
Revolutions Revisited
Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment
Ralph Lerner(Author)
The University of North Carolina Press
Published on 30. May 2011
Book
Paperback/Softback
152 pages
978-0-8078-5742-7 (ISBN)
Description
In this elegant extended essay, Ralph Lerner concentrates on the politics of enlightenment--the process by which those who sought to set minds free went about their work. Eighteenth-century revolutionaries in America and Europe, Lerner argues, found that a revolution aimed at liberating bodies and minds had somehow to be explained and defended. Lerner first investigates how the makers of revolution sought to improve their public's aspirations and chances. He pays particular attention to Benjamin Franklin, to the tone and substance of revolutionaries' appeals on both sides of the Atlantic, and to the preoccupations of first- and second-generation enlighteners among the Americans. He then unfolds the art by which later political actors, confronting the profound political, constitutional, and social divisions of their own day, drew upon and reworked their national revolutionary heritage. Lerner's examination of the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexis de Tocqueville shows them to be masters of a political rhetoric once closely analyzed by Plato and his medieval student al-Farabi but now nearly forgotten.
More details
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Chapel Hill
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight
234 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8078-5742-7 (9780807857427)
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E-Book
11/2000
The University of North Carolina Press
€24.49
Available for download
Person
Ralph Lerner is professor, Committee on Social Thought, at the University of Chicago. He is author of The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic and coeditor of The Founders' Constitution.