The Political Thought of Anacharsis Cloots: A Proponent of Cosmopolitan Republicanism in the French Revolution

The article considers the meaning of freedom in the context of the revolution, its interpretation by social philosophers of the second half of the 20th century (H.Arendt, H.Marcuse, E.Fromm, Y.Habermas and other scientists). It is emphasized that the struggle for freedom can be one of the factors of the beginning of revolutionary events, at the same time, revolutionary events can cause a new round of the struggle for freedom. Investigating the genesis of the concept of “revolution”, it is noted that in the political aspect, the origins of the revolution lie in the plane of “civil disorder” of the ancient polis. At the initial stage, there was an understanding of the revolution as a restoration, an attempt to find the absolute in the past, and a fear of founding something completely new. Based on the comparative characteristics of the French and American revolutions, it is noted that initially they were perceived by their participants primarily as an uprising against tyranny and oppression, as a return to the old just order. The revolutionary goals of the American and French revolutions were identical – freedom from domination. But unlike the French, the American revolution focused not on liberation, but on the establishment of a new republic, a new type of government. Thus, the French revolution was the revolution of the liberators, and the American revolution was the revolution of the founders. A key difference between the French and American revolutions was the assessment of freedom as the main goal of the revolution: the French revolution rose against a limited monarchy, the American revolution against an absolute one. The American Revolution was aimed at the formation of new institutions, a system of checks and balances, and the division of power into separate branches of government. The French Revolution almost immediately lost the public political space, personal “political freedom” was replaced by the “unified will of the people”, and the destruction of the old system did not lead to the proper formation of the new one. Despite the obvious success of the American revolution, it was the French revolution with all its problems and pitfalls that became the prototype of almost all revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Smith died only a year after the French Revolution and before the impact of the industrial revolution on restructuring the social order could be fully understood. But he had a profound influence on the generation of thinkers in the early part of the next century who tried to make sense of the social currents unleashed by the French and industrial revolutions. It was especially in Germany — ironically a country yet to experience either a bourgeois or an industrial revolution — that Smith’s writings and those of the Scottish Enlightenment had the most influence. Not surprisingly the ideas were viewed, evaluated, absorbed and reworked through an intellectual tradition very different from the hard-headed empiricism of the Scottish Enlightenment. In the process they were transformed to yield a new discourse which combined the traditional preoccupations of German Idealism with a social philosophy more appropriate to the particular, uneven development of the German social formation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

If more people knew more about the French Revolution, their views could serve as a measure of their politics—as, say, views of the Russian Revolution once did. The history of the French Revolution is difficult to separate out from its impact on political theory and on the fault lines between Left and Right. Political thinkers such as Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, G.W.F. Hegel, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Karl Marx were keen interpreters of the Revolution’s historical significance. The account each one chose to embrace indicated where he or she stood on the political spectrum. For a time, Marx was the triumphant interpreter, and preeminent historians of the Revolution, figures such as Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, relied on a Marxist class analysis in order to explain the course of events. The Revolution secured a central place in the Left’s heritage. The Marxist approach lost its dominance in 1978 with the publication of François Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution. Although others before him had challenged the Marxist account (notably George Taylor and Alfred Cobban), Furet succeeded in shifting the discourse on the Revolution away from class and material conditions toward the discussion of political ideas and languages. Furet’s achievement was not only to define a new research agenda for the Revolution. By overturning the Marxist interpretation, with its emphasis on the rise and politicization of the bourgeoisie, Furet deprived many leftists of what had been for them the source and origin of modern radical politics. In turn, if the Revolution could no longer be justified by reference to the emancipatory aspirations of the bourgeoisie (and the nascent proletariat), critical attention could be drawn to the Reign of Terror. Furet’s new reading of the Revolution was well timed, occurring just as French intellectuals became increasingly aware of, and critical of, the Russian Revolution’s culmination in Stalinism. Now the French Revolution could be reinterpreted as the founding event of left-wing totalitarianism. It is against this backdrop that French historian Sophie Wahnich’s In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution enters into the politicized debate over the Revolution’s legacy.

