British Thinkers Research Articles

The Russian right and the dilemmas of party organisation

THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF THE UNITED STATES and the ideologists of the Russian Right had a lot in common. At first glance such a comparison seems absurd. After all, men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson created a democratic political system that supported the peaceful transfer of power from one political party to another for the first time in world history. The leaders of the Russian Right wanted to take their country back to a romanticised time when the people and Communist Party were united in their quest to fulfil Marxist-Leninist ideals. In spite of these differences, the two groups shared many common opinions in their conceptualisation of society and the role of a political opposition. Jefferson and his contemporaries felt that political parties would be sores on the body politic, a claim that their 'disciples' in the Russian Right repeated. The Founding Fathers drew their conception of parties and factions, terms that many writers used interchangeably, from the 18th century English thinkers who looked back on the upheavals of the 17th and early 18th century in their country. In contrast to most contemporary political analysts, who feel that a democratic political system requires more than one political party, the Founding Fathers felt that society should be based on unity and that parties would only create unnecessary conflicts. They assumed that a party would become the instrument of a small group of people who would use it to their own narrow benefit at the expense of the larger society. The early Englishmen and Americans felt that zeal for a party would necessarily divert its adherents from loyalty to the country as a whole. Party activists would agitate for party rather than national interests.1 Accordingly, the incumbent Federalists viewed Jefferson's rising Republican Party as an illegitimate organisation that would do the country great harm if allowed to rule. In this sense the incumbents identified themselves as the government, leading to the assumption that any attack on them was a blow to the public good. The ideologists of the Russian Right have adapted the same basic philosophy to their own conditions. They believed that Soviet society should be pervaded with concord and ruled through consensus. Opposition groups, in their view, supported the interests of the shadow economy and political forces who favoured a restoration of private property and capitalism. And, like the Federalists, the Russian Right felt that any attack on the incumbent Communist Party would hurt the Russian state.

D'Holbach et le «whig canon»

Pierre Lurbe : D'Holbach and the "Whig canon". D'Holbach's work shows the influence of late 17th and early 18th century neo-Harringtonian thinkers (in particular Trenchard, Gordon and Toland), known thanks to John Wilkes. His work seems to have a similar theme, namely that liberty and wealth depend on landowners, by definition independent and virtuous. But d'Holbach does not adopt the same point of view as the English thinkers, for a closer analysis reveals several important changes of meaning. The landowner is described by d'Holbach more as a producer in the Physiocratic sense than as a neo-Harringtonian aristocrat ; the former's virtue, essentially sociable, is opposed to the latter's, which preserves something fundamentally martial ; for d'Holbach the search for happiness replaces the defence of independence ; and he seems to favour a form of enlightened despotism rather than his predecessors' Polybian model of the balance of powers.

