Author: I. BradleyPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
The Optimists : Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism
Author: I. BradleyThe Optimists
Author: Ian BradleyPublisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 9780571271290
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
Ian Bradley's The Optimists was first published in 1980, when the values of Victorian Liberalism were enjoying something of a renaissance - as they are today. Politicians of different parties were once again expounding the Gladstonian principles of public economy, self-help, European unity and home rule for the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. This book examines the nature and development of these ideas. It traces their origins in the Romantic movement, the industrial revolution and the general European Liberal awakening of the mid-nineteenth century and charts their collapse in the face of the predominance of class attitudes and the increasingly bitter clash of capital and labour at the end of the century. During its heyday, from the mid-1850s to the mid-1880s, Liberalism attracted many eminent Victorians, including leading literary figures like Anthony Trollope, George Meredith and William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as philosophers like John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, Richard Cobden, John Bright, T. H. Green, and, of course, W. E. Gladstone. Using a mass of evidence, from novels, unpublished letters and autobiographical writings as well as from contemporary speeches and biographies, Ian Bradley has built up a picture of the complex and often conflicting forces which made men espouse the Gladstonian creed. He isolates the different strands in the Victorian Liberal Movement, the thrust and competitiveness of up-and-coming merchants and manufacturers, the love of liberty felt by rationalists and romantics alike, and the stern imperatives of the Nonconformist Conscience. He concludes that for all their differences and inconsistencies, Victorian Liberals were bound together by an all-pervasive sense of optimism and a fundamental faith in the goodness of man and the reality of progress.
Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism
Author: D. MalachukPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403982244
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
This book recovers and recommends the core conviction of Victorian liberal theory that human beings, with the help of the state, can achieve an objective moral perfection. The first half of the book considers the diverse modern biases that have blinded us to the merit of this core conviction and weaves together disparate new scholarship (primarily in political theory and Victorian Studies) to set the stage for a reconsideration of that conviction. The second half of the book is that reconsideration outlining the various policies the Victorian liberals (John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, primarily, with a half dozen other nineteenth-century British and American authors) recommended the state employ in the perfection of human beings.
Victorian Liberalism
Author: Richard BellamyPublisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040001629
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Book Description
First published in 1990, Victorian Liberalism brings together leading political theorists and historians in order to examine the interplay of theory and ideology in nineteenth-century liberal thought and practice. Drawing on a wide range of source material, the authors examine liberal thinkers and politicians from Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill to William Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain. Connections are drawn throughout between the different languages which made-up liberal discourse and the relations between these vocabularies and the political movements and changing social reality they sought to explain. The result is a stimulating volume that breaks new ground in the study of political history and the history of political thought.
Aristocratic Liberalism
Author: Alan KahanPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351315544
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 422
Book Description
"Liberalism" is widely used to describe a variety of social and political ideas, but has been an especially difficult concept for historians and political scientists to define. Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville define one type of liberal thought. They share an aristocratic liberalism marked by distaste for the masses and the middle class, opposition to the commercial spirit, fear and contempt of mediocrity, and suspicion of the centralized state. Their fears are combined with an elevated ideal of human personality, an ideal which affirms modernity. All see their ideals threatened in the immediate future, and all hope to save European civilization from barbarism and militarism through some form of education, although all grow more pessimistic towards the end of their lives. Aristocratic Liberalism ignores the national boundaries that so often confine the history of political thought, and uses the perspective thus gained to establish a pan-European type of political thought. Going beyond Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville, Aristocratic Liberalism argues for new ways of looking at nineteenth-century liberalism. It corrects many prevalent misconceptions about liberalism, and suggests new paths for arriving at a better understanding of the leading form of nineteenth-century political thought. The new Afterword by the author presents a novel description of liberal political language as the "discourse of capacity," and suggests that this kind of language is the common denominator of all forms of European liberalism in the nineteenth century. Aristocratic Liberalism will be valuable to students of history, political science, sociology, and political philosophy.
Victorian Britain (Routledge Revivals)
Author: Sally MitchellPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136716173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1014
Book Description
First published in 1988, this encyclopedia serves as an overview and point of entry to the complex interdisciplinary field of Victorian studies. The signed articles, which cover persons, events, institutions, topics, groups and artefacts in Great Britain between 1837 and 1901, have been written by authorities in the field and contain bibliographies to provide guidelines for further research. The work is intended for undergraduates and the general reader, and also as a starting point for graduates who wish to explore new fields.
