Suchergebnisse

Sociability and self-love in the theatre of moral sentiments: Mandeville to Adam Smith / E. J. Hundert -- 'That noble disquiet': meanings of liberty in the discourse of the North / Dario Castiglione -- Language, sociability, and history: some reflections on the foundations of Adam Smith's science of man / Nicholas Phillipson -- Adam Smith and tradition: the Wealth of nations before Malthus / Richard F. Teichgraeber III -- Economy and polity in Bentham's science of legislation / David Lieberman -- 'A gigantic manliness': Paine's republicanism in the 1790s / Richard Whatmore -- Irish culture and Scottish enlightenment: Maria Edgeworth's histories of the future / Marilyn Butler -- Improving Ireland: Richard Whately, theology, and political economy / Norman Vance -- Political and domestic economy in victorian social thought: Ruskin and Xenophon / Jane Garnett -- State and market in British university history / Sheldon Rothblatt -- Mr Gradgrind and Jerusalem / Donald Winch

Modern British intellectual history has been a particularly flourishing field of enquiry in recent years, and these two tightly integrated volumes contain major new essays by almost all of its leading proponents. The contributors examine the history of British ideas over the past two centuries from a number of perspectives that together constitute a major new overview of the subject. History, Religion, and Culture begins with eighteenth-century historiography, especially Gibbon's Decline and Fall. It takes up different aspects of the place of religion in nineteenth-century cultural and political life, such as attitudes towards the native religions of India, the Victorian perception of Oliver Cromwell, and the religious sensibility of John Ruskin. Finally, in discussions which range up to the middle of the twentieth century, the volume explores relations between scientific ideas about change or development and assumptions about the nature and growth of the national community

George Orwell and William Empson worked closely together at the BBC during the Second World War and they remained friends thereafter. In The Structure of Complex Words (1951) Empson paid surprisingly serious attention to the view of language expounded in Nineteen Eighty-Four, seeing in Orwell's presentation of the meaningless slogans of totalitarianism, such as "War Is Peace," a challenge to his own more rationalistic analysis of how language works. This article first explores the development of Orwell's thinking about language, including his engagement with Basic English (which Empson helped to propagate); a particularly close, and critical, analysis is given of his celebrated essay "Politics and the English Language." Orwell's views are then contrasted with Empson's unpacking of the interplay of multiple senses within individual words, demonstrating that even the most extreme propaganda statements need to draw upon and respect the mechanics of meaning as embodied in such words if they are to be persuasive. Intellectual historians have much to learn from these exchanges, as do contemporary analysts of "fake news" and authoritarian bombast more generally.