The Széchenyi Chain Bridge at Budapest

The Cover Design THE SZECHENYI CHAIN BRIDGE AT BUDAPEST JUDIT BRODY Ask any Hungarian who built the Szechenyi Chain Bridge (Szechenyi Lanchid) over the Danube in the center of Budapest and more than likely the answer will be: “Adam Clark, the Scottish en­ gineer.” Indeed, the square on the Buda side of the bridge even bears the name “Clark Adam ter.” Yet Adam Clark was only the resi­ dent engineer in the employment of the designer and contractor, Wil­ liam Tierney Clark.1 While Adam Clark endeared himself to the Hungarian nation, Wil­ liam Tierney Clark’s role was often ignored, and he himself was regarded, with suspicion and disdain, as an intruder. He was somewhat unfairly accused of not visiting the construction site often enough and in effect leaving the full responsibility in the hands of Adam Clark. This was not an unusual state of affairs, and a more likely explanation of William Tierney Clark’s unpopularity may be found in his antagonism toward the 1848—49 Hungarian rebellion against Austria.2 Adam Clark’s popularity, on the other hand, rests on his personal involvement with the whole engineering enterprise and with the Hungarian cause. In Britain the situation is reversed: W. T. Clark is well known for his Marlow Bridge (built 1824—27, reconstructed since, but in keepMs . Brody is on the staff of the Science Museum Library, South Kensington, Lon­ don. Grateful thanks are given to all who helped her, and especially to D. Bryden, Dr. J. V. Field, R. Hartnett, Prof. S. Stern, and the editor of this journal. ‘A biography ofW. T. Clark (1783-1852) appears in the Dictionary ofNationalBiogra­ phy, his obituary, in Minutes ofProceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers 12 (1853): 153-57. A recent biography of A. Clark (1811-66) is Horvai K.n6, Clark Adam (Buda­ pest, 1968). For a 20th-century account of the history of the bridge, see V. D. Bar­ ker, “Szechenyi and His ‘English Bridge,’ ” Hungarian Quarterly 4 (1938): 451-65. 2W. T. Clark made some scathing remarks in his “Some Account of the Progress of the Works, 1839-45,” in Supplement to the Theory, Practice and Architecture ofBridges, ed. G. R. Burnell (London, 1850), e.g., pp. 62, 63.© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/88/2901-0003$01.00 104 The Széchenyi Chain Bridge at Budapest 105 ing with its original appearance), and the old Hammersmith Bridge (built 1829—31), both similar to the Budapest suspension bridge, though on a smaller scale. Adam Clark’s name, however, is un­ known outside Hungary and does not conjure up any engineering monuments in British minds.3 Construction of the suspension bridge over the Danube between 1839 and 1849 was not just a typical example of the export of Brit­ ish technology. It also played a role in hastening social reforms in Hungary. Its significance was realized even at the time, as is sug­ gested in this observation made by a traveler: “It is hardly possible for us to imagine how the mere building of a single bridge between two towns should be a matter of such violent interest to the whole kingdom as to give rise to tediously protracted debates in the gen­ eral Diet.”4 The symbolic significance of bridges, both as representa­ tions of “the new technological world of metal” and as works of art, has recently been pointed out by David Billington.5 The Danube bridge also served as a symbol of a reform movement that was basi­ cally initiated by Count Széchenyi and as a symbol of the unity of the emerging nation. An independent kingdom in the past, Hungary had in time be­ come a constituent nation of the Habsburg Empire. Prior to 1848 it remained a feudal society where serfdom still existed and the nobil­ ity were exempt from all taxation. In addition, since the court was in Vienna, the upper classes were estranged from their native land to the extent that many could not speak the Hungarian language and considered it the peasants’ vernacular. In the 1780s Joseph II had attempted to implement some reforms, to introduce equality in...

