The Constitutional Theories of Thomas Paine

1946 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Meng
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Common People ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Great Ability ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Common

The latter half of the eighteenth century was a period of tremendous social, political, and economic fermentation. Much of our contemporary civilization was shaped by the forces released during those five decades. Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Germans of great ability and deserved renown had written and were writing of the rights of man and of the citizen. More than ever before in the history of the modern world thought was being given to the lot of the common people. In America, and later in France, Thomas Paine epitomized this liberal intellectual trend in words that have been adopted as classic expressions of the inherent value of the human personality.Unfortunately, the phenomenal growth of industrial capitalism during he nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused the new bourgeois ruling classes to lose sight of the basic human values stressed so emphatically by the eighteenth-century intellectuals.

The Birth of Democracy

1957 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-61
Author(s):  
Christopher Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Modern World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Market Place ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Common People ◽  
Considerable Difficulty ◽  
Democratic Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Revolution

The origins of modern democracy are so closely bound up with the history of liberalism that it is a matter of considerable difficulty to disentangle them and to distinguish their distinctive contributions to the common political tradition of modern Western culture. For this question also involves that of the relation between the three revolutions, the English, the American, and the French, which transformed the Europe of the ancien régime, with its absolute monarchies and state churches, into the modern world. Now all these three revolutions were liberal revolutions and all of them were political expressions of the movement of the European enlightenment in its successive phases. But this movement was not originally a democratic one and it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the democratic ideal was clearly formulated. On the continent of Europe the revolution of ideas preceded the political and economic revolutions by half a century, and the revolution of ideas was not in any sense of the word a democratic movement; it was the work of a small minority of men of letters who looked to the nobles and the princes of Europe rather than to the common people, and whose ideal of government was a benevolent and enlightened absolutism, like that of Frederick the Great or the Empress Catherine of Russia. There was an immense gulf between the ideas of Voltaire and Turgot, of Diderot and D'Alembert, and the opinions of the average man. The liberalism of the philosophers was a hothouse growth which could not be easily acclimatized to the open air of the fields and the market place.

Strange Vernaculars

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Sorensen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Literature ◽  
English Language ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
British History ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Common People ◽  
National Community ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

While eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied, less well-known are the era's popular collections of odd slang, criminal argots, provincial dialects, and nautical jargon. This book delves into how these published works presented the supposed lexicons of the “common people” and traces the ways that these languages, once shunned and associated with outsiders, became objects of fascination in printed glossaries, and in novels, poems, and songs. The book argues that the recognition and recovery of outsider languages was part of a transition in the eighteenth century from an aristocratic, exclusive body politic to a British national community based on the rhetoric of inclusion and liberty, as well as the revaluing of a common British past. These representations of the vernacular made room for the “common people” within national culture, but only after representing their language as “strange.” Such strange and estranged languages, even or especially in their obscurity, came to be claimed as British, making for complex imaginings of the nation and those who composed it. Odd cant languages, witty slang phrases, provincial terms newly valued for their connection to British history, or nautical jargon repurposed for sentimental connections all toggle, in eighteenth-century jest books, novels, and poems, between the alluringly alien and familiarly British. Shedding new light on the history of the English language, the book explores how eighteenth-century British literature transformed the patois attributed to those on the margins into living symbols of the nation.

scholarly journals Fra eneveldets scene mot representative forsamlinger: visitasen som offentlig arena i Norge, ca. 1750–1850

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 183-211
Author(s):  
Trond Bjerkås
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Public Participation ◽  
General Public ◽  
Common People ◽  
Lay Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Control Apparatus ◽  
The Church

From the Stage of State Power to Representative Assembly?: The Visitation as a Public Arena, 1750–1850In the eighteenth century, the bishops’ visitations to dioceses constituted an important part of the control apparatus of the Church and the absolutist state. The article examines visitations in Norway in terms of public arenas, where the common people interacted with Church officials. During the period 1750 to 1850, the visitations were gradually transformed from arenas in which the state manifested its power towards a largely undifferentiated populace, to meeting places that resembled representative assemblies with both clerical and common lay members. Thus, it adapted to new forms of public participation established by the reforms of national and local government in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the process amounted to an elitization, because a few representatives replaced of the congregation as a whole. It is also argued that parish churches in the eighteenth century functioned as general public forums with a number of other functions in addition to worship, such as being places of trade and festivities. This seems to change in the nineteenth century, when churches became more exclusively religious arenas. The transition can be seen in the context of new forms of participation in Church matters. Many clerics wanted greater participation by sections of the commoners, in order to strengthen control in moral and religious matters.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole von Germeten
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Government Regulation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

The conclusion surveys how in nineteenth-century Mexico, Europe, and regions around the world under European colonial rule, sex work took place in an environment of increasing government intervention, a phase in the history of sexuality that extends into the twenty-first century. The concern about disease control took on a more scientific, sanitary tone in the eighteenth century. This discourse remained critical to sex work law, as it does to the present day. Through prolific regulations, scientific studies, works of literature, and statements made by sex workers themselves, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw an enormous increase in the archiving and inscribing of women who sold sex. But their roles remained the same: either pathetic victims (usually of non-whites or non-Christians or other feared populations), lascivious and scandalous disturbers of the peace, or dehumanized and horrific threats to public health. Imperialism and international conceptions of race/gender difference led to increasing government regulation in locations as dispersed as the disappearing Spanish American viceroyalties, extending outwards to Europe, Asia, and Oceania.

