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Book The Dream of Absolutism

    Book Details:
  • Author : Hall Bjørnstad
  • Publisher : University of Chicago Press
  • Release : 2021-10-15
  • ISBN : 022680383X
  • Pages : 247 pages

Download or read book The Dream of Absolutism written by Hall Bjørnstad and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction. The problem with absolutism ; Beyond mere propaganda ; Approaching absolutism differently: royal glory and royal exemplarity ; The dream of absolutism -- The grammar of absolutism. The dream of a book like no other ; Taking Louis XIV's Mémoires seriously ; Absolutism, explained to a child: "The first and most important part of our entire politics" ; The utility of "These Mémoires" ; The paradoxes of absolutist exemplarity ; Conclusion: "So many ghastly examples" -- Mirrors of absolutism. Introduction: Our body in this space ; An age of mirrors ; A gallery celebrating greatness ; Making the king see what he felt ; A mirror for one ; In lieu of conclusion: Mirrors for a future without a past -- Absolutist absurdities. Exhibit A: The royal historiographer and the unparalleled greatness of Louis XIV ; Exhibit B: Absolutism from the cabinet of fairies to the cabinet of the king ; Conclusion: Seven theses on the dream of absolutism.

Book The Dream of Absolutism

    Book Details:
  • Author : Hall Bjørnstad
  • Publisher : University of Chicago Press
  • Release : 2021-10-15
  • ISBN : 022680397X
  • Pages : 247 pages

Download or read book The Dream of Absolutism written by Hall Bjørnstad and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dream of Absolutism examines the political aesthetics of power under Louis XIV. What was absolutism, and how did it work? What was the function of the ostentatious display surrounding Louis XIV at Versailles? What is gained—and what is lost—by approaching such expressions of absolutism as propaganda, as present-day scholars tend to do? In this sweeping reconsideration of absolutist culture, Hall Bjørnstad argues that the exuberance of Louis XIV’s reign was not top-down propaganda in any modern sense, but rather a dream dreamt collectively, by king, court, image-makers, and nation alike. Bjørnstad explores this dream through a sustained close analysis of a corpus of absolutist artifacts, ranging from Charles Le Brun’s famous paintings in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles via the king’s secret Mémoires to two little-known particularly extravagant verbal and textual celebrations of the king. The dream of absolutism, Bjørnstad concludes, lives at the intersection of politics and aesthetics. It is the carrier of a force that emerges as a glorious image; a participatory emotional reality that requires reality to conform to it. It is a dream, finally, that still shapes our collective political imaginary today.

Book In the King s Wake

Download or read book In the King s Wake written by Jay Caplan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before the guillotines of the 1789 Revolution brought a grisly political end to the ancien régime, Jay Caplan argues, the culture of absolutism had already perished. In the King's Wake traces the emergence of a post-absolutist culture across a wide range of works and genres: Saint-Simon's memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency; Voltaire's first tragedy, Oedipe; Watteau's last great painting, L'Enseigne de Gersaint; the plays of Marivaux; and Casanova's History of My Life. While absolutist culture had focused on value directly represented in people (e.g., those of noble blood) and things (e.g., coins made of precious metals), post-absolutist culture instead explored the capacity of signs to stand for something real (e.g., John Law's banknotes or Marivaux's plays in which actions rather than birth signify nobility). Between the image of the Sun King and visions of the godlike Romantic self, Caplan discovers a post-absolutist France wracked by surprisingly modern conflicts over the true sources of value and legitimacy.

Book AMERICAN ABSOLUTISM

Download or read book AMERICAN ABSOLUTISM written by Gary A. Freitas and published by Fulton Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2024-01-29 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disrupting the Generational Cycle of Distrust in America's 600 Year Cultural War You are about to scan a high-resolution MRI of the psychological forces generating discord and disrupting the American democratic experiment. Absolute-mindedness is not a personality type, clinical disorder or social psychopathology, but an archaic "trust" adaptation giving rise to much of today's populist frustration and anger. When trust is disrupted early in life -- complexity, ambiguity, and disappointment fixate on a trust-mistrust duality -- good-bad, right-wrong, us versus them. Republicans and Democrats are undergoing cultural mitosis. An evolutionary social and political speciation driving us toward an autocratic America. Constitutional "originalists" were raised in parental originalism emphasizing principle and discipline over empathy and reasoning. Solo mass shootings are a predictable abandonment pattern over the course of America's history of gun rights and vigilante ethos. Conspiracy theories are repetitive information diffusion in dense social networks during times of social unrest, triggering individuals pre-wired for resignation, grievance, and revenge. The modern dictator: a "dark triad" of malignant narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. American Absolutism explores what happens when human adaptation loses viability as it comes face-to-face with an exponentially evolving complexity that is the modern human condition.

