Aristocratic Politics Research Articles

Richard Champion and the Rockingham Whigs: The Aristocratic Politics of a Bristolian Quaker Merchant in the Age of the American Revolution

Abstract This article explores the political career and writings of Richard Champion (1743–1791), a Bristolian Quaker and merchant who acted as a local supporter and agent of the Rockingham Whigs. It aims to recover a forgotten aspect of Lewis Namier’s original ambition to understand eighteenth-century politics through the perspective of relatively ordinary people such as merchants and civil servants. However, against old Namierite assumptions, as well as much of the recent historiography on the post-1760 period in British politics which focuses on a dichotomous conflict between ‘radical Whigs’ and ‘new Tories’, this article restores the importance of the Rockingham Whigs. Importantly, it shows that a commercial Dissenter such as Champion could be fully attuned to the aristocratic and party-centred interpretation of British politics associated with the Rockinghamites and Edmund Burke, and thus encourages us to consider the idea of ‘aristocratic government’ in inclusive and eclectic ways. The case-study of Champion demonstrates that a close reading of political correspondence from the period can confirm, as well as destabilise, the Whig history of party.

Sean Gilsdorf, The Favor of Friends: Intercession and Aristocratic Politics in Carolingian and Ottonian Europe

Dans ce livre relativement bref, Sean Gilsdorf accomplit pourtant beaucoup. Il concentre son attention sur l’intercession, revelee principalement dans des lettres et diplomes, essentiellement sur l’Empire carolingien au ixe s. et sur l’Allemagne ottonienne au xe et debut du xie s. Mais, certaines des contributions les plus importantes de The Favor of Friends sont dues a la volonte de l’a. de sortir de ces limites. Ainsi, S. Gilsdorf introduit son analyse par une discussion sur la petition tel...

Greek History

This is a particularly rich crop of books on Greek history. I commence with two important volumes on citizenship in archaic and classical Greece. Traditional narratives of Greek citizenship are based on three assumptions: that citizenship is a legal status primarily linked to political rights; that there was a trajectory from the primitive forms of archaic citizenship to the developed and institutionalized classical citizenship; and that the history of citizenship is closely linked to a wider Whig narrative of movement from the aristocratic politics of archaic Greece to classical Athenian democracy.

Reflection upon mores and the Reconstruction Movement: A dilemma of the Yongjia Conservatives during the Post-Taiping Restoration

The law of power in Xia-Qi (chivalry) destroyed the hierarchical structure of the Imperial and produced an equalization so that the traditional governance was involved in crises. It was on the reflection upon the crises that the reconstruction prompted by literati during the Tongzhi and Guangxu periods was based. Confucian classics studies played an important role in shaping the elites’ ideology and individual wills. Associations of literati and kinship networks also contributed to the spread of these academic studies. Different judgments about the real relations between people of different social statuses caused conflicts in social transformation practices. For example, a higher-ranking group of literati in Wenzhou in southeast ZhengJiang province adopted a conservative scheme of reconstructing the patriarchal clan system and Confucian academic traditions in order to realize moralization in the imperial political structure. This conservative reconstruction, however, had an impact contrary to its initial goal of moralization: scholar-tyrants plundered finite land resources in the local mountainous society, while those disciples following the higher-ranking masters corrupted the academic atmosphere so that aristocratic politics became the principles dominating the private school of the prominent clan. In addition, immorality among close relatives in the prominent family ruined local customs. Superficially, it seemed that conservative moralization was obstructed and that local affairs managed by the literati had failed, but this created a new historical opportunity for the transformation of social structure in modern China. Social organizations that were based on general individual mind structures would play a fundamental role in the modern democracy in China.

The Favor of Friends: Intercession and Aristocratic Politics in Carolingian and Ottonian Europe. By SeanGisldorf. Brill's Series on the Early Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill. 2014. xv + 210 pp. €104. ISBN: 9789004264588.

The Favor of Friends: Intercession and Aristocratic Politics in Carolingian and Ottonian Europe. By SeanGisldorf. Brill's Series on the Early Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill. 2014. xv + 210 pp. €104. ISBN: 9789004264588.

