Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 The Scottish Enlightenment, the Moral Sense, and the Civilizing Process -- 2 Burke and the Scottish Enlightenment -- 3 Wollstonecraft and the Scottish Enlightenment -- 4 "The Most Important of All Revolutions" -- 5 Vindicating a Revolution in Morals and Manners -- 6 Burke on Democracy as the Death of Western Civilization -- 7 Wollstonecraft on Democracy as the Birth of Western Civilization -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index

"Edmund Burke, long considered modern conservatism's founding father, is also widely believed to be an opponent of empire. However, Daniel O'Neill turns that latter belief on its head. This fresh and innovative book shows that Burke was a passionate supporter and staunch defender of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, whether in the New World, India, or Ireland. Moreover--and against a growing body of contemporary scholarship that rejects the very notion that Burke was an exemplar of conservatism--O'Neill demonstrates that Burke's defense of empire was in fact ideologically consistent with his conservative opposition to the French Revolution. Burke's logic of empire relied on two opposing but complementary theoretical strategies: Ornamentalism, which stressed cultural similarities between "civilized" societies, as he understood them, and Orientalism, which stressed the putative cultural differences distinguishing "savage" societies from their "civilized" counterparts. This incisive book also shows that Burke's argument had lasting implications, as his development of these two justifications for empire prefigured later intellectual defenses of British imperialism"--Provided by publisher

A review essay on books by (1) A. Kalyvas & I. Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press); (2) C. Sheehan, James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press); (3) A. de Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press); & (4) P. Rahe, Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect (Yale U Press).