A Modern Maistre

A Modern Maistre
Author: Owen Bradley
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 1999-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780803212954

"The guiding thread of Owen Bradley's analysis is Maistre's theory of sacrifice, a comparativist study of the ritualization of human barbarity in religious practices, punishments, wars, and revolutions."--BOOK JACKET.

The French Idea of History

The French Idea of History
Author: Carolina Armenteros
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2011-07-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 080144943X

Maistre emerges from this deeply learned book as the crucial bridge between the Enlightenment and the historicized thought of the nineteenth century.

Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence

Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence
Author: Richard A. Lebrun
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2001-10-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0773569774

Joseph de Maistre (1753B1821) was an extraordinarily gifted and insightful commentator on foundational developments that have shaped our modern world. His reaction to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, though hostile, was remarkably open and included innovative and still-valuable theorizing about such human phenomena as violence and unreason. The political and theoretical issues he addressed continue to challenge us today. In Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence leading Maistre scholars offer interpretations of his thought and make available in English recent French scholarship on his life and work. They provide a portrait of Maistre as a significant thinker in numerous fields, upsetting the image of him as a backward-looking "reactionary," a reinterpretation furthered by contemporary interest in Counter-Enlightenment thought in general. Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence is a valuable resource, providing not only a cross-section of current Maistre scholarship but also notes and biographical suggestions for further study. Contributors include Owen Bradley (University of Tennessee), Jean-Louis Darcel (Université de Savoie), Jean Dinezet (former OECD director-general), Graeme Garrard (University of Wales), Richard A. Lebrun, Vera Miltchyna (Writer's Union, Moscow), Jean-Yves Pranchère (independent scholar), W. Jay Reedy (Bryant College), and Benjamin Thurston (D.Phil. candidate, Oxford).

Joseph de Maistre and his European Readers

Joseph de Maistre and his European Readers
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2011-05-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9004206868

Following the publication of Isaiah Berlin's essay on Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), the Savoyard philosopher has been known primarily in the English-speaking world as a precursor of fascism. The essays in this volume challenge this view. Disclosing the inaccuracies and limitations of Berlin's account, they illustrate Maistre's colossally diverse European posterity. Far from an inflexible ideologist, Maistre was a versatile and deeply modern thinker who attracted interpreters across the political spectrum. Through the centuries, Maistre's passionate Europeanism has contributed to his popularity from Madrid to Moscow. And in our times, when religion is re-asserting itself as a source of public reason, his theorization of the encounter between tradition and modernity is lending his work ever more urgent relevance. Cover illustration by Matthieu Manche

St Petersburg Dialogues

St Petersburg Dialogues
Author: Joseph de Maistre
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 444
Release: 1993-03-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0773563806

Written and set on the banks of the Neva, St Petersburg Dialogues is a startlingly relevant analysis of the human prospect in the twenty-first century. As the literary critic George Steiner has remarked, "the age of the Gulag and of Auschwitz, of famine and ubiquitous torture ... nuclear threat, the ecological laying waste of our planet, the leap of endemic, possibly pandemic, illness out of the very matrix of libertarian progress" is exactly what Joseph de Maistre foretold. In the Dialogues Maistre addressed a number of topics that are discussed briefly or not at all in his other works already available in English. These include an apologetic for traditional Christian beliefs about providence, reflections on the social role of the public executioner and the "divinity" of war, a critique of John Locke's sensationalist psychology, meditations on prayer and sacrifice, and a mini-course on "illuminism." The literary form is that of the "philosophical conversation" – one that allowed Maistre to be deliberately provocative and to indulge his taste for paradox, a "methodical extravagance" that he judged particularly appropriate for the eighteenth-century salon. Translator and editor Richard Lebrun provides a full scholarly edition of this classic work, complete with an introduction, chronology, critical bibliography, and generous explanatory notes. The Dialogues will be of interest to scholars of literary history as well as the history of ideas.