This article discusses the relation between colonialism and the sovereignty of peoples through a dialogue between Hegel and the thought of the French Revolution. These two sides are relevant to each other not only because of their historical proximity, but also because of the connections that can be established when we approach the topic of colonialism through these two manifestations. Hegel is explicit that his philosophy of history and his philosophy of right are supposed to be philosophies of freedom. Yet despite the importance that he lends to freedom, Hegel also explicitly defends, in the very same text, colonial domination when he deals with the relation between peoples. A similar problem had arisen in the course of the French Revolution. Following the declarations of war, France is confronted on various occasions with the question of how to deal with other peoples and countries. With the foundation of the Republic in 1792, the relation with other peoples becomes central in the revolutionary debates. The topic of colonialism is part of the constituting debates, and not only because of the uprisings in then Saint Domingue leading to the Haitian Revolution. This article is a part of a larger research project that attempts to reassess the relations between Hegel and the French Revolution, and deals with the question of how we can re-read Hegel's interpretation of the French Revolution based on the evolving historiography of the Revolution. After an introduction of both sides of this dialogue, the paper discusses how Hegel's political philosophy can be applied to understand the debates about the emancipation of colonies that take place during the French Revolution. The next part further analyses some issues, such as the notion of sovereignty and, in the concluding remarks, I summarize my discussion and point to some avenues for further research.

In what sense was the French Revolution exceptional – a moment of potential liberation both unique and uncertain? “Exceptionality” has a specific meaning in political philosophy, and, using this meaning as a departure point, this paper develops a specifically sociological typology of states of exception – enunciative, reciprocal, and structural – grounded in a Hegelian sociology of power. The schema is useful for parsing and interpreting several of Robespierre’s most important speeches during the Revolution. This analysis leads to retheorization of modernity in the French Revolution, with specific attention to the interpretation, in Paris, of the revolution in Saint Domingue.

Amelia Alderson Opie's (1769-1853) Adeline Mowbray (1805) is usually considered an anti-Jacobin novel of the post-French Revolution and Reign of Terror era because of its ostensible condemnation of the radical opposition to marriage, despite Opie's close ties with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft's circle of radicals. Written in the ＂war of ideas＂ and arduously participating in the assessment of both the status quo and emergent political philosophies, Adeline Mowbray seems to tout a conservative political allegiance but actually undermines contemporary British reactionary, patriarchal society's value systems by revealing them to be devoid of substantial merit. Opie's novel of purpose effectively deploys the trope of contamination, a label frequently imposed upon such social outcasts as reading women, fallen women, radicals, and racial others at the time, to reflect on society instead. Turning the idea of contamination on its head, Opie reveals British society, which is usually portrayed to be endangered by contamination, to be the actual seat of a polluted wasteland. This strategy of equivocation- publicly endorsing dominant ideologies and covertly critiquing them- allows Opie to maintain feminine propriety while articulating her honest if subversive observations about society in the repressive political era depicted in the novel. Equivocation works as an expedient by which Opie manages her rebellion, which was not tolerated by her society since female rebels were associated with the French Revolution and deemed immoral. Opie's rebellion, reined in by indirection, presents a quasi-conservative outlook, which helped to secure not only her reputation but the publication of her work. Opie exposes the fragility of and injustice in social conventions and public opinion. Godwin’s concept of rational and affectionate companionship without the sanction of marriage, while excoriated as immoral, when practiced by Adeline and Glenmurray in the novel, is the only benevolent, sensible, and meaningful relationship within the fictional economy, though society spares no effort to persecute them. The British society and its measures to quell any radical impulses in the wake of the French Revolution, Opie implies, stunt Britain's social, political, and cultural progress and creates an infested environment, which not only contaminates its subjects but also endangers possibly its purest elements. In the novel, British society's multi-faceted measures to exclude perceived pollutants, such as reading women, radicals, fallen women, and racial others, are revealed to be misdirected attempts to rid presumed, superficial ills, while failing comprehensively to tackle the genuine elements of contamination such as patriarchal tyranny, libertinism, greed, and hypocrisy.

This article argues that the first non-utopian proposals to eliminate poverty through the universal provision of social insurance appeared in the seventeen-nineties. They formed part of a novel programme which linked the pursuit of equality with commercial society and a republican polity found both in Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) and in the so-called ‘social chapter’ of Tom Paine's Rights of Man: Part Two (1792). Little attention has generally been paid to the similarity between these proposals. Most immediately, this was the result of the common association of Condorcet and Paine with the Girondin party during the French Revolution. But as a new form of republican radicalism, it was also rooted in two major intellectual and institutional advances in the second half of the eighteenth century. The first was a more confident belief in the control over chance through the coming together of the collection of vital statistics and the mathematics of probability. The second was the great impetus given to positive future-oriented conceptions of ‘commercial society’ following Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Turgot's reforming liberal ministry of 1774–6. But neither of these developments was in itself sufficient to account for programmes of universal social insurance. This was the product of the radicalization of political thinking in the light of the American and French revolutions. As a result of Louis XVI's attempted flight to Varennes in 1791, the French had to consider moving to an American-style republic without a hereditary executive. Sceptics, however, most prominently the Abbe Sieyes, argued that it was impossible to transfer American institutions to Europe; the only result of attempting to abolish monarchy in Europe would be the formation of a new aristocracy which in turn would breed corruption and civil war. The Girondin answer to Sieyes attempted to demonstrate that a programme of progressive taxation, social insurance and universal education could enable the replication in Europe of the more equal social conditions of America.