Book Reviews

AbstractBook Reviewed in this article:The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading. By Jonathan Riley‐Smith.The English Judiciary in the Age of Glanvill and Bracton, c. 1176–1239. By Ralph Turner.Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe. By R. W. Southern.Crown and Nobility, 1271–1461. By Anthony Tuck.The Royal Household and the King's Affinity: Service, Politics and Finance in England, 1360–1413. By Chris Given‐Wilson.Doctors and Medicine in Medieval England, 1340–1530. By Robert S. Gottfried.Renaissance Reviuals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1576–1980. By Wendy Griswold.The Quakers and the English Revolution. By Barry bay.Let Your Words Be Few. Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth‐Century Quakers. By Richard Bauman.A Woman's Life in the Court of the Sun King: Letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz, 1652–1722. Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchesse d‘Orléans. Trans. and introduced by Elborg Forster.The French Army and Politics, 1870–1970. By Alistair Horne.The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. By Martin Gilbert.Industry and Politics in the Third Reich: Ruhr Coal, Hitler and Europe. By John Gillingham.The Wedemeyer Mission: American Politics and Foreign Policy during the Cold War. By William Stueck.Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920. By James T. Kloppenberg.China Through the Ages: History of a Civilization. By Franz Michael.The Bakufu in Japanese History. Edited by Jeffrey P. Mass and William B. Hauser.The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. By James Axtell.Colonial Augusta: “Key to the Indian Country.” Edited by Edward J. Cashin.The Southern Indians and Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1816. By Florette Henri.Smugglers & Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution. By John W. Tyler.Joel Barlow: A Connecticut Yankee in an Age of Revolution. By Samuel Bernstein.George Washington and the American Military Tradition. By Don Higginbotham.A Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Republic. By Henry Mayer.Loosening the Bonds: Mid‐Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850. By Joan M. Jensen.Zachary Taylor: soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest. [Southern Biography Series.] By K. Jack Bauer.Kit Carson: A Pattern for Heroes. By Thelma S. Guild and Harvey L. Carter.Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856–1905. By Barbara M. Brenzel.Farming the Frontier: The Agricultural Opening of the Oregon Country, 1786–1846. By James R. Gibson.New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America: Essays in Honor of Kenneth Stampp. Edited by Robert H. Abzug and Stephen E. Maizlish.Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862–1882. By Gerald David Jaynes.John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader. [Southern Biography Series.] By Robert E. May.Into The Wilderness With The Army of The Potomac. By Robert Garth Smith.Chinese in the Post‐Civil War South: A People Without A History. By Lucy M. Cohen.The “Spider Web.” Congress and Lobbying in the Age of Grant. By Margaret Susan Thompson.Dreams and Visions: A Study of American Utopias, 1865–1917. By Charles J. Rooney Jr.When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self‐Reconstruction in the South, 1865–1867. By Dan T. Carter (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1865. Pp. xiii, 285. $12.95.)Coxey's Army: An American Odyssey. By Carlos A. Schwantes.The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900. [Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science.] By John C. Teaford.Welfare and the Poor in the Nineteenth‐Century City, Philadelphia, 1800–1854. By Priscilla Ferguson Clement.Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900. By Roger Lane.The Life and Legend of Jay Gould. By Maury Klein.The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940. By Daniel Horowitz.Spirit of Vengeance: Nativism and Louisiana Justice, 1921–1924. By John V. Baiamonte Jr.Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee. By Robert J. Norrell.The Kansas City Monarchs: Champions of Black Baseball. By Janet Bruce.Hard Times & New Deal in Kentucky: 1929–1939. By George T. Blakey.Bluegrass: A History. By Neil V. Rosenberg.Economic Security and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1950. By Robert A. Pollard.Cold War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948–1968. By Thomas J. Noer.Social Change in the United States, 1945–1983. By William Issel.By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. By Paul Boyer.Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, The United States, and the Modern Historical Experience. By Gabriel Kolko.

The Cows in the Dark Night

In the far-off days before the first World War, the British journalMindwas full of articles by writers who thought of themselves as “Neoidealists”. So when theenfant terribleof the groves of Academic Oxford in that generation—a “pragmatic Humanist” by the name of Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller—played his most notorious practical joke upon his colleagues by publishing a mock-issue of the journal (under the titleMind!) he offered as a frontispiece “A portrait of the Absolute in the pink of condition”. Beneath a pale-pink semi-transparent tissue (which, except for its colour, was quite normal for the photographic plates in Victorian memoirs) one found a printed frame that embraced a perfectly blank white sheet of paper.

A Prolegomenon for the History of British Political Thought During the Nineteenth Century

They have lost all commanding views in literature, philosophy and science. A good Englishman shuts himself out of three fourths of his mind and confines himself to one fourth. He has learning, good sense, power of labour, and logic; but a faith in the laws of the mind like that of the Archimedes–a belief like that of Euler and Kepler, that experience must follow and not lead the laws of the mind; a devotion to the theory of politics like that of Hooker and Milton and Harrington, the modern English mind repudiates.