Contract

2019 ◽  
pp. 369-385
Author(s):  
John Baker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Standard Form ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
Third Party ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Privity Of Contract

This chapter explores some lines of development in contract law after 1600. First there were questions flowing from the decision in Slade’s Case – the pleading formulae known as the ‘common counts’ in indebitatus assumpsit were quickly settled and the perjury problems after the disuse of wager of law were dealt with in the Statute of Frauds 1677. Attempts to rationalize consideration in the eighteenth century were unsuccessful save that it became distinct from the requirement of an intention to be bound. The chapter traces the history of privity of contract and of the various attempts to give remedies to third-party beneficiaries. It then discusses the implication of terms into contracts, the difference between conditions and warranties, exclusion clauses, and the problems occasioned by standard-form contracts.

The Archaeology of the French Revolution

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Professional Discipline ◽  
The People ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of both nationalism and archaeology as a professional discipline. The aim of this chapter is to show how this apparent coincidence was not accidental. This discussion will take us into uncharted territory. Despite the growing literature on archaeology and nationalism (Atkinson et al. 1996; Díaz-Andreu & Champion 1996a; Kohl & Fawcett 1995; Meskell 1998), the relationship between the two during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has yet to be explored. The analysis of how the past was appropriated during this era of the revolutions, which marked the dawn of nationalism, is not helped by the specialized literature available on nationalism, as little attention has been paid to these early years. Most authors dealing with nationalism focus their research on the mid to late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the ideas that emerged during the era of the revolutions bore fruit and the balance between civic and ethnic nationalism (i.e. between a nationalism based on individual rights and the sovereignty of the people within the nation and another built on the common history and culture of the members of the nation) definitively shifted towards the latter. The reluctance to scrutinize the first years of nationalism by experts in the field may be a result of unease in dealing with a phenomenon which some simply label as patriotism. The term nationalism was not often used at the time. The political scientist Tom Nairn (1975: 6) traced it back to the late 1790s in France (it was employed by Abbé Baruel in 1798). However, its use seems to have been far from common, to the extent that other scholars believed it appeared in 1812. In other European countries, such as England, ‘nationalism’ was first employed in 1836 (Huizinga 1972: 14). Despite this disregard for the term itself until several decades later, specialists in the Weld of nationalism consider the most common date of origin as the end of the eighteenth century with the French Revolution as the key event in its definition.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
S. Elizabeth Penry
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Common People ◽  
New Towns ◽  
The Common ◽  
Planned Towns ◽  
The Town ◽  
Over Time

In the sixteenth century, Spaniards forcibly resettled Andeans into planned towns called reducciones. Andeans adapted the political and religious institutions of the new towns, the cabildo (town council) and the cofradías (confraternities), and made them their own, organizing them by the Andean social form, the ayllu. Over time, political legitimacy and authority within towns was transferred from traditional native hereditary lords, the caciques, to the common people of the town, who called themselves the común. Although a Spanish word, común took on Andean meaning as it was the word used to translate terms for collective land and the collective people of a town. It became a recognized shorthand for a political philosophy empowering common people. In the late eighteenth-century era of Atlantic Revolutions, the común rose up against its caciques, in an Enlightenment-from-below moment of popular sovereignty.

Bearing Witness

2018 ◽  
pp. 184-217
Author(s):  
Santana Khanikar
Keyword(s):  
State Of Exception ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Common People ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

This chapter discusses conflict and violence in Lakhipathar, over a period of two decades, drawing on oral histories from the people of Lakhipathar. Listening to the narratives of past sufferings here has worked not merely a tool to know what happened to the narrators in the past but it also gives a key to analyse why and how they live in the present. Apart from offering evidence towards the larger argument of the work, this part of the book has also aimed towards opening a conversation on some buried and forgotten moments in the history of the Indian state that resemble what could be called an Agambenian ‘state of exception’. The dense narratives give a picture of the collaboration and deceit, revenge and violence, suspicion and fear in war-torn Lakhipathar and how the common people negotiated their ways through these.

Francisco de Combés’s History of Mindanao and Jolo (1667)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
Common People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

In this excerpt from his history of the southern Philippines and of the efforts of the Jesuits to convert its inhabitants, Francisco de Combés (1620–1665) paints a sensationalist image of the religious life of Mindanao, emphasizing the supposed atheism of the common people and the practice of sorcery by their Muslim rulers. The heroic Jesuits operating out of the Spanish settlement of Zamboanga struggle with the volatile politics of the Islamicate south in their heroic efforts to bring Christianity to people that they misrecognize as “moors.” Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez places the text in the context of Spain’s troubled relationship with Mindanao.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document