Suchergebnisse

Was there an Enlightenment in Ireland? Was there even a distinctivelyIrish Enlightenment? Few scholars have bothered even to pose this question. Historians of Ireland during the era of Protestant Ascendancy have tended to be all-rounders rather than specialists; their traditional preoccupations are constitutional clashes between London and Dublin, religious conflict, agrarian unrest and popular politicization. With few exceptions there has been no tradition of intellectual history, and little interest in the methodological debates associated with the rise of the "Cambridge school". Most advances in our understanding of Irish philosophical writing have consequently originated outside Ireland's history departments. One by-product of recent work on the Scottish Enlightenment has been the rediscovery of the "Molesworth Circle" by two scholars engaged in a painstaking reconstruction of Francis Hutcheson's early career in Dublin. At the other end of the century, meanwhile, some of the most exciting and ambitious attempts to conceptualize the republicanism of the United Irishmen have come from a leading historian of revolutionary France, James Livesey. His previous research on the "commercial republicanism" of Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson and Brissot has suggested a new framework for understanding Irish radicals such as Wolfe Tone, Thomas Addis Emmet and, in particular, Arthur O'Connor.

This article explores the ways in which Irish historiography has been shaped by paramilitary violence, counter-insurgency and the intimate, close-quarter killings that characterized the Troubles. Irish historiography, as a professional or academic enterprise, had long been committed to ideals of impartiality influenced by Herbert Butterfield and Michael Oakeshott. It was also acutely conscious of its proximity to violent political upheaval, and during the 1970s would display a heightened sense of the urgency of dispassionate historical inquiry. Prominent scholars believed that professional research would dispel the 'myths' that sustained the gunmen of the Provisional IRA. In the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement, however, historians face the challenge of explaining the militant republicanism which they had previously sought to defuse. This article considers several recent analyses of the Provisional movement. It reveals the extent to which the most vociferous criticism of the Provisionals descends from the far Left of republicanism itself — from those who belonged to the Official IRA or its successor organization the Workers' Party, or from the 'dissident' republicans of the 1990s.