No Second-hand Religion: Thomas Erskine's Critique of Religious Authorities

After practicing law in Edinburgh for six years, Thomas Erskine (1788–1870) inherited the estate of Linlathen upon the death of his brother, James. Thereby freed to devote his time to theological reflection and writing, he wrote five books between 1820 and 1837 which stated opinions sharply at odds with the prevailing religious positions of early nineteenth-century British thinkers. In his first book,Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion, he maintained that the surest sign of Christianity's truth is not to be found in the traditional evidential sources–miracles, fulfilled prophecies, the veracity of the apostles, and so on–but in the intimate relation, or “fittingness,” which inheres between the mode of being recommended in the Bible and the moral, physical, and mental constitution of human beings. This emphasis on the internal and subjective aspects of religious experience characterizes all of Erskine's works and places him, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, at the forefront of a new way of theologizing in Britain which was to come to fruition in the so-called “Broad Church.” Erskine represents an indigenous British “turn to the subject” antedating the widespread appropriation of continental thought by English and Scottish theologians.

The dominant minority

John Stuart Mill and Sir Charles Wood are the British thinkers to whom I wish to pay special tribute in this paper. I must begin, however, by recalling that in London 30 years ago, I was accused of propounding a ‘natural law of white minorities’ and of being unduly deterministic in my prediction that the then still proposed Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, to be entrusted mainly to a white minority, could not succeed. It availed little to reply that my hypothesis of ‘Imperial inertia’, as I called it, and my forecast for the Federation, were made in the hope that the Federal constitution and its mode of implementation might be modified before it was imposed in 1953 by the government of the United Kingdom. I also urged that the key concepts ‘partnership’ and ‘trusteeship’ should be closely defined—it will be remembered that the Federation was formally dedicated to interracial partnership—and that careful regard should be given to what I termed ‘external partnership’, ‘internal partnership’, ‘external trusteeship’ and ‘internal trusteeship’, and to the important, dynamic relations between these concepts and policies, relationships which were scarcely recognized.

Le débat sur l'idée de ville parmi les économistes italiens au XVIIIe siècle

The concept of the town has evolved through the ages. During the XVII and XVIII centuries such a question encouraged an important debate between the French and English thinkers and economists, notedly William Petty, Fougerolle, Jean-François Melon, the Abbot of St-Pierre... This gave birth to the thoughts of the Italian économists of the XVIII century on the concept of the town. These writers took an interest in the problems of towns in considering the growth in their population and their demographic concentration. They attempt to distinguish the social difficultes or the dangers represented by urbanization. We find such points of view in the italian states where economic research is more fully developped, that is in the South and Lombardie-Venetie.

"The Two Cultures" revisited

relationship between science and the humanities has been a topic of debate ever since there was science. This dialogue was heightened and focused some 20 years ago by publication of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution by the British thinker C. P. Snow. this issue of C&EN (page 21) senior editor Wil Lepkowski takes a fresh look at the again active interface between those who study science and develop technology and those who tend to think in broader, if less mechanistic, human terms. Apparently there hasn't been a lot of solid progress on this front, in spite of a considerable amount of excitement. As Lepkowski writes, In general the humanities (and the humanities- based social sciences) make scientific argument murky. They complicate the mechanistic way science views reality. A good scientist shuns disorderly phenomena. He also writes that, In a sense, the claim can be made that the artists—the writer, the sensitive ...