The Greenian Moment
Author: Denys LeightonPublisher: Imprint Academic
ISBN: 9780907845546
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402
Book Description
This study of T.H. Green views his philosophical opus through his public life and political commitments, and it uses biography as a lens through which to examine Victorian political culture and its moral climate. The book deals with the political and religious history of Victorian Britain in examining the basis of Green's Liberal partisanship. It demonstrates how his main ethical and political conceptions--his idea of "self-realisation" and his theory of individuality within community--were informed by evangelical theology, popular Protestantism and an idea of the English national consciousness as formed by religious conflict. While the significance of Kantian and Hegelian elements in Green's thought is acknowledged, it is argued that "indigenous" qualities of Green's teachings resonated with values shared alike by elite and rank-and-file Liberals during the mid and late Victorian era. In examining Green's beliefs about the historical evolution of English liberty, his championing of (Liberal) Nonconformity and Nonconformist causes and his approval of religious bases of community, this study analyzes the ripening of a Greenian moment and traces Green's influence on Liberal, quasi-socialist and Conservative social reform down to the 1920s. The lasting impact of Green's teachings on British and Western political philosophy, apparent in the current vogue for communitarianism in liberal theory, indicates limitations of the "secularization thesis" still tacitly accepted by historians of Western political thought.
Victorian Values
Author: Gordon MarsdenPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131788681X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Book Description
Victorian Values is an absorbing portrait of Victorian society and culture, presenting different aspects of the age through profiles of representative or pioneering figures - among them Dickens, Pugin, Mary Kingsley, Lord Leighton, Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain. It illuminates Victorian attitudes to a range of issues from education, health and self-help to civic ideals and sexual identity. Widely used and enjoyed by students, teachers and general readers alike, it has now been extended with four new essays and the Introduction, comparing the Victorian age with our own, has been updated and rewritten.
Believing in Britain
Author: Ian BradleyPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 085771080X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
Why is there such intense interest today in the idea of 'Britishness'? Does it really matter, and what is 'Britishness' anyway? Why does the notion of 'being British' seem to have most resonance amongst recent immigrant - especially Asian and Afro-Caribbean - communities? And why is that 'traditional' British values now seem to be most widely practised and cherished by newcomers, not by the dominant majority? This book answers these vital questions by making a unique contribution to the current debate about British identity. It investigates why Liverpool is the most British of UK cities, with a regional accent representing a medley of Welsh, Scots, Irish and English; how a small village off the M6 motorway is arguably Britain's spiritual heart; and what theme parks, airport shops and eating habits have to tell us about the contemporary national character. It is often claimed that Great Britain is one of the most secular nations on earth. But - controversially - Ian Bradley argues that Britishness is best envisaged as a series of overlapping identities which are at root religious. He views the 400 year-old Union Jack, with its overlaid crosses of three of the nation's four patron saints, as symbolising the United Kingdom's unparalleled combination of unity in diversity, the diversity of a society which now embodies Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and many other - including secular - traditions. He goes on to argue that 'Britishness' has special value as a broad church measure of spiritual and cultural inclusiveness - and as a positive alternative to fundamentalism, narrow nationalism and jingoism. The author explores in separate chapters the distinctive contributions to Britishness made over the centuries by the Celtic traditions of the Welsh and Irish, the Anglo-Saxon strain of tolerance and freedom associated with the English, the moral seriousness of the Scots, and the characteristics of exuberance, modesty and privacy introduced by new black and Asian Britons. Published to coincide with the three hundredth anniversary of the 1707 Act of Union, his book offers a number of radical proposals. These include re-designing the Union flag to incorporate a black cross on a gold background, to better reflect the hybridity of contemporary Britain, and replacing George, Andrew and Patrick with a new trinity of patron saints - Columba, Bridget and Edward the Confessor. Ian Bradley contends that a rejuvenated BBC, monarchy and Commonwealth all have a part to play in forging a new sense of British identity which combines myth, imagination and tradition with a broad, open-minded inclusivity and respect for difference. Believing in Britain makes a consistently thoughtful and challenging contribution to one of the most important discussions of our time.
Overcoming Matthew Arnold
Author: James Walter CaufieldPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317084497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
Opening the way for a reexamination of Matthew Arnold's unique contributions to ethical criticism, James Walter Caufield emphasizes the central role of philosophical pessimism in Arnold's master tropes of "culture" and "conduct." Caufield uses Arnold's ethics as a lens through which to view key literary and cultural movements of the past 150 years, demonstrating that Arnoldian conduct is grounded in a Victorian ethic of "renouncement," a form of altruism that wholly informs both Arnold's poetry and prose and sets him apart from the many nineteenth-century public moralists. Arnold's thought is situated within a cultural and philosophical context that shows the continuing relevance of "renouncement" to much contemporary ethical reflection, from the political kenosis of Giorgio Agamben and the pensiero debole of Gianni Vattimo, to the ethical criticism of Wayne C. Booth and Martha Nussbaum. In refocusing attention on Arnold's place within the broad history of critical and social thought, Caufield returns the poet and critic to his proper place as a founding father of modern cultural criticism.