Book Dialogues on Relativism  Absolutism  and Beyond

Download or read book Dialogues on Relativism Absolutism and Beyond written by Michael Krausz and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2011-01-16 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is truth, goodness, or beauty? Can we really define these concepts without the idea of a frame of reference? In the newest addition to the New Dialogues in Philosophy series, Michael Krausz presents fictional dialogues between four former classmates who hold significantly different views about these questions. As they travel in India, a place with unfamiliar concepts and customs, these four friends debate the rightness of relativism and absolutism. Are these concepts irreconcilable? Might there be a better view that goes beyond both of them? These lively discussions provide students with an accessible introduction to one of the most enduring and far-reaching philosophical problems of our age.

Book Louis XIV and Absolutism

Download or read book Louis XIV and Absolutism written by Ragnhild Marie Hatton and published by Columbus : Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 1976 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Absolutism in Central Europe

Download or read book Absolutism in Central Europe written by Peter Wilson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Absolutism in Central Europe is about the form of European monarchy known as absolutism, how it was defined by contemporaries, how it emerged and developed, and how it has been interpreted by historians, political and social scientists. This book investigates how scholars from a variety of disciplines have defined and explained political development across what was formerly known as the 'age of absolutism'. It assesses whether the term still has utility as a tool of analysis and it explores the wider ramifications of the process of state-formation from the experience of central Europe from the early seventeenth century to the start of the nineteenth.

Book The Material City

    Book Details:
  • Author : Alan Blum
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2023-04-03
  • ISBN : 022801784X
  • Pages : 298 pages

Download or read book The Material City written by Alan Blum and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2023-04-03 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Redirecting examinations of the culture of the city away from its customs, art, and amenities to focus on the mental life of modern society, Alan Blum explores the methods cities and their subjects use to find meaning in the context of urban life, in particular the city’s relationships to social change and what has traditionally been identified as justice. The Material City pictures the city as a landscape of diverse clashes over beliefs, a site that exhibits interpretive collisions over globalization, gentrification, innovation, preservation, market value, popular culture, crowds, consumption, urban governance, and different strategies for healing the democratic city’s ever-present conflicts over these concerns. Each chapter uses a problem of urban life to observe and analyze assumptions and values that are typically taken for granted and unspoken, using elements of the philosophy of Plato as well as the work of modern thinkers such as Georg Simmel, Gertrude Stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Lacan. The Material City translates contested views of everyday life and its management into a deeper reflection on urbanity as a system of desire. The historical and the contemporary metropolis alike are shown to be sites where the enigma of mortality – and its relation to pleasure, comedy, and fate – plays out.

Book Military Gazette

Download or read book Military Gazette written by and published by . This book was released on 1860 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book A History of Curiosity

Download or read book A History of Curiosity written by Justin Stagl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2002. A History of Curiosity examines the early methodology of anthropological and social research from a critical­historical perspective. The three principal methods of research, travel, the survey and the collection of significant objects, are studied in the context of the social conditions and intellectual trends of early modern times. The author's grasp of the vast, often obscure, but highly interesting body of literature which emerged in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries commands the attention of a wide readership outside purely academic boundaries. He weaves together a series of separate studies, emphasising links between the figures, the philosophies and the literatures of early modern times; links which have previously only been suspected. In focussing on the ars apodemica, or art of travelling'', a body of formal instructions on how to travel, observe and record the information gathered, the author demonstrates the origins of the characteristic inquisitive and systematizing spirit of the modern West.

