Thoughts on French Affairs 1791

Burke, Edmund; Mitchell, L. G.; Todd, William B.

doi:10.1093/oseo/instance.00040490

Cited by 3 publications

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“…This, for Burke, is not just imprudence; it is madness, pure and simple. For when the French revolutionaries use the rights of man to "destroy all traces of ancient establishments," 60 or when he claims that Jacobism represents the attempt "to eradicate prejudice [as such] out of the minds of men," a new pitch of destruction is reached. 61 What is now under attack is not simply the resources for intelligent judgments and sensible evaluations but, instead, the condition to judge and evaluate, period.…”

Section: The Rights Of Man and The Loss Of Judgmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rights of Man and the Care of the Self

Lefebvre

2014

Political Theory

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In this article, I claim that Mary Wollstonecraft and Edmund Burke both conceive of the rights of man as a medium for individuals to care for and cultivate the self. Beginning with Michel Foucault's doubts that a concern with the care of the self can be found in modern political thought, I turn to Wollstonecraft and Burke in order to show that their debate turns precisely on the question of whether the rights of man enables or disables a care of the self. For Wollstonecraft, on the one hand, the rights of man provide women with a means to overcome a destructive set of virtuessuch as beauty, chastity, and modesty-that leave them spiritually destitute and deeply unhappy. For Burke, on the other hand, such rights devastate the system of manners that had previously nurtured the self's relation to itself. Regardless of this disagreement, my key claim is that both thinkers conceive of the rights of man not just as a juridical construction but also as a comprehensive way of life. In this way, I extend Foucault's notion of the care of the self-along with his conception of ethics, conversion, and personal cultivation-to a foundational debate in the human rights tradition. KeywordsRights of Man, human rights, care of the self,

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Section: The Rights Of Man and The Loss Of Judgmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rights of Man and the Care of the Self

Lefebvre

2014

Political Theory

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“…In bringing into being the term “middle class” in the English‐speaking areas, a leading role was played by the impacts of two international political events—the War of American Independence and the French Revolution, both of which were considered as “revolts of the middle class” against the anciens regimes, and especially concerning the latter of which Englishmen and women considered as a great menace to themselves the fact that “the monied men, merchants, principal tradesmen, and men of letters (hitherto generally thought the peaceable and even timid part of society) are the chief actors” (Burke, 1791: 346). In North America and Australia where state‐building projects had been done without the nobles nor the laborers, the term “middle class” was “a misnomer” and was “best understood as a somewhat inappropriate linguistic import from England” (Blumin, 1989: 2) 6 .…”

Section: A Conceptual History Of “Middle Class”mentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpretative Freedom and New Combination: The Way in Which the “Middle Class” Has Been Narrated

Onoue

2010

Int J Japanese Sociology

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The English words “middle class” have experienced much more connotations and denotations—typically “bourgeoisie,” “white‐collar,” and professional—than any other class‐referring word since the latter half of the 18th century. On the one hand, in response to such diverse narrations during about two and a half centuries, I partially agree with some of the nominalistic theories of class, in that the middle classes were not created until they were named by contemporaries. On the other hand, my view diverges from those theories, in my asserting that the contemporaries have had an interpretative freedom to recognize “middle classes” only within the bounds of plausibility on the side of the realistic social world. The typical middle class in each period has emerged in such a way that Schumpeter's new combination is performed in a stage of recession by new entrepreneurs, who will move into the “middle” strata and hold some cultural leadership but still obtain inconsistent statuses, to be recognized as “middle class”ex post facto in a boom time. Two Kondratieff's cycles have had one recognition of the typical “middle class.” The new combination is one of the pressures bringing middle classes into a modern society, contrary to the so‐called class decomposition into the two poles.

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“…30 'Men of letters (hitherto thought the peaceable and even timid part of society) are the chief actors in the French revolution.' 31 Burke's fear was that tradition and order would be swept away by dangerous innovations, of which the French Revolution was the latest manifestation; the spirit of calculation was vital to new industry and commerce, but antithetical to tradition in hierarchy and institutions. 32 French social theorists, from the Enlightenment onwards, embodied the destruction of the old order, and the replacement of experience and order by theory and revolution.…”

Section: T H Leverementioning

confidence: 99%

Dr Thomas Beddoes: chemistry, medicine, and the perils of democracy

Levere

2009

Notes Rec. R. Soc.

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Beddoes lectured on chemistry at Oxford in the years that included the French Revolution, the Terror, and the outbreak of war with France, as well as the success in France of the chemical revolution. The very public dispute between Edmund Burke and Joseph Priestley meant that the latter's study of different kinds of air was politically tainted. Beddoes's democratic beliefs and his support for the new chemistry of Lavoisier meant that as chemist and physician he had to deal with complaints that he was potentially seditious and pro-French. His medical theories, allied to pneumatic chemistry and building on the work of Priestley, were accordingly suspect. In spite of that, he became the physician and friend to several members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham and to members of their family, and they in return became his patrons. His collaboration with James Watt was crucial for his development of pneumatic medicine. The full extent of Lunar patronage, and especially that of James Keir and Thomas Wedgwood, has hitherto not been recognized, but it was the concealed scale of that patronage that made possible the execution of Beddoes's ambitious programme of treatment and research.

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Thoughts on French Affairs 1791

Cited by 3 publications

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The Rights of Man and the Care of the Self

The Rights of Man and the Care of the Self

Interpretative Freedom and New Combination: The Way in Which the “Middle Class” Has Been Narrated

Dr Thomas Beddoes: chemistry, medicine, and the perils of democracy

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