Suchergebnisse

Students of the Enlightenment have long assumed that the major movement towards atheism in the Ancien Régime was centered in the circle of intellectuals who met at the home of Baron d'Holbach during the last half of the eighteenth century. This major critical study shows, contrary to the accepted views, that in fact, atheism was not the common bond of a majority of the members and that, far from being alienated figures, most of the members were privileged and publicly successful citizens devoted to peaceful and gradual reform. Alan Charles Kors determines the coterie's membership and discov

"Students of the Enlightenment have long assumed that the major movement towards atheism in the Ancien Régime was centered in the circle of intellectuals who met at the home of Baron d'Holbach during the last half of the eighteenth century. This major critical study shows, contrary to the accepted views, that in fact, atheism was not the common bond of a majority of the members and that, far from being alienated figures, most of the members were privileged and publicly successful citizens devoted to peaceful and gradual reform. Alan Charles Kors determines the coterie's membership and discovers it to have been a diverse assemblage of philosophes, men of letters, and scientists. Analyzing the thought and behavior of those members who lived past 1789, the author argues that the hostility to the Revolution expressed by the coterie's survivors was fully consistent with their world view."--

AbstractJohn Stuart Mill is the critical transitional figure between the classical liberalism of the 19th century, with its emphasis upon the creative power of free individuals unfettered by government or social interventions, and the welfare-state liberalism of the 20th century, with its combination of individual choice in matters of belief and lifestyle and the political redistribution of wealth. In On Liberty and The Subjection of Women, Mill offered a defense of self-sovereignty and voluntary association that appeared to extend explicitly to the economic spheres. Both works are celebrations of the productive and moral enhancements of individual liberty. In The Principles of Political Economy, however, Mill's categorical distinction between "production" and "distribution" assigned the latter to the "expedient" discretion of the state, inviting, in theory, a democratic redistributionist state. Mill's posthumous Essays on Socialism reveal that he was no friend of socialism or Marxism, but that he welcomed a more active and interventionist state. One of individual liberty's most notable defenders, paradoxically, provided the theoretical underpinning of its current diminution.

Ann Thomson's Bodies of Thought is simultaneously an outgrowth of her prior work and a new direction in her scholarship. She has done rigorous and original study of the mid-eighteenth-century French materialist Julien Offray de La Mettrie, offering important critical editions and major articles. She also has done fruitful studies of broader issues of eighteenth-century medicine, vitalism, Epicureanism, and clandestine literature. These endeavors immersed her in precisely the consequences—both intended and unintended, in France, above all—of the sorts of debates that she examines here. She knows well the early modern issues and implications of debates about mind and body, and she can explain them with precision and fluency.

There is no "after socialism." There will not be
in our or in our children's lifetimes an "after
socialism." In the wake of the Holocaust and the ruins
of Nazism, anti-Semitism lay low a bit, embarrassed by its worst
manifestation, its actual exercise of state dominion. In the
wake of the collapse of Communism, socialism's only real
and full experience of power, socialism too lays low for just
a moment. Socialism's causes in the West, however, remain
ever with us, the product of the convergence of two extraordinary
achievements: liberal free enterprise and political democracy.
The former creates wealth that has transformed all human
possibility, but it also gives rise to particularly deep envy.
The latter allows ambition a route to power by an appeal to
the democratic state to seize and redistribute wealth in the
name of social equality. As Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises
understood perfectly, the bounty of free enterprise leads the
unproductive to believe that such wealth is a fact of nature,
there for the taking.