Download or read book The Political Thought of Thomas Spence written by Matilde Cazzola and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is an intellectual analysis of the political ideas of English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), who was renowned for his "Plan", a proposal for the abolition of private landownership and the replacement of state institutions with a decentralized parochial organization. This system would be realized by means of the revolution of the "swinish multitude", the poor labouring class despised by Edmund Burke and adopted by Spence as his privileged political interlocutor. While he has long been considered an eccentric and anachronistic figure, the book sets out to demonstrate that Spence was a deeply original, thoroughly modern thinker, who translated his themes into a popular language addressing the multitude and publicized his Plan through chapbooks, tokens, and songs. The book is therefore a history of Spence's political thought "from below", designed to decode the subtle complexity of his Plan. It also shows that the Plan featured an excoriating critique of colonialism and slavery as well as a project of global emancipation. By virtue of its transnational scope, the Plan made landfall in the British West Indies a few years after Spence's death. Indeed, Spencean ideas were intellectually implicated in the largest slave revolt in the history of Barbados.
Download or read book Thomas Spence written by Alastair Bonnett and published by . This book was released on 2014-09 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2014 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of an important and original voice in the history of radicalism: Thomas Spence. Spence described himself as 'the poor man's advocate' but he may equally be described as 'the poor man's revolutionary', for what he advocated was a dramatic over-turning of the existing social order. Spence wasn't interested in compromise, with reforms and half-freedoms. Spence's story is a rags to rags tale of defiance and ingenuity. Today Spence's name is little known but this in no way reflects his significance. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century it was synonymous with ultra-radical opinion. Thomas Spence was the subject of four contemporary biographical memoirs. Moreover, three years after his death an Act of Parliament was passed prohibiting 'All societies or clubs calling themselves Spencean or Spencean Philanthropists'. Spenceanism appears to be unique: it has a good claim to be the only political ideology to have ever been outlawed by the British Parliament. Spence's scheme for local and democratic ownership of the land found a receptive audience within sections of the labouring poor. In 1817 Thomas Malthus observed that, 'an idea has lately prevailed among the lower classes of society that the land is the people's farm, the rent of which ought to be divided equally among them'. This, in a nutshell, is 'Spence's Plan'. It sounds simple but it carried profound economic claims. It was a message spread more by way of tavern meetings, chalked graffiti and ballads than by published treatise. In 1787 Spence moved to London, setting up a bookshop on Chancery Lane. He plunged himself into the capital's turbulent radical sub-culture. He sold Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man and went to prison for doing so. But he disagreed with Paine on a number of fundamental issues. Paine had no qualms about private property in land. Spence began issuing a penny weekly, Pigs' Meat or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude, which could hardly have been more inflammatory. Spence was taking considerable risks in a dangerous city: spies, threats and conspiracy swirled around him. Spence's wish for 'perfect freedom' often took him one step further than his peers. He accorded women equal democratic rights. For the time it was a daring idea but Spence went even further. For what about the rights of children? Spence's The Rights of Infants no doubt provoked more than a few incredulous smiles when it was published in 1796. Yet cruelty towards children was a topic Spence returned to time and again and it is fitting that today he is cited as one of the world's first champions of children's rights. He was an angry man, a revolutionary and an insurrectionist but he was anchored by humanitarian concerns and a wide-ranging, omnivorous, interest in the betterment of his fellows. In this book we hope to go some way in retrieving Spence, of bringing him before a new generation. This book contains works by Spence, including Property in Land Every One's Right, which has not been in print since it first appeared over 230 years ago, and contributions from Alastair Bonnett, Malcolm Chase, Gregory Claeys, Rachel Hammersley, Jon Mee, John Marangos, Robert W. Rix, Joan C. Beal, Michael T. Davis, and Keith Armstrong.
Download or read book English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth Century written by Joan C. Beal and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Spence (1750-1814) was a native of Newcastle upon Tyne who is best known for his political writings, and more particularly for his radical 'Plan' for social reform involving common ownership of the land. One hitherto neglected aspect of Spence's Plan was his proposal to extend thebenefits of reading and of 'correct' pronunciation to the lower classes by means of a phonetic script of his own devising, first set out and used in Spence's Grand Repository of the English Language (1775).The Grand Repository was one of many English pronouncing dictionaries produced in the late eighteenth-century to satisfy the growing demands for a clear guide to 'correct' pronunciation. It differs from its contemporaries firstly in that it was intended primarily for the lower classes, and secondlyin that it is the only eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionary of English to use a truly 'phonetic' script in the sense of one sound being represented by one symbol.In this fascinating and unique account, Beal pays particular attention to the actual pronunciations advocated by Spence and his contemporaries with a view to reconstructing what was felt to be 'correct' pronunciation in eighteenth-century Britain. With broad appeal to linguists and historians alike,this study highlights the importance of pronouncing dictionaries as a resource for the historical phonologist, and provides a valuable addition to the limited body of knowledge on eighteenth-century pronunciation.
