Moral Capital Brown, Christopher Leslie
12/2012
eBook
Revisiting the origins of the British antislavery movement of the
late eighteenth century, Christopher Leslie Brown challenges
prevailing scholarly arguments that locate the roots of
abolitionism in ...economic determinism or bourgeois humanitarianism.
Brown instead connects the shift from sentiment to action to
changing views of empire and nation in Britain at the time,
particularly the anxieties and dislocations spurred by the American
Revolution.
The debate over the political rights of the North American
colonies pushed slavery to the fore, Brown argues, giving
antislavery organizing the moral legitimacy in Britain it had never
had before. The first emancipation schemes were dependent on
efforts to strengthen the role of the imperial state in an era of
weakening overseas authority. By looking at the initial public
contest over slavery, Brown connects disparate strands of the
British Atlantic world and brings into focus shifting developments
in British identity, attitudes toward Africa, definitions of
imperial mission, the rise of Anglican evangelicalism, and Quaker
activism.
Demonstrating how challenges to the slave system could serve as a
mark of virtue rather than evidence of eccentricity, Brown shows
that the abolitionist movement derived its power from a profound
yearning for moral worth in the aftermath of defeat and American
independence. Thus abolitionism proved to be a cause for the
abolitionists themselves as much as for enslaved Africans.
What is the state? The State of Freedom offers an important new take on this classic question by exploring what exactly the state did and how it worked. Patrick Joyce asks us to re-examine the ...ordinary things of the British state from dusty government files and post offices to well-thumbed primers in ancient Greek and Latin and the classrooms and dormitories of public schools and Oxbridge colleges. This is also a history of the 'who' and the 'where' of the state, of the people who ran the state, the government offices they sat in and the college halls they dined in. Patrick Joyce argues that only by considering these things, people and places can we really understand the nature of the modern state. This is both a pioneering new approach to political history in which social and material factors are centre stage, and a highly original history of modern Britain.
On Liberty John Stuart Mill, John Stuart
2017
eBook
At the time it was published in 1859, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty was a radical and controversial work; it argued for the right of individuals to possess freedom from the state in moral and ...economic matters. Mill declares that "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign", contrasting this with the "tyranny of the majority." He states that an individual can do anything they like as long as it doesn't harm another - the well-known.
Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean is a collection of
essays that explores fundamental questions of equality and freedom
on the non-sovereign islands of the Dutch Caribbean. Drawing on
in-depth ...ethnographic research, historical and media analysis, the
study of popular culture, and autoethnographic accounts, the
various contributions challenge conventional assumptions about
political non/sovereignty. While the book recognizes the existence
of nationalist independence movements, it opens a critical space to
look at other forms of political articulation, autonomy, liberty,
and a good life. Focusing on all six different islands and through
a multitude of voices and stories, the volume engages with the
everyday projects, ordinary imaginaries, and dreams of equaliberty
alongside the work of independistas and traditional social
movements aiming for more or full self-determination. As such, it
offers a rich and powerful telling of the various ways of being in
and belonging to our contemporary postcolonial world.
Evil is the core challenge in thinking about freedom. With keen historical awareness, this study reconstructs the problematic interrelation between freedom and necessity in German Idealism and ...illuminates Schelling's systematic approach around the year 1809. This reinterpretation of Schelling's treatise on freedom considers systematic and theological questions as well as the effective tradition of Platonism and Neo-Platonism.
This work provides an interpretation of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) and elucidates the fundamental principles of Mill's concept of liberty. For Mill, the right to form one's own convictions ...and live according to them should only be infringed upon for one reason, namely "to prevent harm to others".
It is commonly observed that behind many of the political and cultural issues that we face today there are impoverished conceptions of freedom, which, according to D. C. Schindler, we have inherited ...from the classical liberal tradition without a sufficient awareness of its implications. Freedom from Reality presents a critique of the deceptive and ultimately self-subverting character of the modern notion of freedom, retrieving an alternative view through a new interpretation of the ancient tradition. While many have critiqued the inadequacy of identifying freedom with arbitrary choice, this book seeks to penetrate to the metaphysical roots of the modern conception by going back, through an etymological study, to the original sense of freedom. Schindler begins by uncovering a contradiction in John Locke's seminal account of human freedom. Rather than dismissing it as a mere "academic" problem, Schindler takes this contradiction as a key to understanding the strange paradoxes that abound in the contemporary values and institutions founded on the modern notion of liberty: the very mechanisms that intend to protect modern freedom render it empty and ineffectual. In this respect, modern liberty is "diabolical"—a word that means, at its roots, that which "drives apart" and so subverts. This is contrasted with the "symbolical" (a "joining- together"), which, he suggests, most basically characterizes the premodern sense of reality. This book will appeal to students and scholars of political philosophy (especially political theorists), philosophers in the continental or historical traditions, and cultural critics with a philosophical bent.
In Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment, Denise Schaeffer challenges the common view of Rousseau as primarily concerned with conditioning citizens’ passions in order to promote republican ...virtue and unreflective patriotic attachment to the fatherland. Schaeffer argues that, to the contrary, Rousseau’s central concern is the problem of judgment and how to foster it on both the individual and political level in order to create the conditions for genuine self-rule. Offering both a detailed commentary on Rousseau’s major work on education, Emile, and wide-ranging analysis of the relationship between Emile and several of Rousseau’s other works, Schaeffer explores Rousseau’s understanding of what good judgment is, how it is learned, and why it is central to the achievement and preservation of human freedom. The model of Rousseauian citizenship that emerges from Schaeffer’s analysis is more dynamic and self-critical than is often acknowledged. This book demonstrates the importance of Rousseau’s contribution to our understanding of faculty of judgment, and, more broadly, invites a critical reevaluation of Rousseau’s understanding of education, citizenship, and both individual and collective freedom.
