A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution

A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution
Author: William H. Sewell (Jr.)
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822315384

What Is the Third Estate? was the most influential pamphlet of 1789. It did much to set the French Revolution on a radically democratic course. It also launched its author, the Abbé Sieyes, on a remarkable political career that spanned the entire revolutionary decade. Sieyes both opened the revolution by authoring the National Assembly's declaration of sovereignty in June of 1789 and closed it in 1799 by engineering Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état. This book studies the powerful rhetoric of the great pamphlet and the brilliant but enigmatic thought of its author. William H. Sewell's insightful analysis reveals the fundamental role played by the new discourse of political economy in Sieyes's thought and uncovers the strategies by which this gifted rhetorician gained the assent of his intended readers--educated and prosperous bourgeois who felt excluded by the nobility in the hierarchical social order of the old regime. He also probes the contradictions and incoherencies of the pamphlet's highly polished text to reveal fissures that reach to the core of Sieyes's thought--and to the core of the revolutionary project itself. Combining techniques of intellectual history and literary analysis with a deep understanding of French social and political history, Sewell not only fashions an illuminating portrait of a crucial political document, but outlines a fresh perspective on the history of revolutionary political culture.

How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Abridged Edition)

How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Abridged Edition)
Author: Neil Davidson
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2017-03-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1608467325

An abridged edition of the insightful work praised as “an impressive contribution both to the history of ideas and to political philosophy” (Alasdair MacIntyre, author of After Virtue). Once of central importance to left historians and activists alike, recently the concept of the “bourgeois revolution” has come in for sustained criticism from both Marxists and conservatives. In this abridged edition of his magisterial How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? Neil Davidson expertly distills his theoretical and historical insights about the nature of revolutions, making them accessible for general readers. Through extensive research and comprehensive analysis, Davidson demonstrates that what’s at stake is far from a stale issue for the history books—understanding that these struggles of the past offer far reaching lessons for today’s radicals.

Writing Revolution: Representation, Rhetoric, and Revolutionary Politics

Writing Revolution: Representation, Rhetoric, and Revolutionary Politics
Author: Sheila Delany
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2023-09-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004684093

Revolutionary and writer: how do they fit together in one person’s work? Using literary texts from French, German, Russian and American pro-revolutionary writers, Sheila Delany examines the synergy of politics and rhetoric, art and social commitment. The writers she considers gave voice to the hopes of their time. Some led the events in person as well as through their writing; others worked to build a movement. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Mao, Sylvain Maréchal, Boris Lavrenov, Bertolt Brecht and others are here: consummate rhetoricians all, not necessarily on the same page politically but for the revolutions of their day.

Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue

Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue
Author: Mark Garrett Longaker
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0271074779

During the British Enlightenment, the correlation between effective communication and moral excellence was undisputed—so much so that rhetoric was taught as a means of instilling desirable values in students. In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, Mark Garrett Longaker explores the connections between rhetoric and ethics in the context of the history of capitalism. Longaker’s study lingers on four British intellectuals from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century: philosopher John Locke, political economist Adam Smith, rhetorical theorist Hugh Blair, and sociologist Herbert Spencer. Across one hundred and fifty years, these influential men sought to mold British students into good bourgeois citizens by teaching them the discursive habits of clarity, sincerity, moderation, and economy, all with one incontrovertible truth in mind: the free market requires virtuous participants in order to thrive. Through these four case studies—written as biographically focused yet socially attentive intellectual histories—Longaker portrays the British rhetorical tradition as beholden to the dual masters of ethics and economics, and he sheds new light on the deliberate intellectual engineering implicit in Enlightenment pedagogy.

Bourgeois Equality

Bourgeois Equality
Author: Deirdre N. McCloskey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 830
Release: 2017-10-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 022652793X

The last 200 years have witnessed a 100-fold leap in well-being. Deirdre McCloskey argues that most people today are stunningly better off than their forbearers were in 1800, and that the rest of humanity will soon be. A purely materialist, incentivist view of economic change does not explain this leap. We have now the third in McCloskey's three-volume opus about how bourgeois values transformed Europe. Volume 3 nails the case for that transfiguration, telling us how aristocratic virtues of hierarchy were replaced by bourgeois virtues (more precisely, by attitudes toward virtues) that made it possible for ordinary folk with novel ideas to change the way people, farmed, manufactured, traveled, ruled themselves, and fought. It is a dramatic story, and joins a dramatic debate opened up by Thomas Piketty in his best-selling Capital in the 21st Century. McCloskey insists that economists are far too preoccupied by capital and saving, arguing against the position (of Piketty and most others) that capital induces a tendency to get more, that money reproduces itself, that riches are created from riches. Not so, our intrepid McCloskey shows. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, among the biggest wealth accumulators in our era, didn't get rich through the magic of compound interest on capital. They got rich through intellectual property, creating billions of dollars from virtually nothing. Capital was no more important an ingredient to the original Apple or Microsoft than cookies or cucumbers. The debate is between those who think riches are created from riches versus those who, with McCloskey, think riches are created from rags, between those who see profits as a generous return on capital, or profits coming from innovation that ultimately benefits us all.

Bourgeois Dignity

Bourgeois Dignity
Author: Deirdre N. McCloskey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 588
Release: 2011-11-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226556743

Arguing that the biggest economic story of our times is how China & India have embraced neoliberalism, Deirdre McCloskey suggests that economic change depends less on foreign trade, investment or material causes, & a whole lot more on ideas & what people believe.