Download or read book The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution written by Anna Plassart and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of ideas have traditionally discussed the significance of the French Revolution through the prism of several major interpretations, including the commentaries of Burke, Tocqueville and Marx. This book argues that the Scottish Enlightenment offered an alternative and equally powerful interpretative framework for the Revolution, which focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined the 'modernity' analysed by Hume and Smith in the eighteenth century. The Scots observed what they understood as a military- and democracy-led transformation of European modern morals and concluded that the real historical significance of the Revolution lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary international order. This book recovers the Scottish philosophers' powerful discussion of the nature of post-revolutionary modernity and shows that it is essential to our understanding of nineteenth-century political thought.
Download or read book Scotland and France in the Enlightenment written by Deidre Dawson and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Scottish and French Enlightenments are arguably the two intellectual movements of the eighteenth century that were most influential in shaping the modern age. The essays in Scotland and France in the Enlightenment explore a wide range of topics of historical relevance to eighteenth-century scholars, while engaging students with broad interdisciplinary interests in the humanities and social sciences. The ways in which Scottish philosophy influenced French painting, how the Encyclopaedia Britannica presented the French Revolution, the impact of Macpherson's Ossian on the development of French Romanticism, the moral education of children, the relation between reflection and perception in the arts and in moral life, humankind's relationship to other animals, and the links between violence and imagination, fear and sanity, are only some of the topics covered. This challenging selection of essays comparing Scottish and French enlightenment views of natural history, jurisprudence, moral philosophy, history, and art history complicates and enriches the notion of Enlightenment, and will inaugurate a new field of Franco-Scottish studies.
Download or read book Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment written by Iain McDaniel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although overshadowed by his contemporaries Adam Smith and David Hume, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson strongly influenced eighteenth-century currents of political thought. A major reassessment of this neglected figure, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future sheds new light on Ferguson as a serious critic, rather than an advocate, of the Enlightenment belief in liberal progress. Unlike the philosophes who looked upon Europe’s growing prosperity and saw confirmation of a utopian future, Ferguson saw something else: a reminder of Rome’s lesson that egalitarian democracy could become a self-undermining path to dictatorship. Ferguson viewed the intrinsic power struggle between civil and military authorities as the central dilemma of modern constitutional governments. He believed that the key to understanding the forces that propel nations toward tyranny lay in analysis of ancient Roman history. It was the alliance between popular and militaristic factions within the Roman republic, Ferguson believed, which ultimately precipitated its downfall. Democratic forces, intended as a means of liberation from tyranny, could all too easily become the engine of political oppression—a fear that proved prescient when the French Revolution spawned the expansionist wars of Napoleon. As Iain McDaniel makes clear, Ferguson’s skepticism about the ability of constitutional states to weather pervasive conditions of warfare and emergency has particular relevance for twenty-first-century geopolitics. This revelatory study will resonate with debates over the troubling tendency of powerful democracies to curtail civil liberties and pursue imperial ambitions.
Download or read book The Scottish Enlightenment written by Alexander Broadie and published by Birlinn. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the truly great intellectual and cultural movements of the world. Its achievements in science, philosophy, history, economics, and other disciplines also, were immense; and its influence has hardly if at all been dimmed in the intervening two centuries. This book, written for the general reader, considers the achievement of this most astonishing period of Scottish history. It attends not only to the ideas that made the Scottish Enlightenment such a wondrous moment, but also to the people themselves who generated these ideas – men such as David Hume and Adam Smith, who are still read for the sake of the light they shed on contemporary issues.
Download or read book History and the Enlightenment written by Hugh Trevor-Roper and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-29 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historical philosophy of the Enlightenment -- The Scottish Enlightenment -- Pietro Giannone and Great Britain -- Dimitrie Cantemir's Ottoman history and its reception in England -- From deism to history: Conyers Middleton -- David Hume, historian -- The idea of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire -- Gibbon and the publication of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire 1776-1976 -- Gibbon's last project -- The romantic movement and the study of history -- Lord Macaulay: the history of England -- Thomas Carlyle's historical philosophy -- Jacob Burckhardt.
