'French Revolution' tag archive

NEWS REVOLUTION THE VIEW FROM PARIS To discover the temper of a modem culture, it often pays to look at the advertising. Those guys spend an awful lot of money trying to find out about it. So, my first story from attending the World Congress on the French Revolution and other celebrations of the Bicentenary […]

of Oxford University’. Ayer’s radicalism, together with his enduring commitment to scientific philosophising in the manner of Russell, made the rest of the British philosopical establishment uneasy, and his philosophical work was widely regarded as obsolete by the 1950s. (His masterpiece, Language, Truth and Logic was published in 1936.) Still, he had ‘the qualities of […]

EDITORIAL THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY You will certainly have heard by now that 1989 is the bicentenary of the French Revolution. In many quarters there will be events – be they sentimental, thought-provoking, spectacular or brash – to mark the occasion. All in all, in this issue you will fmd various pieces referring to the […]

Who Made the French Revolution?: An Essay on Current Historiography Noel Parker In his most approachable work, The Coming of the French Revoiution,2 Georges Letebvre, the authoritative marxist historian of the Revolution, sub-divided it thus: an aristocratic revolution (the reform effort by the monarchy) which failed; a bourgeois revolution which succeeded, with the help of […]

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Tensions in Feminist Philosophy Jean Grimshaw The history of the reception and interpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a complex and fascinating one. 1 It was praised by many of her radical contemporaries, including Tom Paine and Mary’s husband, the radical anarchist philosopher and social theorist, […]

Hegel was born in 1770 and died in 1831. Thus he lived through the most revolutionary epoch the world had yet seen: the overthrow of the old regime in France, the revolutionary wars of Napoleon, his defeat, the restorations. Even at the time of Hegel’s death everything appeared still unsettled. History has still work to […]

became more apparent to him. Tern never acted wrongly ‘without feeling and suffering for it’. ~8 It will perhaps be evident to some readers that I am making a point parallel to the point which leads Wittgenstein to reject the possibility of ‘private’ assignments of names to referents. The parallel is cernplex, and hardly worth […]

Commentary Colonizing citizenship Françoise vergès ʻWe are not the victims but the children of a crime against humanity.ʼ [1] Commemorations are important events in France. If, on the one hand, they offer the government the opportunity to reinforce a ʻcertain idea of Franceʼ, on the other hand they give historians, researchers and activists the possibility […]

Two hundred years ago this month (January 2004), the French colony of SaintDomingue on the island of Hispaniola became the independent nation of Haiti. Few transformations in world history have been more momentous, few required more sacrifice or promised more hope. And few have been more thoroughly forgotten by those who would have us believe […]

The promise of justice Howard caygill Breaking the promise of justice is an act peculiarly repugnant to reason. It implies a double betrayal: not only of the promised justice but also of the justice of the promise. Nevertheless, how is it possible to do justice to the promise of justice? Especially when this very promise […]

The will of the people Notes towards a dialectical voluntarism Peter hallward By ‘will of the people’ I mean a deliberate, emancipatory and inclusive process of collective selfdetermination. Like any kind of will, its exercise is voluntary and autonomous, a matter of practical freedom; like any form of collective action, it involves assembly and organization. […]

The absent philosopherprince Thinking political philosophy with Olympe de Gouges Ariella azoulay Since the publication of Olivier Blanc’s biography of Olympe de Gouges and the first collection of her texts, compiled and edited by Benoîte Groult, [1] dozens of articles on various aspects of de Gouges’s work have been published. All of them share the […]