The Veil of Chastity: Mary Astell's Feminism

The Veil ofChastity: MaryAstell’s Feminism RUTH PERRY One of the first English thinkers to consider systematically the place accorded to women in the culture was the politically conser* vative, religiously devout daughter of a Newcastle coal merchant named Mary Astell. Her conclusions about women are inseparable from her religious faith, her belief in political authority, and her com* mitment to philosophical rationalism. Nevertheless, this was the first issue on which she addressed the public, the first cause which drew her into print. By 1700 she had published 570 pages on the subject. This article is not intended to outline the intellectual sources of her feminism, her complicated allegiance to her own intelligence, to rea* son, or to absolute authority. Nor is it intended to spell out her at* titudes towards particular men, attitudes as various as the men them* selves: her unqualified admiration for Henry Dodwell, the scholarly nonjuror, her contempt for Shaftesbury and his sophisticated Deism, her comradely criticism ofJohn Norris and of Francis Atterbury, and so on. But there is in her feminism a component of sexual disaffec* tion, a rejection of physiological womanhood, and a satiric dismissal of men as a class, and it is the context of this attitude which this study explores. For it is not enough to recognize and label this strain 25 26 / RUTH PERRY in Astell’s thought without also making clear how unfavorable were the conditions in her culture to the biological female. And although the energy of Astell’s prose discloses something of the psychological motivation behind her solution to the problem of sexual relations with men, to a historian considering women’s alternatives in that era, the choice of celibacy—however repressive it may seem to post-Freudians —has the ring of emancipation. Jeremy Taylor, whom Astell read and admired, described chastity as “the circumcision of the heart, the cutting off all superfluity of nautiness and a suppression of all irregular desires in the matter of sensual or carnal pleasure.” It was grace which forbade and restrained sexual excess, by which he meant “fornication, adultery, . . . volun­ tary pollutions . . . unnatural lusts and incestuous mixtures,” as well as “all immoderate use of permitted beds; concerning which judg­ ment is to be made, as concerning meats and drinks: there being no certain degree of frequency or intention prescribed to all persons; but it is to be ruled as the other actions of man, by proportion to the end, by the dignity of the person in the honour and severity of being a Christian. . . J’1 He assumed that restraint made one a better Chris­ tian because of the way the ascetic habit of self-denial loosened one’s grasp on the material world and left more time to spiritual involve­ ment, to meditation and prayer. Mary Astell was comfortable with these intellectual conceptions of chastity, having been raised on seventeenth-century Platonism, and thought of love clarified of the flesh as the ideal—an ideal best ap­ proximated by religious feeling. Her uncle, who according to tradi­ tion directed what little formal learning she had, attended Cam­ bridge in the 1650s, during the heyday of the “Cambridge platonists.” Ralph Astell was first admitted as a pensioner to St. John’s College, but briefly emigrated to Emmanuel College, then very much under the sway of Ralph Cudworth, Benjamin Whichcote, and John Worthington. There were the moral philosophers who led the attack on Hobbes’ materialism by asserting the preeminence of ab­ solute spiritual values which proceeded from God and governed the universe. For them, the moral life consisted in discovering these in­ nate, immutable ideas by reason, and then trying to live by them. Mary Astell undoubtedly imbibed some distillation of this idealism Mary AstelVs Feminism / 27 from her uncle Ralph. She, too, believed that the intellect could as­ certain the moral dimensions of ordinary experience—and had responsibility to do so—not so much by identifying moral feelings as by thinking abstractly through to absolute moral ideas and judging action in terms of them. The appetites and senses had a different pur­ pose; they were to preserve the body, and could not be trusted to assess the spiritual meaning of experience. Steady...

Toward an Oral Poetics

WE SHALL NEVER DEVELOP an effective oral poetics if we begin by reading Homer. The Iliad and Odyssey come to us already written down, edited, and recopied an unknown number of times. They belong to an era, stretching right up through Middle Ages, when large quantities of written literature were memorized and recited aloud. Some of this literature escaped into folk tradition, as bits and pieces of literature always do. The Yugoslav guslar may well be, in effect, a sort of distant, humbled descendant of ancient upper-class Athenian schoolchild (described by Eric Havelock) who was taught to recite a written Homer but not to read it. If so, guslar has elevated verse epic to an oral art it may not have been when it started: he is no memorizer, but is instead able to compose on his feet. To memorize a story is not same as to remember it. A metrical framework fitted out with matching formulas may facilitate memorization, as Havelock suggests, but it does not follow from this that preliterate cultures of eastern Mediterranean (or anywhere else) were heavily invested in metrical expression. There may be verse epics in semiliterate whether ancient Greek or modern Yugoslavian, but when we turn to what Walter Ong calls oral cultures, verse epic does not exist. The quasi-metrical patterns suggested by West African riddles and some North American Indian song texts are never sustained for more than two or three lines. There are sung epics in non-Islamic Africa, but their texts are not metrical.' If we turn back to ancient written records, we find that oldest known literary documents are Sumerian tablets antedating earliest Greek writing by a thousand years, and they are not metrical.2 Claims that Homeric and Vedic verse forms come straight out of a nonliterate past rest largely on Classical and Brahmanical tradition, and are to be taken in same light as genealogical lore of royal families. For most part, narrators in primary oral cultures do not sing stories but speak them. They do not memorize stories, but remember them. They are not talking digital computers, programmed to retrieve stored formulas in right order. The digital computer lacks what we call in English mind's eye: a good narrator sees his story, and such ready-made phrases as he may use are not the substance of his thought but an aid in rapid verbal expression of that thought, not internal equivalent of a written text but a bag of tricks.3 Even taken by themselves, these ready-made phrases are highly vari-

