The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution

The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution

Author: Anna Plassart

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-05-12

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1316300323

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Historians of ideas have traditionally discussed the significance of the French Revolution through the prism of several major interpretations, including the commentaries of Burke, Tocqueville and Marx. This book argues that the Scottish Enlightenment offered an alternative and equally powerful interpretative framework for the Revolution, which focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined the 'modernity' analysed by Hume and Smith in the eighteenth century. The Scots observed what they understood as a military- and democracy-led transformation of European modern morals and concluded that the real historical significance of the Revolution lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary international order. This book recovers the Scottish philosophers' powerful discussion of the nature of post-revolutionary modernity and shows that it is essential to our understanding of nineteenth-century political thought.


Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution

Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution

Author: Anna Plassart

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9781316327067

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Historians of ideas have traditionally discussed the significance of the French Revolution through the prism of several major interpretations, including the commentaries of Burke, Tocqueville and Marx. This book argues that the Scottish Enlightenment offered an alternative and equally powerful interpretative framework for the Revolution, which focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined the 'modernity' analysed by Hume and Smith in the eighteenth century. The Scots observed what they understood as a military- and democracy-led transformation of European modern morals and concluded that the real historical significance of the Revolution lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary international order. This book recovers the Scottish philosophers' powerful discussion of the nature of post-revolutionary modernity and shows that it is essential to our understanding of nineteenth-century political thought.


Scotland and France in the Enlightenment

Scotland and France in the Enlightenment

Author: Deidre Dawson

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780838755266

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The Scottish and French Enlightenments are arguably the two intellectual movements of the eighteenth century that were most influential in shaping the modern age. The essays in Scotland and France in the Enlightenment explore a wide range of topics of historical relevance to eighteenth-century scholars, while engaging students with broad interdisciplinary interests in the humanities and social sciences. The ways in which Scottish philosophy influenced French painting, how the Encyclopaedia Britannica presented the French Revolution, the impact of Macpherson's Ossian on the development of French Romanticism, the moral education of children, the relation between reflection and perception in the arts and in moral life, humankind's relationship to other animals, and the links between violence and imagination, fear and sanity, are only some of the topics covered. This challenging selection of essays comparing Scottish and French enlightenment views of natural history, jurisprudence, moral philosophy, history, and art history complicates and enriches the notion of Enlightenment, and will inaugurate a new field of Franco-Scottish studies.


The Scottish People and the French Revolution

The Scottish People and the French Revolution

Author: Bob Harris

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-09-30

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1317315308

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Presents a study of the political culture of Scotland in the 1790s. This book compares the emergence of 'the people' as a political force, with popular political movements in England and Ireland. It analyses Scottish responses to the French Revolution across the political spectrum; explaining Loyalist as well as Radical opinions and organisations.


Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

Author: Iain McDaniel

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0674075269

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Unlike his contemporaries, who saw Europe’s prosperity as confirmation of a utopian future, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson saw a reminder of Rome’s lesson that egalitarian democracy could become a self-undermining path to dictatorship. This is a major reassessment of a critic overshadowed today by David Hume and Adam Smith.


Enlightenment in Scotland and France

Enlightenment in Scotland and France

Author: Mark L. Hulliung

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-07-20

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 0429847017

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Enlightenment in Scotland and France: Studies in Political Thought provides comparative analysis of the Scottish and French Enlightenments. Studies of the two Enlightenments have previously focused on the transnational, their story one of continuity between Scottish intellectuals and French philosophes and of a mutual commitment to combat fanaticism in all its forms. This book contends that what has been missing, by and large, from the scholarly literature is the comparative analysis that underscores the contrasts as well as the similarities of the Enlightenments in Scotland and France. This book shows that, although the similarities of "enlightened" political thought in the two countries are substantial, the differences are also remarkable and stand out in culminating relief in the Scottish and French reactions to the American Revolution. Mark Hulliung argues that it was 1776, not 1789, that was the moment when the spokespersons for Enlightenment in Scotland and France parted company.


The Scottish Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment

Author: Alexander Broadie

Publisher: Birlinn

Published: 2012-11-01

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0857904981

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The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the truly great intellectual and cultural movements of the world. Its achievements in science, philosophy, history, economics, and other disciplines also, were immense; and its influence has hardly if at all been dimmed in the intervening two centuries. This book, written for the general reader, considers the achievement of this most astonishing period of Scottish history. It attends not only to the ideas that made the Scottish Enlightenment such a wondrous moment, but also to the people themselves who generated these ideas – men such as David Hume and Adam Smith, who are still read for the sake of the light they shed on contemporary issues.


The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment

The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment

Author: Thomas Ahnert

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-01-27

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0300153813

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In the Enlightenment it was often argued that moral conduct, rather than adherence to theological doctrine, was the true measure of religious belief. Thomas Ahnert argues that this “enlightened” emphasis on conduct in religion relied less on arguments from reason alone than has been believed. In fact, Scottish Enlightenment champions advocated a practical program of “moral culture,” in which revealed religion was of central importance. Ahnert traces this to theological controversies going back as far as the Reformation concerning the conditions of salvation. His findings present a new point of departure for all scholars interested in the intersection of religion and Enlightenment.


Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland

Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland

Author: Michael Michie

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780773510258

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An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland is a political and intellectual biography of Sir Archibald Alison (1792-1867), historian, social critic, criminal lawyer, and sheriff of Lanarkshire. The first author to examine the full range of Alison's writings and activities, Michael Michie reveals a significant link between the Scottish Enlightenment and Victorian conservatism. Michie argues that Alison's conservative ideas were deeply influenced by the social and political thought of the Scottish Enlightenment. He contends that Alison was the embodiment of the High Tory appropriation of the legacy of Adam Smith particularly evident in the belief that commercial agrarian capitalist society was the most appropriate form for both the maintenance of order and the practice of virtue. Developing the suggestion that a conservative interpretation of the enlightened legacy was possible for the succeeding century, Michie's study offers a useful corrective to the received wisdom that Victorian Liberalism was the true heir of the Scottish Enlightenment.


The French Revolution

The French Revolution

Author: Ian Davidson

Publisher: Profile Books

Published: 2016-08-25

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1847659365

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The fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 has become the commemorative symbol of the French Revolution. But this violent and random act was unrepresentative of the real work of the early revolution, which was taking place ten miles west of Paris, in Versailles. There, the nobles, clergy and commoners of France had just declared themselves a republic, toppling a rotten system of aristocratic privilege and altering the course of history forever. The Revolution was led not by angry mobs, but by the best and brightest of France's growing bourgeoisie: young, educated, ambitious. Their aim was not to destroy, but to build a better state. In just three months they drew up a Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was to become the archetype of all subsequent Declarations worldwide, and they instituted a system of locally elected administration for France which still survives today. They were determined to create an entirely new system of government, based on rights, equality and the rule of law. In the first three years of the Revolution they went a long way toward doing so. Then came Robespierre, the Terror and unspeakable acts of barbarism. In a clear, dispassionate and fast-moving narrative, Ian Davidson shows how and why the Revolutionaries, in just five years, spiralled from the best of the Enlightenment to tyranny and the Terror. The book reminds us that the Revolution was both an inspiration of the finest principles of a new democracy and an awful warning of what can happen when idealism goes wrong.