1790 saw the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France – the definitive tract of modern conservatism as a political philosophy. Though women of the period wrote texts that clearly responded to and reacted against Burke’s conception of English history and to the contemporary political events that continued to shape it, this conversation was largely ignored or dismissed, and much of it remains to be reconsidered today. Examining the works of women writers from Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft to the Strickland sisters and Mary Anne Everett Green, this book begins to recuperate that conversation and in doing so uncovers a more complete and nuanced picture of women’s participation in the writing of history. Professor Mary Spongberg puts forward an alternate, feminized historiography of Britain that demonstrates how women writers’ recourse to history caused them to become generically innovative and allowed them to participate in the political debates that framed the emergence of modern British historiography, and to push back against the Whig interpretation of history that predominated from 1790-1860.

Because they were Marxists, the Bolsheviks in Russia, both before and after taking power in 1917, believed that the past was prologue: that embedded in history was a Holy Grail, a series of mysterious but nonetheless accessible and comprehensible universal laws, that explained the course of history from beginning to end; those who understood these laws would be able to mould the future to conform to their own expectations. But what should the Bolsheviks do if their Marxist ideology proved to be either erroneous or insufficient—if it could not explain, or explain fully, the course of events that followed the revolution they carried out in the country they called the Soviet Union? Something else would have to perform this function. The underlying argument of this book is that the Bolsheviks saw the revolutions in France in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 as supplying practically everything Marxism lacked. In fact, these four events comprised what for the Bolsheviks was a genuine Revolutionary Tradition. The English Revolution and the Puritan Commonwealth of the seventeenth century were not without utility—the Bolsheviks cited them and occasionally utilised them as propaganda—but these paled in comparison to what the revolutions in France offered a century later, namely legitimacy, inspiration, guidance in constructing socialism and communism, and, not least, useful fodder for political and personal polemics.

Journal Article Kenneth Margerison. P.-L. Roederer: Political Thought and Practice during the French Revolution. (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, number 73, part 1.) Philadelphia: The Society. 1983. Pp. 166. $12.00 Get access Margerison Kenneth. P.-L. Roederer: Political Thought and Practice during the French Revolution. (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, number 73, part 1.) Philadelphia: The Society. 1983. Pp. 166. $12.00. Jack R. Censer Jack R. Censer George Mason University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 89, Issue 2, April 1984, Page 452, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/89.2.452 Published: 01 April 1984

Book reviewed in this article: Death and the Enlightenment. Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth‐Century France. By John McManners. Etudes sur le XVIIIe siècle. Volume 8. Edited by Roland Mortier and Hervé Hasquin. The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment. By P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams. The Human Face of God. William Blake and the Book of Job. By Kathleen Raine, The Letters of Erasmus Darwin. Edited by Desmond King‐Hele. The Plays of David Garrick. Edited by Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann. Homer's Original Genius. Eighteenth‐Century Notions of the Greek Epic. (1688–1798). By Kirsti Simonsuuri. Evelina by Fanny Burney. Edited with an introduction by Edward A. Bloom with the assistance of Lillian D. Bloom. Feminism in Eighteenth‐Century England. By Katharine M. Rogers Philosophy and Ideology in Hume's Political Thought. By David Miller. Berkeley. By J. O. Urmson. Berkeley. By G. J. Warnock. Dean Tucker: Eighteenth‐Century Economic and Political Thought. By George Shelton. The Dynamics of Change: The Crisis of the 1750s and English Party Systems, By J. C. D. Clark. The Emergence of the British Two‐Party System 1760–1832. By Frank O'Gorman. In Defiance of Oligarchy. The Tory Party 1714–60. By Linda Colley. Augustan England: Professions, State and Society 1680–1730. By Geoffrey Holmes. English Society in the Eighteenth Century. By Roy Porter. The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800. By P. J. Corfield. European Textile Printers in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Peel and Oberkampf. By S. D. Chapman and S. Chassagne. The British Soldier in America. By Sylvia Frey. Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue 1793–1798. By David Geggus. Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739. By Colin A. Palmer. A Woman to Deliver her People. Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution. By James K. Hopkins. Origins of the ‘Forty‐Five’. By Walter Biggar Blaikie. The French Revolution: the Fall of the Ancien Régime to the Thermidorian Reaction, 1785–1795. By John Hardman, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution. The First Years. By Michael L. Kennedy. Napoleon's Continental Blockade. The Case of Alsace. By Geoffrey Ellis. The Philosophes and Post‐Revolutionary France. By John Lough. The Empire Unpossess'd. An Essay upon Gibbon's Decline and Fall. By Lionel Gossman Voyage autour du monde par la frégate ‘La Boudeuse’ et la flûte ‘L'Etoile’ en 1766, 1767, 2768 et 1769. By Louis Antoine de Bougainville. Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime. By Norman Bryson Diderot and the ‘Grand Goût’: The Prestige of History Painting in the Eighteenth Century (The Zaharoff Lecture for 1981–82). By Roland Mortier Rousseau after Two Hundred Years: Proceedings of the Cambridge Bicentennial Colloquium. Edited by R. A. Leigh. A Bibliography of Eighteenth‐Century Legal Literature. By J. N. Adams and G. Averley with assistance from F. J. G. Robinson. Beförderer der Aufklärung in Mittel‐ und Osteuropa: Freimaurer, Gesellschaften, Clubs. Herausgegeben von Éva H. Balázs Reisen und Reisebeschreibungen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert als Quellen der Kulturbeziehungsforschung. Herausgegeben von B. I. Krasnobaev Discourses on Art. By Sir Joshua Reynolds. Edited by Robert R. Wark.