ENGLISH WORDS IN EUROPEAN MOUTHS AND MINDS

ENGLISH WORDS IN EUROPEAN MOUTHS AND MINDS

Christians for Zion, 1600-1919

(1976). Christians for Zion, 1600-1919. Journal of Palestine Studies: Vol. 5, No. 3-4, pp. 123-141.

Historical Spectrum of Value Theories (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 247 These criticisms, though not without point, are not offered as decisively destructive. Bergson et le calcul infinitesimal is an excellent book: clear, well-reasoned, and extremely perceptive, especially in areas of Bergson's thought which have been misunderstood or, as often, neglected. Along with t3apek's Bergson and Modern Physics it makes an important contribution to the current reassessmeut of Bergson's philosophy. P. A. Y. GtrNrr~ North Texas State University Historical Spectrum o[ Value Theories. Volume II, Anglo-American Group. By W. H. Werkmeister. (Lincoln, Nebraska: Johnsen Publishing Co., 1973. Pp. xxiii -t- 370. $8.50) Edmund Husserl once regretted that mankind had created many philosophies but not one philosophy which would be universally recognized as the only right one. He might have forgotten how terribly monotonous philosophy would be under such an "ideal" circumstance. Also in philosophical thought variatio delectat, as the reading of the second volume of Werkmeister's Historical Spectrum of Value Theories reveals again. In the first volume of this work, published in 1970, its distinguished author showed the variety of colors the axiological problem reflects in the German-speaking world. In his second volume he lets us see different ways in which values have been interpreted by Anglo-American thinkers. In his Introduction Professor Werkmeister deals briefly with some value-theoretical Ideas of such Anglo-American thinkers as Royce, Bradley, Ormond, Moore, Santayana and Laird, starting his detailed analyses with a presentation of Wilbur Marshall Urban's theory of values. In the preface of his book Valuation: Its Nature and Laws (I 909) Urban explicitly acknowledged his indebtedness to the Austrians Meinong and Ehrenfels, the founders of the philosophy of values. According to Urban, the psychological equivalent of the value-predicate is always a feeling but one which actualizes pre-existent conative dispositions . Aesthetic experience, he thinks, is "characterized by repose in the object" (p. 19). Over-individual or social values are divided by Urban into economic and moral ones, the former being instrumental, the latter intrinsic. Werkmeister recalls the polemics between Urban and Herbert Schneider, whose arguments were based on pragmatism. The pragmatic value theory was developed by John Dewey, to whose "Instrumentalism" Werkmeister dedicates the second chapter of his book. According to Dewey, valuations occur in concrete situations when it is necessary to bring something into existence which is lacking or to conserve something which is threatened by possible disappearance. Valuations to him must be either ethical or economic . The special province of judgments of valuations are for Dewey conflicts between ends of conduct and means of attaining them. Values are not ascertained in but assigned to things. "The value of an economic object or of a moral act," Dewey wrote, "depends upon my desires and feelings, and therefore must remain a matter of my private appreciation " (p. 51). After having excluded the realm of the "aesthetic" from the sphere of values, Dewey reintroduced it in his book Art and Experience as a life function. Our experience of the work of art has a "satisfying emotional quality because it possesses internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movements." Werkmeister explains that insofar as this structure of the work of art is immediately felt, it is "aesthetic" in Dewey's sense. 248 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The book offers also a synthesis of Bosanquet's doctrine according to which values have their ultimate ground in the "nisus toward the whole," the seeing of all things in a harmonius way. It is the "vision of the whole" which gives us the sense of value, according to the famous British thinker. As for Maurice Picard, he considers values to be "relations of interest between conscious activity and environment" (p. 79). This thinker considers rightfully all instrumental values (which he calls "contributary") as objective, insists on their having degrees, but denies (likewise rightfully) degrees of truth. In Prall's "aesthetically oriented theory" we find the idea that aesthetic theory is an account not only of one type of value, but the essential nature of all value, all value being intuited and, in a way, "aesthetic." Charles G. Shaw's humanistic approach to values starts from the idea that in art humanity surmounts...

