Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought

Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought
Author: Stephen Miller
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2001
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780838754818

Although Hume and Johnson told profoundly different views of religion, their political thinking has much in common. Their reformist thought differs radically from what might be called the transformist thought of Marat, who hoped the French would become disinterested citizens whose civil religion was patriotism.".

The Chevalier d'Eon and his Worlds

The Chevalier d'Eon and his Worlds
Author: Simon Burrows
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2011-10-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1441174044

Cross-dressing author, envoy, soldier and spy Charles d'Eon de Beaumont's unusual career fascinated his contemporaries and continues to attract historians, novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, image makers, cultural theorists and those concerned with manifestations of the extraordinary. D'Eon's significance as a historical figure was already being debated more than 45 years before his death. Not surprisingly, such sensational material has attracted the attention of enthusiasts, scholars and literateurs to 'the strange case of the chevalier d'Eon'. He has also attracted the attention of psychologists and sexologists, and for most of the last century his gender transformation has been viewed through a Freudian lens. His cross-dressing, it was usually assumed, must have a psychosexual explanation. Until the second half of the twentieth century the terms 'Eonist' and 'Eonism' were the standard English words for transvestites and transvestism respectively, but 'Eonism' was also, thanks to Havelock Ellis, widely regarded as a psychological condition or compulsion. However, in the mid-twentieth century, new ideas about gender-identity disorders led to d'Eon being redefined not as a transvestite, but a transsexual - a person who considers their sex to have been 'misassigned'. The essays in this collection contribute to d'Eon's rehabilitation as a figure worthy of scholarly attention and display a variety of disciplinary approaches. Drawing on new research into d'Eon's life, this volume offers original and nuanced readings of how a gender identity could come to be negotiated over time.

The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution

The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution
Author: John Phillip Reid
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1988
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780226708966

"Liberty was the most cherished right possessed by English-speaking people in the eighteenth century. It was both an ideal for the guidance of governors and a standard with which to measure the constitutionality of government; both a cause of the American Revolution and a purpose for drafting the United States Constitution; both an inheritance from Great Britain and a reason republican common lawyers continued to study the law of England." As John Philip Reid goes on to make clear, "liberty" did not mean to the eighteenth-century mind what it means today. In the twentieth century, we take for granted certain rights—such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press—with which the state is forbidden to interfere. To the revolutionary generation, liberty was preserved by curbing its excesses. The concept of liberty taught not what the individual was free to do but what the rule of law permitted. Ultimately, liberty was law—the rule of law and the legalism of custom. The British constitution was the charter of liberty because it provided for the rule of law. Drawing on an impressive command of the original materials, Reid traces the eighteenth-century notion of liberty to its source in the English common law. He goes on to show how previously problematic arguments involving the related concepts of licentiousness, slavery, arbitrary power, and property can also be fit into the common-law tradition. Throughout, he focuses on what liberty meant to the people who commented on and attempted to influence public affairs on both sides of the Atlantic. He shows the depth of pride in liberty—English liberty—that pervaded the age, and he also shows the extent—unmatched in any other era or among any other people—to which liberty both guided and motivated political and constitutional action.

Healers and Achievers

Healers and Achievers
Author: Raphael S. Bloch, M.D.
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 791
Release: 2012-05-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1469192489

Summary of Healers and Achievers (ID No. 110473) by Raphael S. Bloch, M.D. It is not widely known that throughout history physicians have contributed more than just medical care to civilization. Healers and Achievers is a series of biographies of doctors from ancient Egypt to the twenty-first century who distinguished themselves with lasting non-medical accomplishments. They include the architect of the first Egyptian pyramid, a pope, the "Fathers" of astronomy, geology, magnetism, and taxonomy, American Founding Fathers, French Revolutionaries, a buccaneer, world-class athletes, a spy, and an astronaut. Their life stories are told in the context of the eras in which they lived, and their fields of medical and non-medical expertise are explained in terms comprehensible to both laymen and physicians.

French Revolutionaries and English Republicans

French Revolutionaries and English Republicans
Author: Rachel Hammersley
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780861932733

Following the cataclysmic events of 1789 some of those involved in the Revolution began to take seriously the possibility of a French republic. Various ideas developed about the form this should take and the models on which it could be based, from those of ancient Greece and Rome, to modern republics such as Geneva or the United States of America. However, a small number of thinkers - centred around the radical, Paris-based Cordeliers Club - looked to the writings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English republicans for guidance about realising ancient republican ideals in the modern world. This book offers an intellectual history of the Club, through a close analysis of texts and the relationships between their authors. Its main focus is on individual club members and their translations of and borrowings from the works of such thinkers as Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney and Thomas Gordon: the author shows how the Cordeliers adapted and developed those ideas so as to make them serve contemporary circumstances and concerns, and demonstrates that even after the establishment of a French republic in 1792, members of the Cordeliers Club continued to make use of English republican ideas in order to respond to key constitutional and political questions. Rachel Hammersley is Senior Lecturer in History at Newcastle University.

European Contexts for English Republicanism

European Contexts for English Republicanism
Author: Gaby Mahlberg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317139747

European Contexts for English Republicanism offers new perspectives on early modern English republicanism through its focus on the Continental reception of and engagement with seventeenth-century English thinkers and political events. Looking both at political ideas and at the people that shaped them, the collection examines English republican thought in its wider European context during the later seventeenth and eighteenth century. In a number of case studies, the contributors assess the different ways in which English republican ideas were not only shaped by the thought of the ancients, but also by contemporary authors from all over Europe, such as Hugo Grotius or Christoph Besold. They demonstrate that English republican thinkers did not only act in dialogue with Continental authors and scholars, their ideas in turn also left a long-lasting legacy in Europe as they were received, transformed and put to new uses by thinkers in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. Far from being an exclusively transatlantic affair, as much of the established scholarship suggests, English republican thought also left its legacy on the European Continent, finding its way into wider debates about the rights and wrongs of the English Civil War and the nature of government, while later translations of English republican works also influenced the key thinkers of the French Revolution and the liberals of the nineteenth century. Bringing together a range of fresh and original essays by British and European scholars in the field of early modern intellectual history and English studies, this collection of essays revises a one-sided approach to English republicanism and widens the scope of study beyond linguistic and national boundaries by looking at English republicans and their continental networks and legacy.