Download or read book The Burke Wollstonecraft Debate written by Daniel I. O'Neill and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many modern conservatives and feminists trace the roots of their ideologies, respectively, to Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). Here, according to the author Burke is misconstrued if viewed as mainly providing a warning about the dangers of attempting to turn utopian visions into political reality.
Download or read book The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution written by Anna Plassart and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first study of the Scottish Enlightenment reception and interpretation of the French Revolution.
Download or read book The First Scottish Enlightenment written by Kelsey Jackson Williams and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment present the half-century or so before 1750 as, at best, a not-yet fully realised precursor to the era of Hume and Smith, at worst, a period of superstition and religious bigotry. This is the first book-length study to systematically challenge that notion. Instead, it argues that the era between approximately 1680 and 1745 was a 'First' Scottish Enlightenment, part of the continent-wide phenomenon of early Enlightenment and led by the Jacobites, Episcopalians, and Catholics of north-eastern Scotland. It makes this argument through an intensive study of the dramatic changes in historiographical practice which took place in Scotland during this era, showing how the documentary scholarship of Jean Mabillon and the Maurists was eagerly received and rapidly developed in Scottish historical circles, resulting in the wholesale demolition of the older, Humanist myths of Scottish origins and their replacement with the foundations of our modern understanding of early Scottish history. This volume accordingly challenges many of the truisms surrounding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish history, pushing back against notions of pre-Enlightenment Scotland as backward, insular, and intellectually impoverished and mapping a richly polymathic, erudite, and transnational web of scholars, readers, and polemicists. It highlights the enduring cultural links with France and argues for the central importance of Scotland's two principal religious minorities—Episcopalians and Catholics—in the growth of Enlightenment thinking. As such, it makes a major intervention in the intellectual and cultural histories of Scotland, early modern Europe, and the Enlightenment itself.
Download or read book The Enlightenment written by Dan Edelstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this concise, bold, and innovative book, Dan Edelstein offers us an original account of the Enlightenment. It convincingly argues that the Enlightenment is above all a narrative about social and cultural changes and that its origins can be found in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Therefore, by reconsidering the importance of the French esprit philosophique in the Euroean Enlightenment, this book will be of considerable importance for every scholar and student interested in this period.
Download or read book Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century Volume I written by Aaron Garrett and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Scottish Philosophy is a series of collaborative studies by expert authors, each volume being devoted to a specific period. Together they provide a comprehensive account of the Scottish philosophical tradition, from the centuries that laid the foundation of the remarkable burst of intellectual fertility known as the Scottish Enlightenment, through the Victorian age and beyond, when it continued to exercise powerful intellectual influence at home and abroad. The books aim to be historically informative, while at the same time serving to renew philosophical interest in the problems with which the Scottish philosophers grappled, and in the solutions they proposed. This new history of Scottish philosophy will include two volumes that focus on the Scottish Enlightenment. In this volume a team of leading experts explore the ideas, intellectual context, and influence of Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Reid, and many other thinkers, frame old issues in fresh ways, and introduce new topics and questions into debates about the philosophy of this remarkable period. The contributors explore the distinctively Scottish context of this philosophical flourishing, and juxtapose the work of canonical philosophers with contemporaries now very seldom read. The outcome is a broadening-out, and a filling-in of the detail, of the picture of the philosophical scene of Scotland in the eighteenth century. General Editor: Gordon Graham, Princeton Theological Seminary
Download or read book The Scottish Enlightenment written by Arthur Herman and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the most recent research, but written for the ordinary reader, this book looks at the influence of Scotland and the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment upon western culture.
Download or read book The French Revolution written by Ian Davidson and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 has become the commemorative symbol of the French Revolution. But this violent and random act was unrepresentative of the real work of the early revolution, which was taking place ten miles west of Paris, in Versailles. There, the nobles, clergy and commoners of France had just declared themselves a republic, toppling a rotten system of aristocratic privilege and altering the course of history forever. The Revolution was led not by angry mobs, but by the best and brightest of France's growing bourgeoisie: young, educated, ambitious. Their aim was not to destroy, but to build a better state. In just three months they drew up a Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was to become the archetype of all subsequent Declarations worldwide, and they instituted a system of locally elected administration for France which still survives today. They were determined to create an entirely new system of government, based on rights, equality and the rule of law. In the first three years of the Revolution they went a long way toward doing so. Then came Robespierre, the Terror and unspeakable acts of barbarism. In a clear, dispassionate and fast-moving narrative, Ian Davidson shows how and why the Revolutionaries, in just five years, spiralled from the best of the Enlightenment to tyranny and the Terror. The book reminds us that the Revolution was both an inspiration of the finest principles of a new democracy and an awful warning of what can happen when idealism goes wrong.
Download or read book The Irish Enlightenment written by Michael Brown and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-02 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Scotland and England produced such well-known figures as David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Locke. Ireland’s contribution to this revolution in Western thought has received much less attention. Offering a corrective to the view that Ireland was intellectually stagnant during this period, The Irish Enlightenment considers a range of artists, writers, and philosophers who were full participants in the pan-European experiment that forged the modern world. Michael Brown explores the ideas and innovations percolating in political pamphlets, economic and religious tracts, and literary works. John Toland, Francis Hutcheson, Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, and other luminaries, he shows, participated in a lively debate about the capacity of humans to create a just society. In a nation recovering from confessional warfare, religious questions loomed large. How should the state be organized to allow contending Christian communities to worship freely? Was the public confession of faith compatible with civil society? In a society shaped by opposing religious beliefs, who is enlightened and who is intolerant? The Irish Enlightenment opened up the possibility of a tolerant society, but it was short-lived. Divisions concerning methodological commitments to empiricism and rationalism resulted in an increasingly antagonistic conflict over questions of religious inclusion. This fracturing of the Irish Enlightenment eventually destroyed the possibility of civilized, rational discussion of confessional differences. By the end of the eighteenth century, Ireland again entered a dark period of civil unrest whose effects were still evident in the late twentieth century.
Download or read book The Improvement of Humanity written by R. R. Palmer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines education in both theory and practice during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution when educators aimed at nothing less than reforming humanity and creating a new society. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Natural Law and Moral Philosophy written by Knud Haakonssen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-02-23 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing the most comprehensive guide to modern natural law theory available, this major contribution to the history of philosophy sets out the full background to liberal ideas of rights and contractarianism, and offers an extensive study of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Download or read book Adam Smith Radical and Egalitarian written by I. McLean and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iain McLean reexamines the radical legacy of AdamSmith, arguing that Smith was a radical egalitarian and that his work supported all three of the slogans of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. McLean suggests that Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments , published in 1759, crystallized the radically egalitarian philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. This book brings Smith into full view, showing how much of modern economics and political science is in Smith. The author locates Smith's heritage firmly within the context of the Enlightenment, while addressing the international links between American, French, and Scottish histories of political thought.
Download or read book How the Scots Invented the Modern World written by Arthur Herman and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exciting account of the origins of the modern world Who formed the first literate society? Who invented our modern ideas of democracy and free market capitalism? The Scots. As historian and author Arthur Herman reveals, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland made crucial contributions to science, philosophy, literature, education, medicine, commerce, and politics—contributions that have formed and nurtured the modern West ever since. Herman has charted a fascinating journey across the centuries of Scottish history. Here is the untold story of how John Knox and the Church of Scotland laid the foundation for our modern idea of democracy; how the Scottish Enlightenment helped to inspire both the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution; and how thousands of Scottish immigrants left their homes to create the American frontier, the Australian outback, and the British Empire in India and Hong Kong. How the Scots Invented the Modern World reveals how Scottish genius for creating the basic ideas and institutions of modern life stamped the lives of a series of remarkable historical figures, from James Watt and Adam Smith to Andrew Carnegie and Arthur Conan Doyle, and how Scottish heroes continue to inspire our contemporary culture, from William “Braveheart” Wallace to James Bond. And no one who takes this incredible historical trek will ever view the Scots—or the modern West—in the same way again.