Download or read book The Political Works of Thomas Spence written by Thomas Spence and published by Newcastle Upon Tyne : Avero (Eighteenth-Century) Publications. This book was released on 1982 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cato Street Conspiracy written by Jason McElligott and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-17 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the Cato Street Conspiracy had been successful, Britain would have been proclaimed a republic by tradesmen of English, Scots, Irish and black Jamaican backgrounds. This book explains the conspiracy, and why you have never heard of it.
Download or read book Liberty Property and Popular Politics written by Pentland Gordon Pentland and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few scholars can claim to have shaped the historical study of the long eighteenth century more profoundly than Professor H. T. Dickinson, who, until his retirement in 2006, held the Sir Richard Lodge Chair of British History at the University of Edinburgh. This volume, based on contributions from Professor Dickinson's students, friends and colleagues from around the world, offers a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century Britain and provides a tribute to a remarkable scholarly career.Professor Dickinson's work and career provides the ideal lens through which to take a detailed snapshot of current research in a number of areas. The volume includes contributions from scholars working in intellectual history, political and parliamentary history, ecclesiastical and naval history; discussions of major themes such as Jacobitism, the French Revolution, popular radicalism and conservatism; and essays on prominent individuals in English and Scottish history, including Edmund Burke, Thomas Muir, Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence. The result is a uniquely rich and detailed collection with an impressive breadth of coverage.
Download or read book James Harrington written by Rachel Hammersley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite not being an active participant in the English Civil War, seventeenth-century political thinker James Harrington exercised an important influence on the ideas and politics of that crucial period of history. In The Commonwealth of Oceana he sought to explain why civil war had broken out in 1642, to put the case for commonwealth government, and to offer a detailed constitutional blueprint for a new and successful English government. In this intellectual biography of Harrington, Rachel Hammersley sets a fresh analysis of this and Harrington's other writings against the background of his life and the turbulent period in which he lived. In doing so, this study seeks to move beyond the conventional view of Harrington as primarily a republican thinker, offering a broader and more comprehensive account of him which addresses the complexity of his republicanism as well as exploring his contributions to economic, historical, religious, philosophical, and scientific debates; his experimentation with vocabulary and literary form; and the relationship between his life and thought. Harrington is presented as an innovative political thinker, committed to democracy, social mobility, and meritocracy. Ultimately, this broader examination of Harrington's life and work opens a window on political, economic, religious, and scientific issues which serve to complicate understandings of the English Revolution, and sheds fresh light on the relevance of seventeenth-century ideas to the modern world.
Download or read book Treason By The Book written by Jonathan Spence and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1728 a stranger handed a letter to Governor Yue calling on him to lead a rebellion against the Manchu rulers of China. Feigning agreement, he learnt the details of the plot and immediately informed the Emperor, Yongzheng. The ringleaders were captured with ease, forced to recant and, to the confusion and outrage of the public, spared. Drawing on an enormous wealth of documentary evidence - over a hundred and fifty secret documents between the Emperor and his agents are stored in Chinese archives - Jonathan Spence has recreated this revolt of the scholars in fascinating and chilling detail. It is a story of unwordly dreams of a better world and the facts of bureaucratic power, of the mind of an Emperor and of the uses of his mercy.
Download or read book A False Tree of Liberty written by Susan Marks and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned with the history of the idea of human rights. It offers a fresh approach that puts aside familiar questions such as 'Where do human rights come from?' and 'When did human rights begin?' for the sake of looking into connections between debates about the rights of man and developments within the history of capitalism. The focus is on England, where, at the end of the eighteenth century, a heated controversy over the rights of man coincided with the final enclosure of common lands and the momentous changes associated with early industrialisation. Tracking back still further to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing about dispossession, resistance and rights, the book reveals a forgotten tradition of thought about central issues in human rights, with profound implications for their prospects in the world today.
Download or read book Debating England s Aristocracy in the 1790s written by Amanda Goodrich and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2005 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1790s saw a lively "French Revolution Debate" in England, with much space and intellectual energy, in classic texts by men such as Burke and Paine, and ensuing pamphlet literature, devoted characterisations and representations of the aristocracy; yet this is the first full-scale survey of the subject. Dr Goodrich takes a fresh approach to the topic, illustrating the complexities of the bitter battle fought out in such texts between radicals and loyalists, and highlighting the persistent viciousness and vitriol of a radical anti-aristocratic rhetoric. However, she demonstrates that the loyalist response contained the more innovative campaign, bringing out in particular the development of a commercial loyalism which promoted a new model of society with a modern aristocracy and an open elite; what emerges are English defences of aristocracy which are not simply reducible to ideas of an ancien régime or a Gothic institution. Amanda Goodrich is a lecturer in the history department of the Open University.