Sean Gilsdorf, The Favor of Friends. Intercession and Aristocratic Politics in Carolingian and Ottonian Europe

No AccessSean Gilsdorf, The Favor of Friends. Intercession and Aristocratic Politics in Carolingian and Ottonian EuropeBrigitte MertaBrigitte MertaSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:Jan 2019https://doi.org/10.7767/miog-2015-0230SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail About Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Download book cover ISSN: 0073-8484eISSN: 2307-2903HistoryPublished online:January 2019 PDF download

Edgy

Edgy Jack L. B. Gohn (bio) The heart wants what the heart wants, as Woody Allen tells us. And the heart will generally not be denied. But that is only half the story. The loins also have wants, and they are just as inflexible as the heart. This turns out to be a problem for nearly everyone, because our hearts and our loins so often want incompatible things. The incompatibility was arrestingly explored by two brave and iconoclastic works about sex I saw a day apart in the same place, Theatre Row on 42nd Street. One was Toni Bentley’s adaptation of her own erotic memoir, The Surrender, a one-woman show with Laura Campbell standing in for Bentley. The other was Intimacy, by Thomas Bradshaw, staged by the New Group. The shows are brave for the forthrightness with which they deal with their subject. Sex and sexuality may be ubiquitous in the theater, but extreme honesty about these things is a lot rarer. Even today, for instance, there are usually limits to the depiction and the discussion of sex onstage. These shows, particularly Intimacy, simply brush almost all limits aside. [End Page 408] (Actual erections as part of the performance are, to pick an example, a new one on me—at least on that block of 42nd Street and in this century.) The shows are iconoclastic for the potentially unpopular things they say. One potentially unpopular thing said in The Surrender would be that a (mostly) straight woman loves anal sex. The iconography of the act (male superior, woman not) sorts awkwardly with the feminist ideals most of us like to think we share. Yet if Bentley has one theme, it is that her greatest release occurs precisely when she is most objectified, most, to use her own word, slutty. (“Anal sex is about cooperation. Cooperation in an endeavor of aristocratic politics, involving rigid hierarchies, feudal positions, and monarchist attitudes.”) One could take issue with this analysis by contending Bentley is “topping from the bottom” (in all senses of the word), but this facile formula really fails to do justice to Bentley’s feelings and views. No, if Bentley is saying anything at all about this contradiction, she is saying that the “sluttiness” (anal and otherwise) she practiced with the lover she called A-Man and with others may not have contradicted so much as ignored all elevated notions of human dignity, and that orgasm trumps theory. In so postulating, she is not falling into the opposite fallacy, the one championed by de Sade and Story of O, for instance, that the male-superior position truly bespeaks degradation, or that degradation is mystically liberating. Her point is simply that the loins want what the loins want. Bentley may be looking for what she calls “the joy that lies on the other side of convention,” but it is not the unconventionality per se that she craves. Just the joy. She has another leg up on those French writers, de Sade and Réage, as well. The 120 Days of Sodom and Story of O have to take place in neverlands, fantasized chateaux where perversity can flourish in a way that reality and the laws would never permit elsewhere. Bentley, by contrast, makes her argument out of what she claims is actual experience. Her claims are believable, illustrated with a thousand piquant details conveying the ring of truth, like the gym-rat environment where she meets A-Man (and a redheaded woman who serves for a time as their mutual lover), or the way she encounters a born-again Christian (whose backsliding she prompts) while cutting dowels at a Home Depot. The Surrender, then, seems dedicated throughout to honesty about sexual reality. Intimacy at least starts out the same way. This seven-character play, built around the ubiquity of masturbation, pornography, and the sexual fantasies that fuel them, is like Schnitzler’s La Ronde in depicting a circle of tangentially associated individuals whose sexual secrets end up linking them together in unacknowledged ways. The play takes for granted, as did Kinsey, that masturbation is pretty much a universal behavior, at least for men, and that pornography, the ultimate masturbatory...