Little Dorrit in Italy

Research Article| March 01 1975 Little Dorrit in Italy William Burgan William Burgan Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1975) 29 (4): 393–411. https://doi.org/10.2307/2933367 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation William Burgan; Little Dorrit in Italy. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1 March 1975; 29 (4): 393–411. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2933367 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1975 By The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Development of Kant's View of Ethics (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 113 Reid's publications," writes Ross, "is a philosophically more adroit version of the central tenets advanced by Home" (p. 99). While Kames was not an interesting philosopher or even at times a very competent one, his reaction to the ideas of the English thinkers (particularly Locke, Newton, Berkeley, Clarke, Butler and the English deists), and to those of his cousin David Hume are of interest, for they afford an insight into the intellectual life of the Edinburgh literati, showing both the boldness of their speculations and their determination to solve in new ways the problems posed by empiricism, skepticism, and the growing secularism of their own society. One of the virtues of Professor Ross's account of the philosophy of Kames is that it shows how wide a hearing it got and traces the lines of its influence well into the nineteenth century. Sometimes Ross's argument seems strained because it goes beyond the information contained in the sources he is using or because the interpretation of these sources is questionable . For example, the Select Society's efforts to teach the Scots standard English were not so ludicrous as they have often been depicted and surely caused less mirth in Edinburgh than Ross suggests (p. 179 f). Thomas Sheridan, who lectured at Edinburgh under the Society's auspices, did not lecture to empty halls but to the fashionable 61ite of the city who alone could afford the subscription costs. Among those who heard him were some of the men who helped to found the University's Chair of Rhetoric and Belies Lettres during this time. To censure the efforts of the enlightened Scots to teach and use English is to forget how much they felt disadvantaged by their inability to speak in a manner like that of the English, with whom many of them had to compete for jobs, or to write in the language in which they did not habitually speak. The book contains a number of petty errors of detail, e.g., the giving to Lord Provost George Drummond a title which he never had (p. 198), the mistake in Andrew Crosbie's name (p. 313), and the often repeated story that Adam Ferguson charged with his regiment at Fontenoy when in fact Ferguson had not yet taken his place in it as chaplain (p. 168). Ross tells us that Hugh Blair had "great talents as a speaker" (p. 168), but it is known that Blair was almost incapable of speaking extemporaneously and for this reason took little part in the public debates of the General Assembly and refused to become its moderator. These are venial errors which do not much effect the value of the book, and they are errors which to some extent are explicable in terms of the sources which Ross has used. There are other lapses which seem to me more significant because they affect the characterization given to Kames and to the time in which he lived. Ross tells us that Kames was an original member of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society (p. 71), but in the first published list of the members of the Society printed in 1737 or 1738 Kames' name does not appear. Kames is said to have been one of the original members of the Select Society (p. 177), but the minute books of the Society show that he was admitted to the group only after it had been expanded to include all of the really notable and able men in Edinburgh. Kames' absence from the list of the founders of these two bodies suggests that he was perhaps not as well-respected and liked as one might think. There can, however, be no doubt that once in he proved to be an active member and an able and stimulating leader who did much to give direction to the clubs' works, and to enhance their standing in a city where both were somewhat suspect. ROOER L. EMERSON University of Western Ontario The Development o/Kant's View of Ethics. By Keith Ward. (New York: Humanities Press, 1972. Pp. xii -I- 184) This is an interesting and, in some respects, an important book. Its most significant thesis is...

