Suchergebnisse

William Selinger's Parliamentarism: from Burke to Weber aims to redefine our understanding of what it means to live in a free state. It displaces the concept of "democracy" as a (supposedly) central concern for a range of canonical nineteenth-century authors, and demonstrates that another concept, that of "parliamentarism", stood at the core of many European liberal writers' quest for liberty. Selinger shows that Montesquieu's description of a "balanced" English constitution protected by a system of checks and balances was challenged by a number of contemporary observers of British politics (including Jean-Louis de Lolme and Edmund Burke), who elaborated rival accounts emphasizing instead the dominant position of a powerful representative assembly which mirrored the nation it represented. The resulting doctrine of "parliamentarism", the book demonstrates through a series of case studies that include Tocqueville, Mill and Weber, subsequently became the "dominant paradigm of a free state across Europe" (p. 9) in the nineteenth century.

This article argues for a reassessment of James Mill's anticlerical, and possibly atheistic, brand of secularism. Mill's well-known religious skepticism and criticism of the Church of England, it is suggested, have tended to obscure his otherwise dispassionate assessment of religion as a social phenomenon. The article traces Mill's lifelong belief that religious improvement was a necessary precondition to societal progress, from his first major publication in 1805 to his late advocacy of a tolerant state religion in 1835. In this, Mill differed starkly from Jeremy Bentham, who considered all religious beliefs harmful and whose utopian utilitarian society was secular rather than tolerant. The article contends that eighteenth-century Scottish enquiries into human manners and religious progress directly inspired Mill's lifelong ambition to use religion as a tool to reform manners and create the educated public opinion he believed was indispensable to the enactment of his democratic and utilitarian programme.

Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- General Editor's Preface -- Introduction Michael Mosher and Anna Plassart -- 1 Sovereignty Daniel Lee -- 2 Liberty and the Rule of Law Yoshie Kawade -- 3 The Common Good Rebecca Kingston -- 4 Economic and Social Democracy Alexander Schmidt -- 5 Religion and the Principles of Political Obligation Niall O'Flaherty -- 6 Citizenship and Gender Dorinda Outram -- 7 Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism Inder S. Marwah -- 8 Democratic Crises, -- 9 International Relations James Stafford -- 10 Beyond the Polis Joanna Innes -- Notes -- References -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.

This volume surveys the burst of political imagination that created multiple Enlightenment cultures in an era widely understood as an age of democratic revolutions. Enlightenment as precursor to liberal democratic modernity was once secular catechism for generations of readers. Yet democracy did not elicit much enthusiasm among contemporaries, while democracy as a political system remained virtually nonexistent through much of the period. If seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas did underwrite the democracies of succeeding centuries, they were often inheritances from monarchical governments that had encouraged plural structures of power competition. But in revolutions across France, Britain, and North America, the republican integration of constitutional principle and popular will established rational hope for public happiness. Nevertheless, the tragic clashes of principle and will in fraught revolutionary projects were also democratic legacies. Each chapter focuses on a distinct theme: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the common good ; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and the transformations of sovereignty-a synoptic survey of the cultural entanglements of enlightenment and democracy

This volume surveys the burst of political imagination that created multiple Enlightenment cultures in an era widely understood as an age of democratic revolutions. Enlightenment as precursor to liberal democratic modernity was once secular catechism for generations of readers. Yet democracy did not elicit much enthusiasm among contemporaries, while democracy as a political system remained virtually nonexistent through much of the period. If seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas did underwrite the democracies of succeeding centuries, they were often inheritances from monarchical governments that had encouraged plural structures of power competition. But in revolutions across France, Britain, and North America, the republican integration of constitutional principle and popular will established rational hope for public happiness. Nevertheless, the tragic clashes of principle and will in fraught revolutionary projects were also democratic legacies. Each chapter focuses on a distinct theme: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the "common good"; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and the transformations of sovereignty-a synoptic survey of the cultural entanglements of "enlightenment" and "democracy."