Review of 'The Favor of Friends: Intercession and Aristocratic Politics in Carolingian and Ottonian Europe'

Review of 'The Favor of Friends: Intercession and Aristocratic Politics in Carolingian and Ottonian Europe'

ICHIZAWA Tetsu, Studies in the history of aristocratic politics in medieval Japan, Tokyo, 2011

ICHIZAWA Tetsu, Studies in the history of aristocratic politics in medieval Japan, Tokyo, 2011

Aristocratic Politics and the Crisis of Scottish Kingship, 1286–96

In the ten years from 1286 Scotland experienced a crisis of royal succession and sovereignty which by 1296 seemed to have left it a conquered land in the hands of the English king. The activities of Scotland's leading magnates and prelates in this period have been analysed in terms of the divisive effects of a disputed royal succession and of the defence of collective liberties as a self-conscious community of the realm. However, as with political crises in other medieval realms, the leaders of this community also acted as individual lords with concerns of land, lordship and office. Such concerns were normal features of political life but between 1286 and 1296 had to be resolved in exceptional circumstances of interregnum and the loss of sovereignty. Events which derived from the interplay of aristocratic politics included the murder of Duncan, earl of Fife, the legal dispute over the lands of Macduff and rivalries between leading Hebridean lords. Issues like these fed into and shaped the issues confronting the Scottish guardians and King John and were significant elements in the crisis which engulfed the realm.

V Plautus

If Plautus had a real name, it seems never to have been known or inquired after. ‘Titus Maccius Plautus’ means something like ‘Willy McBozo Greasepaint’, and the disquieting proliferation of variants in the manuscripts is the equivalent of indecision over whether ‘McBozo’ should be spelled with a ‘Mac-’ and a small B. Plautus is a variant form of planipes (‘flatfoot’), attested as a nickname for performers in the barefoot Latin mime; Maccius means ‘son of Maccus’, the buffoonish hero of the Oscan fabula Atellana; while even the innocuous-looking praenomen Titus was used as a pet name for the male organ of business. The strong theatrical connections are nevertheless suggestive in the light of the ancient biographical tradition on Plautus, which is a shaky-looking edifice, but on one striking central point, there seems never to have been any doubt in antiquity: unlike other early Roman dramatists, Plautus came to the writing of plays not as a poet but as a professional man of the theatre. In contrast to his contemporaries Naevius and Ennius, he specialized in a single dramatic genre, and it may be his indifference to epic and tragedy in particular that kept him out of the aristocratic patronage and politics in which the careers of others were enmeshed.

Nietzsche: Virtue Ethics. . . Virtue Politics?

Aristotelian notion of megalopsychia found in Nicomachean Ethics and the figure of the Ubermensch. I will approach this connection in a variety of ways in the first section of my essay and will show how we must go beyond Kaufmann. If one chooses to dismiss the connection between Aristotle’s and Nietzsche’s ethics, as I will do, this does not mean that Nietzsche’s ethics cannot be read as an instance of virtue ethics. In the second section, I will articulate how it is possible to interpret the ethical ideas of Nietzsche as forming a type of virtue ethics that focuses on the character development of the agent. I will define virtue ethics and show how Nietzsche can be seen as a virtue ethicist. I will explain how he shares the critical moment found in the revival of virtue ethics mostly articulated in the twentieth century and also how he shares in the constructive program found therein. 3 In a third section, I will address the problem that awaits those who want to read Nietzsche generously, as I do, as a virtue ethicist. This problem arises with respect to his aristocratic politics found in certain texts. It will then become clear that an articulation of his ethical ideas with respect to his political ideas is problematic. I will attempt to solve this problem, though my proposed solution will emphasize a certain part of the corpus while necessarily overlooking another.

Aristocratic Faction and Reformist Politics in Eighteenth-Century Hampshire: The Election of December 1779