Download or read book Politics in Commercial Society written by Istvan Hont and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars normally emphasize the contrast between the two great eighteenth-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Rousseau is seen as a critic of modernity, Smith as an apologist. Istvan Hont, however, finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorists of commercial society and from surprisingly similar perspectives. In making his case, Hont begins with the concept of commercial society and explains why that concept has much in common with what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called unsocial sociability. This is why many earlier scholars used to refer to an Adam Smith Problem and, in a somewhat different way, to a Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem. The two problems—and the questions about the relationship between individualism and altruism that they raised—were, in fact, more similar than has usually been thought because both arose from the more fundamental problems generated by thinking about morality and politics in a commercial society. Commerce entails reciprocity, but a commercial society also entails involuntary social interdependence, relentless economic competition, and intermittent interstate rivalry. This was the world to which Rousseau and Smith belonged, and Politics in Commercial Society is an account of how they thought about it. Building his argument on the similarity between Smith’s and Rousseau’s theoretical concerns, Hont shows the relevance of commercial society to modern politics—the politics of the nation-state, global commerce, international competition, social inequality, and democratic accountability.
Download or read book Property Rights and Poverty written by Thomas Allen Horne and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 1990 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Property Rights and Poverty: Political Argument in Britain, 1605-1834
Download or read book Radical Culture Discourse Resistance and Surveillance 1790 1820 written by David Worrall and published by . This book was released on 2019-04 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: England was a spy culture in the years 1790 through 1820. Restriction, regulation and surveillance formed the dominant discursive context. Ultra-radical artisans developed a discourse based on the revolutionary ideology of Thomas Spence which proposed the corporate ownership of land and the overthrow of the Government by physical force. The Spenceans were considered the most radical of the political groups active during this period, with William Blake, Jeremy Bentham, and Percy Shelley the best known of those spied upon for suspected Speancean activities. This book outlines the battle between repressive seditious laws and the radicals whose weapon was the written and spoken word. David Worrall explores the discursive context of the campaigns against sedition in the 1790s, Colonel Despard's intended coup of 1802, the Spa Fields rising of 1816, the planned Bartholomew Fair insurrection of 1817 and the debacle of the 1820 Cato Street conspiracy. He recovers a lost artisan culture recorded by spies, moles and informers who infiltrated the organizations, debating clubs and taverns where radical speakers called for violent revolution, examining for the first time the speeches, conversations, songs, poems, pamphlets, letters, handbills, trials, interrogations, and arrests which constituted the resistance to the Government's regulation of discourse. Radical Culture features a sympathetic portrait of these revolutionaries gleaned almost entirely from the records of the government spies who helped put them in jail. Worrall brings to life the ultra-radicals, dramatizing what they said, how they reacted under extreme conditions of arrest or impending execution, and how the Government hounded them in their last hours of life.
Download or read book The Rights of Infants written by Thomas Spence and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-07-07 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rights of infants By Thomas Spence We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.
Download or read book Left in the Past written by Alastair Bonnett and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-05-06 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the role nostalgia plays in the radical imagination to offer a new guide to the history and politics of the left. In "Left in the Past", Bonnett re-assesses the place of nostalgia within radical politics and, in doing so, provides a new introduction to the history and politics of the left. Bonnett argues that nostalgia has been a chronic, but repressed, aspect of the socialist imagination. "Left in the Past" is premised on the idea that, in our 'post-socialist era', the relationship between radicalism and a sense of loss, and the ambivalent position of socialism in and against modernity, can be viewed with greater clarity. In Section One of the book, Bonnett shows the centrality and repression of nostalgia in both 19th-century radicalism and anti-colonial radicalism. In Section Two, he explores the consequences of this inheritance by way of 20th century and contemporary studies of revolutionary intellectuals and intellectual culture. Bonnett's unique approach in how to understand the left in an age of post-socialism will make book a needed resource for anyone interested in the history and politics of the left and radicalism.
Download or read book The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine written by Jack Fruchtman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the work, philosophy, and life of the influential eighteenth-century American writer. This concise, thoughtful introduction to the work of Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and Rights of Man, explores the impact of one of the most influential minds of the American and French Revolutions and the sources from which his thinking evolved. In Jack Fruchtman Jr.’s helpful interpretation, Paine built his argument for radical revolution in 1776 on a study of nature and Providence and a belief in natural rights. Men and women owed it to themselves to break the chains of rank, hierarchy, and even organized religion in order to live freely, embracing the possibilities of invention, progress, and equality that lay ahead. In 1793, at the height of the French Revolution and its secularizing fury, Paine reminded readers that it was nature's God who created natural rights. The rights of man thus held out both the great potential of freedom and the requirement that human beings be responsible for those who were the least fortunate in society. On balance we may think of Paine as a secular preacher for the rule of reason. “A compelling portrait of Thomas Paine as a serious, complex, and often surprising writer. . . . This is a very useful volume for new students of U.S. political thought, as well as for scholars seeking a quick but illuminating overview of Paine’s writings and philosophy.” —Choice “A great way for the newcomer to appreciate the range, diversity, and raw power and brilliance of Paine's ideas.” —Claremont Review of Books “Fruchtman’s concise analysis is tightly focused. . . . A coherent vision of Paine’s work, encompassing his many contradictions.” —Times Literary Supplement (UK)
Download or read book Western Political Thought written by Robert Eccleshall and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a guide to the vast amount of literature on the history of political thought which has appeared in English since 1945. The editors provide an annotation of the content of many entries and, where appropriate, indicate their significance, controversial nature and readability.
