritual power of Rome declined in the 18th century, the papacy sought to reestablish itself as a cultural authority. The papacy embellished Rome with a number of archaeological and architectural initiatives, linking the popes with classical civilization and casting themselves as the custodians of the shared Western cultural tradition. With a growing art market and the consumer revolution, the populace had expanding access to religious imagery, from fine religious canvases collected by Catholic and Protestant elites, to reproducible prints that were available to nearly every member of society. However, the Enlightenment brought a profound questioning of religion. Religious works of art faced a loss of context in private displays and in the official Salon exhibitions, where they were intermixed with secular and erotic subjects and judged not on the efficacy of their Christian message or function but rather on aesthetic terms in relation to other works. The century ended with the French Revolution and brought violent waves of de-Christianization and iconoclasm. In order to save France’s Christian heritage, religious works of art had to be stripped of their associations with church and crown.

Ästhetische Staaten

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Abuse Of Power ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Ethics Law

Friedrich Schiller, the grand master of the classical aesthetic of autonomy, was also a political thinker. In the 1790s, reading Immanuel Kant upset him, as did the French Revolution: abuse of power, political resistance, conspiracy and tyrannicide are just a few of the genuinely political themes that he repeatedly varies in literary terms. The articles in this volume consider the connection between the political, legal and ethical dimensions of Schiller's work. In addition to his 'big' dramas as well as his philosophical and historical writings, they examine the nexus of ethics, law and politics at the 'margins' of his work, in both his short works and his literary fragments. With contributions by Oliver Bach, Antonino Falduto, Maria Carolina Foi, Markus Hien, Matthias Löwe, Vincenz Pieper, Jens Ole Schneider, Michael Schwingenschlögl, Sebastian Speth, Gideon Stiening and Ludwig Stockinger.

scholarly journals Historical explanation, emotives, and emotional suffering

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-152
Author(s):  
Ljiljana Radenovic
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Emotional Regulation ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
French Society ◽  
Emotional Suffering ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times ◽  
Objectively Measured ◽  
The Revolution

One of the main goals of the book ?The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions ? by William Reddy (Reddy, 2001) is to provide an explanation of the events that led to the French Revolution and the political regimes that followed the First Republic. What makes Reddy?s approach unique is that, unlike standard political, social, economic and similar approaches, it emphasizes the role that emotions and emotional suffering have in the change of political regimes. For this purpose Reddy introduces the concept of emotives. According to him, we use emotives to express and change the emotions we feel. By expressing and changing emotions, we reconsider the values we endorse, and in the times of crisis, we sometimes embrace new ones. In this way, emotives play important role not only in the emotional regulation but also in the formation of our identity. Reddy argues that in the strict emotional regimes in which the use of emotives is restricted individuals experience emotional suffering. Such suffering is not relative to culture and can be objectively measured. Thus, for Reddy some political regimes are better than others. Within this theoretical framework Reddy describes the emotional regime of the French society that preceded the revolution as strict. According to him, emotional suffering that was caused by such regime played substantial role in bringing about the revolution. In this paper I will argue that the emotional regime of the 18th century France was not as strict as Reddy argues. What was strict were the rules for how to behave not for the emotional expressions, i.e. for the use of emotives. Thus, his analysis of the emotional pre-revolutionary regime is not without weakness. I will conclude with some problems that Reddy?s analysis of the acute emotional suffering characteristic of the revolutionary period faces.

The History of Christian Missions to Africa

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Etherington
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Christian Missions ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sub Saharan

Christianity came very early to Africa, as attested by the Gospels. The agencies by which it spread across North Africa and into the Kingdom of Aksum remain largely unknown. Even after the rise of Islam cut communications between sub-Saharan Africa and the churches of Rome and Constantinople, it survived in the eastern Sudan kingdom of Nubia until the 15th century and never died in Ethiopia. The documentary history of organized missions begins with the Roman Catholic monastic orders founded in the 13th century. Their evangelical work in Africa was closely bound up with Portuguese colonialism, which both helped and hindered their operations. Organized European Protestant missions date from the 18th-century evangelical awakening and were much less creatures of states. Africa was a particular object of attention for Evangelicals opposed to slavery and the slave trade. Paradoxically this gave an impetus to colonizing ventures aimed at undercutting the moral and economic foundations of slavery in Africa. Disease proved to be a deadly obstacle to European- and American-born missionaries in tropical Africa, thus spurring projects for enrolling local agents who had acquired childhood immunity. Southern Africa below the Zambezi River attracted missionaries from many parts of Europe and North America because of the absence of the most fearsome diseases. However the turbulent politics of the region complicated their work by restricting their access to organized African kingdoms and chieftaincies. The prevalent mission model until the late 19th century was a station under the direction of a single European family whose religious and educational endeavors were directed at a small number of African residents. Catholic missions acquired new energy following the French Revolution, the old Portuguese system of partnership with the state was displaced by enthusiasm for independent operations under the authority of the Pope in Rome. Several new missionary orders were founded with a particular focus on Africa. Mission publications of the 19th and 20th centuries can convey a misleading impression that the key agents in the spread of African Christianity were foreign-born white males. Not only does this neglect the work of women as wives and teachers, but it diverts attention from the Africans who were everywhere the dominant force in the spread of modern Christianity. By the turn of the 20th century, evangelism had escaped the bounds of mission stations driven by African initiative and the appearance of so-called “faith missions” based on a model of itinerant preaching. African prophets and independent evangelists developed new forms of Christianity. Once dismissed as heretical or syncretic, they gradually came to be recognized as legitimate variants of the sort that have always accompanied the acculturation of religion in new environments. Decolonization caught most foreign mission operations unawares and required major changes, most notably in the recruitment of African clergy to the upper echelons of church hierarchies. By the late 20th century Africans emerged as an independent force in Christian missions, sending agents to other continents.

The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: An Essay Concerning Toleration: And Other Writings on Law and Politics, 1667–1683

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, first ea Shaftesbury ◽  
William Thomson ◽  
Sylvester Brounower
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Law And Politics
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