Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649-1999

Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649-1999

Author: Andrew Bradstock

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-19

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1317791800

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This collection of essays explore the the Diggers, a group of 17th century men who shared a vision of a society based on collective ownership of the land. The themes discussed include the continuing power of leader Winstanley's writings, ideas on civil liberty and the economic background.


The Enchantments of Mammon

The Enchantments of Mammon

Author: Eugene McCarraher

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2019-11-12

Total Pages: 817

ISBN-13: 0674242777

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“An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.” —The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls. “A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.” —Commonweal “More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers.” —Christian Century


A False Tree of Liberty

A False Tree of Liberty

Author: Susan Marks

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-12-05

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 0191663557

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This book is concerned with the history of the idea of human rights. It offers a fresh approach that puts aside familiar questions such as 'Where do human rights come from?' and 'When did human rights begin?' for the sake of looking into connections between debates about the rights of man and developments within the history of capitalism. The focus is on England, where, at the end of the eighteenth century, a heated controversy over the rights of man coincided with the final enclosure of common lands and the momentous changes associated with early industrialisation. Tracking back still further to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing about dispossession, resistance and rights, the book reveals a forgotten tradition of thought about central issues in human rights, with profound implications for their prospects in the world today.


Diggers, Levellers, and Agrarian Capitalism

Diggers, Levellers, and Agrarian Capitalism

Author: Geoff Kennedy

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9780739123744

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"This book situates the development of radical English political thought within the context of the specific nature of agrarian capitalism and the struggles that ensued around the nature of the state during the revolutionary decade of the 1640s. In the context of the emerging conceptions of the state and property - with attendant notions of accumulation, labor, and the common good - groups such as Levellers and Diggers developed distinctive forms of radical political thought not because they were progressive, forward thinkers, but because they were the most significant challengers of the newly constituted forms of political and economic power." "Drawing on recent reexaminations of the nature of agrarian capitalism and modernity in the early modern period, Geoff Kennedy argues that any interpretation of the political theory of this period must relate to the changing nature of social property relations and state power. The radical nature of early modern English political thought is therefore cast-in terms of its oppositional relationship to these novel forms of property and state power, rather than being conceived of as a formal break from discursive conventions."--BOOK JACKET.


Ehud's Dagger

Ehud's Dagger

Author: James Holstun

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 1789608236

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In this meticulously researched, award-winning book, James Holstun details seventeenth-century England's first capitalist revolution, and its first anti-capitalist revolutions, in a stirring project of Marxist history from below.


Portraits of Integrity

Portraits of Integrity

Author: Charlotte Alston

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-04-16

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1350040398

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Portraits of Integrity depicts more than 20 historical, fictional and contemporary figures whose character or life raises questions about what integrity is and how it is perceived. Integrity might be culturally bound, but this diverse set of portraits demonstrates that it is not the special preserve of any one culture. Portraits of Socrates, Mencius, Rama and Job, alongside the aspirational 16th-century couple John and Dorothy Kaye, civil rights activist Ella Baker and an anonymous banker, highlight the persisting – sometimes conflicting – features of a life lived with integrity. An introduction identifies and discusses the key questions and themes raised by the case studies, encouraging the reader to determine for themselves the weight and significance of the recurring topics integrity brings up - truth, awkwardness, goodness, and charisma. For anyone looking to learn more about this elusive virtue, Portraits of Integrity is an essential collection. It uncovers the manifold aspects of integrity, illustrates the various possibilities for its expression in a life and asks whether living a life of integrity means living a life of isolation and hardship, or if it is possible to live with integrity without jeopardising all else.


Exodus and Liberation

Exodus and Liberation

Author: John Coffey

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0199334226

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Tracing a series of political crises in Anglo-American history from the 16th-century Reformation to the civil rights movement Coffey excavates the history of deliverance politics testifying to the powerful political appeal of the Exodus, the Jubilee and the biblical language of liberty.


Revolutionary England and the National Covenant

Revolutionary England and the National Covenant

Author: Edward Vallance

Publisher: Boydell Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9781843831181

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An assessment of the importance of oaths, and the taking of, and the idea of national covenants during a turbulent time in English history. This book studies the oaths and covenants taken during the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century, a time of great religious and political upheaval, assessing their effect and importance. From the reign of Mary I to the Exclusion crisis, Protestant writers argued that England was a nation in covenant with God and urged that the country should renew its contract with the Lord through taking solemn oaths. In so doing, they radically modified understandings of monarchy, political allegiance and the royal succession. During the civil war, the tendering of oaths of allegiance, the Protestation of 1641 and the Vow and Covenant and Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 (all describedas embodiments of England's national covenant) also extended the boundaries of the political nation. The poor and illiterate, women as well as men, all subscribed to these tests of loyalty, which were presented as social contracts between the Parliament and the people. The Solemn League and Covenant in particular continued to provoke political controversy after 1649 and even into the 1690s many English Presbyterians still viewed themselves as bound by itsterms; the author argues that these covenants had a significant, and until now unrecognised, influence on 'politics-out-of-doors' in the eighteenth century. EDWARD VALLANCE is Lecturer in Early Modern British History, University of Liverpool.


Wasteland

Wasteland

Author: Vittoria Di Palma

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2014-08-26

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0300197799

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In an eloquent history of landscape and land use, Vittoria Di Palma takes on the “anti-picturesque”—how landscapes that elicit fear and disgust have shaped our conceptions of beauty and the sublime.


The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution

The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution

Author: Laura Lunger Knoppers

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2012-11-29

Total Pages: 744

ISBN-13: 0191669415

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This Handbook offers a comprehensive introduction and thirty-seven new essays by an international team of literary critics and historians on the writings generated by the tumultuous events of mid-seventeenth-century England. Unprecedented events-civil war, regicide, the abolition of monarchy, proscription of episcopacy, constitutional experiment, and finally the return of monarchy-led to an unprecedented outpouring of texts, including new and transformed literary genres and techniques. The Handbook provides up-to-date scholarship on current issues as well as historical information, textual analysis, and bibliographical tools to help readers understand and appreciate the bold and indeed revolutionary character of writing in mid-seventeenth-century England. The volume is innovative in its attention to the literary and aesthetic aspects of a wide range of political and religious writing, as well as in its demonstration of how literary texts register the political pressures of their time. Opening with essential contextual chapters on religion, politics, society, and culture, the largely chronological subsequent chapters analyse particular voices, texts, and genres as they respond to revolutionary events. Attention is given to aesthetic qualities, as well as to bold political and religious ideas, in such writers as James Harrington, Marchamont Nedham, Thomas Hobbes, Gerrard Winstanley, John Lilburne, and Abiezer Coppe. At the same time, the revolutionary political context sheds new light on such well-known literary writers as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, William Davenant, John Dryden, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, and John Bunyan. Overall, the volume provides an indispensable guide to the innovative and exciting texts of the English Revolution and reevaluates its long-term cultural impact.