Maistre: Considerations on France

Maistre: Considerations on France
Author: Joseph de Maistre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 1994-11-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521466288

Joseph de Maistre's Considerations on France is the best known French equivalent of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. This new edition of Richard Lebrun's 1974 translation is introduced by Isaiah Berlin, with a bibliography and chronology by the translator. Published in 1797, the work of the self-exiled Maistre presents a providential interpretation of the French Revolution and argues for a new alliance of throne and altar under a restored Bourbon monarchy. Although the Directory and then Napoleon delayed Maistre's influence within France until the Restoration, he is now acknowledged as the most eloquent spokesperson for continental conservatism. Considerations on France was a shrewd piece of propaganda, but, as Isaiah Berlin contends, by arguing his case in broad historical, philosophical and religious terms, Maistre raises issues of enduring importance.

The Extreme Right in France, 1789 to the Present

The Extreme Right in France, 1789 to the Present
Author: Peter Davies
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2002
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780415239813

Since 1789, the far right has been an important factor in French political life and in different eras has taken on a range of different guises. This work surveys the history of this contentious political and intellectual tradition.

A Journey Round My Room

A Journey Round My Room
Author: Xavier de Maistre
Publisher:
Total Pages: 176
Release: 1871
Genre: French fiction
ISBN:

In 1790, Xavier de Maistre was 27 years old, and a soldier in the army of the Sardinian Kingdom, which covered swathes of modern-day Northern Italy and Southern France. He was placed under house-arrest in Turin for fighting an illegal duel. It was during the 42 days of his confinement here that he wrote the manuscript that would become Voyage autour de ma chambre. Inspired by the works of Laurence Sterne, with their digressive and colloquial style, de Maistre decided to make the most of his sentence by recording an exploration of the room as a travel journal. de Maistre’s book imbues the tour of his chamber with great mythology and grand scale. As he wanders the few steps that it takes to circumnavigate the space, his mind spins off into the ether. It parodies the travel journals of the eighteenth-century (such as A Voyage Around the World by Louis de Bougainville, 1771), and could be read today as an early take on the modern vogue for “psychogeography” — each tiny thing that he encounters sends de Maistre into rhapsodies, and mundane journeys become magnificent voyages.

The Five Paradoxes of Modernity

The Five Paradoxes of Modernity
Author: Antoine Compagnon
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 1994
Genre: Art, Modern
ISBN: 9780231075770

In this elegant, highly readable book, Compagnon confronts the postmodern's co-optation of the modern by tracing paradoxical elements in the aesthetic of the new - particularly the aesthetic and moral contradictions built into the enthusiasm for the new - in the "five paradoxes of modernity": the superstition of the new, the religion of the future, the mania for theory, the appeal to mass culture, and the passion for repudiation.

The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions

The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions
Author: Joseph de Maistre
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351482319

Joseph de Maistre had no doubt that the root causes of the French Revolution were intellectual and ideological. The degeneration of its first immense hopes into the Reign of Terror was not the result of a ruthless competition for power or of prospects of war. He echoed Voltaire's boast that "books did it all." The philosophers of the Enlightenment were the architects of the new regimes; and the shadow between revolutionary idea and social reality could be traced directly to a fatal flaw in their thought.De Maistre asserts that society is the product, not of men's conscious decision, but of their instinctive makeup. Both history and primitive societies illustrate men's gravitation toward some form of communal life. Since government is in this sense natural, it can not legitimately be denied, revoked, or even disobeyed by the people. Sovereignty is not the product of the deliberation or the will of the people; it is a divinely bestowed authority fitted not to man's wishes but to his needs.The French Revolution to de Maistre's mind was little more than the expansion, conversion, pride, and consequent moral corruption of the philosophers. It differs in essence from all previous political revolutions, finding a parallel only in the biblical revolt against heaven. These sentiments are the passionate and awe-inspired language of one who sees the political struggles of his time on a huge and cosmic scale, judges events sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity), and looks on revolution and counter-revolution as a battle for the soul of humanity. The force of this classic volume still resonates in present-day ideological struggles.