Social philosophy is a branch of philosophy which studies social issues in a critical, radical and comprehensive manner. Since it was formulated, Social philosophy has deconstructed the public understanding in term of not all the creations under the sky directly regulated by the power of God forever and ever. Demolition of public understanding on a large scale occurred just as the emergence of the French revolution, which undermined the feudal social order and begin the process of democratization that generated the spectacular surprises, since no one had previously imagined that a social order which was supposed unchangeable and forever blessed by the will of God has been overhauled and replaced by thoughts of human being. This situation has been strengthen by the development of Frankfurt’s school which developed a critical social science which gradually has been spread to all over the world.

Book Review| April 01 1957 The French Revolution Seen from the Right: Social Theories in Motion, 1789-1799 by Paul Beik The French Revolution Seen from the Right: Social Theories in Motion, 1789-1799. [Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series—Volume 46, Part 1.] By Beik, Paul. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1956. Pp. 122. $6.00. Harold T. Parker Harold T. Parker Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1957) 56 (2): 251. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-56-2-251 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Harold T. Parker; The French Revolution Seen from the Right: Social Theories in Motion, 1789-1799 by Paul Beik. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 April 1957; 56 (2): 251. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-56-2-251 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1957 by Duke University Press1957 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

From the French Revolution onwards, constituent power has been a key concept for thinking about the principle of popular power, and how it should be realised through the state and its institutions. Tracing the history of constituent power across five key moments - the French Revolution, nineteenth-century French politics, the Weimar Republic, post-WWII constitutionalism, and political philosophy in the 1960s - Lucia Rubinelli reconstructs and examines the history of the principle. She argues that, at any given time, constituent power offered an alternative understanding of the power of the people to those offered by ideas of sovereignty. Constituent Power: A History also examines how, in turn, these competing understandings of popular power resulted in different institutional structures and reflects on why contemporary political thought is so prone to conflating constituent power with sovereignty.

Edmund Burke’s legacy has heretofore centered on his seminal work, The Reflections on the Revolution in France. However, Burke’s other contributions have been largely ignored. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to focus on Burke’s literary and political role in the British response to the French Revolution from 1790 until his death in 1797. This study is divided into four chapters. The first chapter contains a contextual background of Burke’s moral and political philosophy. It explains why Burke responded in the manner he did to the French Revolution. The remaining three chapters, in a chronological manner, trace Burke’s influence on the British government’s response to the French Revolution. These roughly six years can be divided into three approximately two-year periods. Chapter 3 analyzes the first period which begins in November 1790 and extends until January 1793. It encompasses the reaction to the Reflections, and ends right before the outbreak of war between Britain and France. The second period, lasting from February 1793 until July 1795, is examined in Chapter 4. Included in this timeframe are Burke’s dealings with the British government concerning war policy; this section ends with the invasion of Quiberon. Chapter 5 studies the third and final period which starts in August 1795 and continues to Burke’s death in July 1797. It witnesses Burke’s withdrawal from foreign affairs, and his investment in the Penn school for émigré children. Source material includes four volumes of Burke’s Correspondence, and uses several primary sources, including A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, Thoughts on French Affairs, Letters on a Regicide Peace, among others. Secondary literature sources are supplementally used to interpret the events and political thinking during that period of time. The findings show that Burke was responsible for a greater impact on the French Revolution than he is credited by most scholars. Regarded by most historians and political scientists as the father of modern Anglo-conservatism, Burke’s legacy should be amended to include his accomplishments following the publication of the Reflections, and his impact on British foreign policy.