David Underdown examines the 1779 parliamentary election in the English county of Hampshire. He explores the political context—the rivalry between the two dukes, of Bolton and of Chandos, and how their conflict was transformed in the 1770s by events in America. Bolton’s candidate, Clarke Jervoise, made a populist appeal to middle-class voters who were sympathetic to the Americans, and also demanded reform of the allegedly corrupt political system in England.Worsley, Chandos’candidate, in contrast, supported Prime Minister North’s policies on both counts: tough coercion against the American rebels, and a firm denial that the parliamentary system needed any kind of reform. Through an analysis of newspaper reports, election pamphlets, and ballads, the significance of the reformers’electoral victory is explained, as well as its place in the wider national debate over political reform in Britain. aristocratic faction and reformist politics 629 77. The tracts and songs from 1790 are printed in “Hampshire Whig Garland”[1790]. For the April 1797 county meeting, see Hampshire Repository, 1:11–13. That a recognizable Bolton interest still held together is apparent from the voting in the contested election of a County Treasurer at the Midsummer Quarter Sessions in 1796. Bonham, Russell, Thomas Ridge, and Charles Powlett were all on one side; the Tory m.p.s Heathcote and Chute, John Penton of Winchester, and several of the more conservative clergy on the other; ibid., 2:38–39. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.230 on Tue, 07 Jun 2016 05:34:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 157.55.39.230 on Tue, 07 Jun 2016 05:34:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The Roman Matron in Britain: Female Political Influence and Republican Response, ca. 1750–1800

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Roman Matron in Britain: Female Political Influence and Republican Response, ca. 1750–1800*Philip Hicks Philip HicksSaint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana Search for more articles by this author Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IndianaPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 77, Number 1March 2005 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/429428 Views: 123Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref © 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Select Bibliography, (Jan 2017): 191–222.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118561652.biblioBruce Buchan, Lisa Hill Affection, Interest and Office in Early Modernity, (Jan 2014): 99–124.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316615_5Amy Culley Reading the Past, (Jan 2014): 34–52.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332646_3BENJAMIN DABBY HANNAH LAWRANCE AND THE CLAIMS OF WOMEN'S HISTORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND, The Historical Journal 53, no.33 (Aug 2010): 699–722.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X10000257

French salons: high society and political sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848

Among the most enduring of French cultural institutions, the salon, is among the most misunderstood. Seen primarily as a venue for apolitical social gatherings, the salon's influence is generally believed to have ended during the French Revolution. In French Salons, Steven Kale challenges conventional thinking about the salon. Drawing on an impressive range of primary sources, he offers a nuanced history of this institution from the eighteenth century through the Revolution of 1848 which emphasizes continuity and evolution over disjuncture and highlights its shifting political character and relevance. Salons, Kale shows, originally provided opportunities for the exchange of literary and philosophical ideas among the French aristocracy. Central to the maintenance of salon culture were salonnieres, aristocratic women such as Madame de Stael who opened their homes to fellow elites and nurtured a sociability that united the members of high society. Salons provided ready-made venues for aristocratic politics during the early years of the French Revolution, when salons were transformed into places where the upper classes could express their political opinions and concerns. Even at the height of the Terror, salons did not dissolve but, rather, were displaced as aristocrats moved their social networks of influence to such cities as Coblenz, Brussels, and London. Napoleon sought to manipulate salon culture for his own ends, but with his fall from power, salons reemerged and proliferated. Although never intended to serve as political clubs, salons became informal sites for the cultivation of political capital and the exchange of political ideas during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy. By 1848, the conditions that sustained aristocratic sociability declined, and salons became increasingly marginal to French public life. At the same time, new political institutions-parties, the press, legislative bodies-emerged that more effectively disseminated and shaped political opinion and led to real political change. Challenging many of the conclusions of recent historiography, including the depiction of salonnieres as influential power brokers, French Salons offers an original, penetrating, and engaging analysis of elite culture and society in France before, during, and after the Revolution.

The Relevance of Nietzsche to Democratic Theory: Micropolitics and the Affirmation of Difference

This paper argues that Nietzsche presents an ontology of excess that, by problematizing the logic of identity, can positively contribute to democratic theory and practice. This ontology is missed by a wide range of interpreters who try to depoliticize Nietzsche's thought, align it with the agonisms of contemporary mass democracy, or re-align it with an aristocratic politics of fixed hierarchy. While Nietzsche himself may not extend this ontology onto the political domain, the writings of Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate how it can provide greater appreciation of the subtleties and complexities of power relations that operate at a micropolitical level.

Aristocratic Houses and Radical Politics: Historical Fiction and the Time-Slip Story in E. Nesbit's "The House of Arden.".