L. T. Hobhouse as a Theoretical Sociologist

A glance at recent publications on the history of theoretical sociology in Europe would reveal that no one has yet attempted to write a full scale history of the early phases of that movement in Britain. There is certainly nothing that compares with Raymond Aron'sMain Currents in Sociological Thoughtfor British sociology. Aron's study, in fact, contains only scattered references to British thinkers and attaches little significance to them. Nor does this absence of Britishers result from some slight on Aron's part. While British sociology during the formative years of the discipline, roughly 1850-1930, did make some notable advances in its empirical branches, it produced no individual worthy to stand with theorists like Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto or Emil Durkheim.The reasons for this shortcoming on the British part are numerous and diverse. First, British thinking generally was concerned with more practical problems and not with theoretical matters and thus, automatically favored less abstract forms of social science. Additionally, those few British thinkers interested in problems of theory generally failed to recognize the significance of the advances of Continental mental philosophers and psychologists whose work has done so much to enrich twentieth century social theory. Yet there is a deeper and more subtle set of reasons interconnected with those aforementioned for the relative stasis of British social thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Through A Glass Darkly, Colonial Attitudes Toward the Native Americans

Is man a salvage at heart, skinned o'er with Manners? Or is salvagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel 's arse? The question posed so delicately by Mary Mungummory, the traveling whore a ' Dorset in John Barth's The SotW eed Fa ctor, reflected an increasingly serious concern of generations of English colonists in America. ] In a culture that saw itself as the apotheosis and vanguard of civilization, contact with the Indian cultures of the New World produced an unexpected and uncharacteristic uncertainty about its own identity. The Indian was important the English mind for what he showed civilized men they not and must not -a negative force in the cosmic duel between Darkness and Light. But he also exerted a positive force, what he was in and of himself, what his culture actually was, posed a threat and a challenge to English culture that struck at the very heart of its existence, its identity, and perhaps most of all, its integrity.' The most obvious threat to the English was, of course, physical. Although the first Indians the Plymouth Pilgrims encountered ran into the wood[s] and whistled [their] dog after them, the Englishmen still expected the worst. We know not how we should find or meet with any Indians, one of them said, except it be to do us a mischief. And they not disappointed. Three days later thirty or forty Nausets attacked a Pilgrim exploration party, having mistaken them Captain T homas Hunt's crew who had earlier kidnapped twenty-seven Indians and sold them slaves. After their superior firepower frus trated the attack, the English followed the Indians into the woods where they shouted all together two several times and shot off a couple of muskets to show the Indians that they were not afraid of them nor discouraged. This may have been a piece

John Bale and the Development of Protestant Hagiography in England

One of the consequences of the Reformation in England (as elsewhere) was that for Protestants, at least, the image of sainthood changed considerably. Erasmus'sColloquieshad poked fun at the kind of saint honoured by theGolden Legend; and Thomas Cromwell drove the point home in his Injunctions of 1536 and 1538. ‘New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth …’ and a new cause naturally creates its new heroes. The changing conception of sainthood in sixteenth-century England, culminating in Foxe'sActes and Monuments,has attracted not a little modern scholarly attention, as for example in Helen C. White'sTudor Books of Saints and Martyrs.But one pivotal figure in this development deserves more intensive study: John Bale (1495–1563), the famous antiquary, dramatist and protestant propagandist. In the 1540s Bale published works on two protestant ‘saints’—Sir John Oldcastle and Mistress Anne Askew—which did much to imprint the new definition of sainthood on the English mind. For these little tracts alone (and particularly in the light of Bale's later relationship with John Foxe) Bale's contribution to protestant hagiography invites a closer look.