Reforming Ideas in Britain
Cambridge University Press, 12/31/2013
EAN 9781107027282, ISBN10: 1107027284
Hardcover, 352 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
Between 1789 and 1815, Britain faced a surge of challenges brought about by the French Revolution. Growing tensions with France, then the outbreak of war, exacerbated domestic political controversy, giving rise to new forms of political protest, to which the government responded with ever-increasing severity. Reforming Ideas in Britain brings together a series of essays to provide a vibrant historiography of Britain's political thought and movements during the 1790s and beyond. Challenging traditional perceptions of the period, Philp prompts us to reconsider the weight of various ideas, interpretations and explanations of British politics and language, showing us instead that this dynamic world of popular politics was at once more chaotic, innovative and open-minded than historians have typically perceived it to be. This is an essential interdisciplinary text for scholars of history, political theory and romanticism that offers a fresh perspective on radicalism, loyalism and republicanism in Britain during the French Revolution.
Introduction
1. The fragmented ideology of reform
2. Vulgar conservatism
3. Disconcerting ideas
explaining popular radicalism and popular loyalism in the 1790s
4. English republicanism in the 1790s
5. Failing the republic
political virtues and vices in the late eighteenth century
6. Paine's experiments
7. Revolutionaries in Paris
Paine, Jefferson and democracy
8. Godwin, Thelwall and the means of progress
9. Politics and memory
Nelson and Trafalgar in popular song
10. The elusive principle
collective self-determination in the late eighteenth century
11. Time to talk.
'Reforming Ideas in Britain will transform the way in which political debate has conventionally been studied and interpreted during the years of the French Revolution and its aftermath. In place of the confrontation between opposed but settled traditions of thought or behaviour, what is highlighted is a developing process of polarization, whose features were as much experimental and theatrical as ideological and whose fragmentation and inconsistencies characterized both sides of the argument. This is not simply a new and exciting way of understanding the debates around the French Revolution; it is an approach to the understanding of the history of ideas which ought to be employed in the study of other periods of political contestation.' Gareth Stedman Jones, Director, Centre for History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge 'Around twenty years ago, two classic essays by Mark Philp completely changed our understanding of the response in Britain to the French Revolution, and of the nature of political movements and ideologies. The essays in this brilliant collection, on the political culture of the 1790s and after, will be just as influential. Philp asks questions about the thinkers and the issues he discusses with a wonderfully developed sense of the interaction of ideas, institutions, cultural practices and events. He is at once a historian, a political theorist, and a literary critic, and I can't think of anyone who exemplifies better the benefits of working across the boundaries of disciplines.' John Barrell, Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York 'The war of political ideas that erupted in Britain during the French Revolution was fierce and consequential, laying out the battle-lines for the democratic reform struggles of the nineteenth century. No-one writes better about this controversy than Mark Philp, whose publications over the years have set the standard for historical scholarship in the area. Whether skewering loyalist ideologues, analysing Paine's views on adult suffrage, or exposing the reactionary uses of popular song, Philp is invariably insightful, wise, compelling. Anyone interested in this turbulent phase of British history will want to read and learn from this book.' Barbara Taylor, Queen Mary University of London