Linda Hall is Senior Lecturer in English at Trinity College, Carmarthen, Wales, U.K. She is the author of two books: Poetry for Life: A Practical Guide to Teaching Poetry in the Primary Years (1989) and An Anthology of Poetry by Women: Tracing the Tradition (1994), both published by Cassell. She reviews regularly for The Use of English and has written for The Times Educational Supplement, The Times Higher Education Supplement, and other professional journals. She is currently working on a book on teaching literature.

Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians

Et virum bonum quom laudabant, ita laudabant, bonum agricolam bonumque colonum.—Cato,De agri culturaIn 1578 Hubert Languet wrote to his young protegee Philip Sidney concerning the latter's plan to assist the Low Countries in their fight against Spain. Surprisingly, the old republican Calvinist monarchomach vetoed the idea, bluntly informing the impulsive teenager that “you and your fellows, I mean men of noble birth, consider that nothing brings you more honour than wholesale slaughter, and you are generally guilty of the greatest injustice.” This hostile assessment of the aristocratic warrior ethos — what Languet derides as “mere love of fame and honour and … displaying your courage” — bears witness to a major ideological upheaval of the early modern period: the attack on the aristocratic politics of violence and, to quote another Elizabethan, “glory got by courage of manhood.”

Medical Protestants: The Eclectics in American Medicine, 1825-1939.

John S. Haller, Jr., provides the first modern history of the Eclectic school of sectarian medicine. The Eclectic school (sometimes called the American School) flourished in the mid-nineteenth century when the art and science of medicine was undergoing a profound crisis of faith. At the heart of the crisis was a disillusionment with the traditional therapeutics of the day and an intense questioning of the principles and philosophy upon which medicine had been built. Many physicians and their patients felt that medicine had lost the ability to cure. The Eclectics surmounted the crisis by forging a therapeutics based on herbal remedies and an empirical approach to disease, a system independent of the influence of European practices. Although rejected by the Regulars (adherents of mainstream medicine), the Eclectics imitated their magisterial manner, establishing two dozen colleges and more than sixty-five journals to proclaim the wisdom of their theory. Central to the story of Eclecticism is that of the Eclectic Medical Institute of Cincinnati, the mother institute of reform medical colleges. Organized in 1845, the school was to exist for ninety-four years before closing in 1939. Throughout much of their history, the Eclectic medical schools provided an avenue into the medical profession for men and women who lacked the financial and educational opportunities the Regular schools required, siding with Professor Martyn Paine of the Medical Department of New York University, who, in 1846, had accused the newly formed Medical Association of playing aristocratic politics behind a masquerade of curriculum reform. Eventually, though, they grudgingly followed the lead of the Regulars by changing their curriculum and tightening admission standards. By the late nineteenth century, the Eclectics found themselves in the backwaters of modern medicine. Unable to break away from their botanic bias and ill-equipped to support the implications of germ theory, the financial costs of salaried faculty and staff, and the research implications of laboratory science, the Eclectics were pushed aside by the rush of modern academic medicine.

:Ceremony and Civility in English Renaissance Prose

Ceremony and Civility in English Renaissance Prose analyzes the emergence of civil prose in texts of the early modern period and defends English Renaissance writers against the current attack on their aristocratic politics. Using Thomas More's History of King Richard III, Philip Sydney's Defense of Poetry, Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, Anne Hall demonstrates the emerging differentiation of civil and ceremonial prose in the early modern period. These works combine ceremonial discourse, acknowledging such traditional values as a God-centered world, and civil prose with its circumspections and irony, thus revealing a philosophical awareness of the complexity of moral and political questions. Since the 1970s, there have been two chief arguments about Renaissance literature. The first is that most Renaissance writers used traditional forms to bolster authority and that they should be regarded with suspicion. The second is that some Renaissance writers altered traditional forms to subvert authority and that they should be admired. Anne Hall contends that there is an alternative position-that many Renaissance writers used tradition to bolster authority and that their versions of tradition and authority deserve a defense that responds to current attacks on their racism, violence, and colonialist repression in texts that were once thought to be about love and education. Hall argues that Renaissance writers could not foresee the ways in which they would need to defend their position against Enlightenment attack, and she supplies what she believes would have been their defense, concluding that such Renaissance discourse must not be considered solely on a historical basis but also from a philosophical viewpoint.