Book Absolutism and Its Discontents

Download or read book Absolutism and Its Discontents written by Michael S. Kimmel and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Dream of Reason  A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance  New Edition

Download or read book The Dream of Reason A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance New Edition written by Anthony Gottlieb and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "His book...supplant[s] all others, even the immensely successful History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell."—A. C. Grayling Already a classic, this landmark study of early Western thought now appears in a new edition with expanded coverage of the Middle Ages. This landmark study of Western thought takes a fresh look at the writings of the great thinkers of classic philosophy and questions many pieces of conventional wisdom. The book invites comparison with Bertrand Russell's monumental History of Western Philosophy, "but Gottlieb's book is less idiosyncratic and based on more recent scholarship" (Colin McGinn, Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Best Book, and a Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2001.

Book Chuang Tzu for Spiritual Transformation

Download or read book Chuang Tzu for Spiritual Transformation written by Robert E. Allinson and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1989-07-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a fundamentally new interpretation of the philosophy of the Chuang-Tzu. It is the first full-length work of its kind which argues that a deep level cognitive structure exists beneath an otherwise random collection of literary anecdotes, cryptic sayings, and dark allusions. The author carefully analyzes myths, legends, monstrous characters, paradoxes, parables and linguistic puzzles as strategically placed techniques for systematically tapping and channeling the spiritual dimensions of the mind. Allinson takes issue with commentators who have treated the Chuang-Tzu as a minor foray into relativism. Chapter titles are re-translated, textual fragments are relocated, and inauthentic, outer miscellaneous chapters are carefully separated from the transformatory message of the authentic, inner chapters. Each of the inner chapters is shown to be a building block to the next so that they can only be understood as forming a developmental sequence. In the end, the reader is presented with a clear, consistent and coherent view of the Chuang-Tzu that is more in accord with its stature as a major philosophical work.

Book King of the World

Download or read book King of the World written by Philip Mansel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 669 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louis XIV was a man in pursuit of glory. Not content to be the ruler of a world power, he wanted the power to rule the world. And, for a time, he came tantalizingly close. Philip Mansel’s King of the World is the most comprehensive and up-to-date biography in English of this hypnotic, flawed figure who continues to captivate our attention. This lively work takes Louis outside Versailles and shows the true extent of his global ambitions, with stops in London, Madrid, Constantinople, Bangkok, and beyond. We witness the importance of his alliance with the Spanish crown and his success in securing Spain for his descendants, his enmity with England, and his relations with the rest of Europe, as well as Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We also see the king’s effect on the two great global diasporas of Huguenots and Jacobites, and their influence on him as he failed in his brutal attempts to stop Protestants from leaving France. Along the way, we are enveloped in the splendor of Louis’s court and the fascinating cast of characters who prostrated and plotted within it. King of the World is exceptionally researched, drawing on international archives and incorporating sources who knew the king intimately, including the newly released correspondence of Louis’s second wife, Madame de Maintenon. Mansel’s narrative flair is a perfect match for this grand figure, and he brings the Sun King’s world to vivid life. This is a global biography of a global king, whose power was extensive but also limited by laws and circumstances, and whose interests and ambitions stretched far beyond his homeland. Through it all, we watch Louis XIV progressively turn from a dazzling, attractive young king to a belligerent reactionary who sets France on the path to 1789. It is a convincing and compelling portrait of a man who, three hundred years after his death, still epitomizes the idea of le grand monarque.

Book Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern Europe

Download or read book Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern Europe written by Cesare Cuttica and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 14 essays in this volume look at both the theory and practice of monarchical governments from the Thirty Years War up until the time of the French Revolution. Contributors aim to unravel the constructs of ‘absolutism’ and ‘monarchism’, examining how the power and authority of monarchs was defined through contemporary politics and philosophy.

Book The Origins of Autocracy

    Book Details:
  • Author : Alexander Yanov
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 1981-01-01
  • ISBN : 9780520042827
  • Pages : 368 pages

Download or read book The Origins of Autocracy written by Alexander Yanov and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1981-01-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the role of Ivan the Terrible in Russian history and the thinking of Russian historians, emphasizing the political actions and ideals of the sixteenth-century czar as they have shaped Russia's development through the present

Book The International Bookbinder

Download or read book The International Bookbinder written by and published by . This book was released on 1905 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: