The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche. Bernard Yack (original) (raw)
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Making and Ending the French Revolution: Nobility, Bourgeoisie and `the People
European History Quarterly, 2009
As the five books under review attest, the dynamic and lively state of scholarship on eighteenth-century France has led to a broadening in the categories of analysis used over the past two decades. The majority of the books considered here transcend the revisionist interpretation of the French Revolution, which took shape 25 years ago and peaked during the bicentenary celebrations in 1989. 1 This interpretation characterized the Revolution as essentially negative because it failed to produce a political order founded upon freedom and individual rights. For all of the liberal rhetoric of 1789, the revisionists claimed, the Revolution was destined to descend into Terror from the beginning. 2 However, in recent years, there has been a questioning of the revisionist interpretation of the French Revolution, much of it in the form of a revitalized social history. Indeed, social history has made a noticeable comeback, albeit not in its classic pre-revisionist form. 3 Historians such as Gary Kates and Jeremy D. Popkin have identified much of this new historiography as 'neo-liberal' because it focuses on the problems of transforming a society from one of hierarchy to one of civil equality as well as emphasizing the role of free will and human choices in european history quarterly European History Quarterly
Rousseau on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind
The argument of the first Discours is governed by the antithesis between the ‘original’ nature of man on the one hand and the corruption of modern civilisation on the other; this antithesis is developed in terms of a contrast between the freedom implied by true being and the enslavement and estrangement which is the human condition in the modern world. Rousseau is concerned not so much with historical details as with the moral theme which allows him to separate the original elements of man’s being from the artificial elements added by the process of civilisation. By ‘original’ Rousseau means ‘what belongs incontestably to man’. Rousseau is therefore concerned to distinguish the essential and authentic as given by true original being from the accidental and artificial elements added by civilisation.
The Cambridge History of French Thought, 2019
French thinkers have revolutionized European thought about knowledge, religion, politics, and society. Delivering a comprehensive history of thought in France from the Middle Ages to the present, this book follows themes and developments of thought across the centuries. It provides readers with studies of both systematic thinkers and those who operate less systematically, through essays or fragments, and places them all in their many contexts. Informed by up-to-date research, these accessible chapters are written by prominent experts in their fields who investigate key concepts in non-technical language. Chapters feature treatments of specific thinkers as individuals including Voltaire, Rousseau, Descartes and Derrida, but also more general movements and schools of thought from humanism to liberalism, via the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Marxism, and feminism. Furthermore, the influence of gender, race, empire and slavery are investigated to offer a broad and fulfilling account of French thought throughout the ages.
Rousseau and Bourgeois Man's Search for Wholeness
The Review of Politics
Why We Are Restless is informed by a certain Tocquevillean urgency. As the Storeys tell us in their introduction, their students, among the most privileged young people in America, are profoundly uneasy, their souls agitated and restless as they ponder questions about how they should live and what will make them happy. The Storeys attempt to make sense of this by examining the thought of what they call four “old French philosophers” (xii). They acknowledge that such an approach, focusing on the writings of Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville as a way of understanding this contemporary American unease, might seem “counterintuitive” (xii) and they are not wrong. The French moralistes are by no means the only thinkers who can shed light on what the authors argue is a distinctively modern form of restlessness. But they convincingly show that these thinkers offer a good, if for Americans somewhat novel, starting point to help our anxious young understand what is troubling them. ...
Law and History Review, 2012
image of the civitas, which was both a creation of human agents (Hobbes' "Artificial man") and also something founded in nature. Changes of State is a remarkable book in a number of ways. It offers what is, in effect, a wholly new understanding of the emergence of the modern concept of the state, and of the seemingly insuperable question of state sovereignty. By focusing, however, on the relationship of individual human actors to both the human and the nonhuman world-what she calls "the uneasy frontier between nature and the city"-Brett has been drawn into the wider question of how the different civitates related, both politically and legally, to one another. This is not merely to say that in this period the natural law, the law of nations, and the positive law were all believed to be, to some degree, interdependent, but that from its very beginning in the sixteenth century, the nation-state, which we have come to think of as the outcome of an internal process, was also conceived in terms that were inescapable external. Today, when the crossing of frontiers has become a commonplace, when the human relationship to the nonhuman, animate and inanimate, is no longer seen as self-evidently instrumental, a proper understanding of this history might well be, as Brett characteristically understates it, "still fruitful for our political thinking today." The book is remarkable in another more purely historical way. Although Brett confesses to what she calls a "Hobbesian coloring," her story quietly upturns what, ever since the early eighteenth century has been seen as a marked break between the neo-Thomist-that is, "scholastic"-conception of the natural law, and Hobbes' and Grotius' formulation of what Richard Tuck called the "modern natural law." Brett does nothing to diminish the originality of either Hobbes or Grotius. (At the end of Chapter 5 she provides one of the most powerful accounts ever written of what she calls the "revolutionary strength" of Hobbes' conception of the state.) But by reading Hobbes and Grotius simultaneously with their neo-Thomist predecessors and contemporaries, by seeing them on such crucial matters as natural liberty, as "joining hands," she has provided a far richer account of both, than any currently on offer.
The Journal of Modern History, 2014
This is the long-awaited third volume in Jonathan Israel's history of the Enlightenment. It thus follows on from Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity [Oxford, 2001] and Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 [Oxford, 2006. Together these volumes constitute by any standard an epic achievement. In his previous works Israel contended that there were two distinct strands to the Enlightenment. One was a liberal Enlightenment, moderate, reformist, elitist. Its leading figures included François-Marie-Arouet de Voltaire, the baron de Montesquieu and "most -but by no means all -British participants in the Enlightenment" (17). The other was the Radical Enlightenment, egalitarian, freethinking, revolutionary. It began with the pioneering work of Benedict de Spinoza. Its banner was then taken up by Denis Diderot, Claude-Adrien Hélvetius, and the baron d'Holbach. Israel continues with that distinction is the current volume and this time a principal aim is to deal with the perennial question -what was the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution? Over many hundred pages he builds up to his answer. The weight of evidence that he has brought together is simply extraordinary.
History of Political Thought, 2021
The article proposes a new interpretation of Kant's claim in The Conflict of the Faculties that enthusiasm for the French Revolution proves that humanity is morally progressing. Most studies explain this enthusiasm through either the moral dilemmas or the historical consequences of the Revolution. By tracing Kant's use of the notion of enthusiasm throughout his work, I show that his concern is rather to find a public manifestation of humanity's moral predisposition. The enthusiasm of the spectators works as this manifestation because it is sensuously analogous to respect for the moral law. By contrast to respect, however, enthusiasm is an affective state that can be communicated from actors to spectators in the public realm. I conclude that the historical significance of the French Revolution stems from what I call 'affective universality': the arousal in all spectators of an affective state that reveals a predisposition to moral virtue.