Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment - Hardcover

Lerner, Ralph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807821365 ISBN 13: 9780807821367

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994

Synopsis

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.

Originally published in 1994.

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About this title

About the Author

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.

Reviews

Revolution "first must be made, in institutions, thinking and expectation and then defended against overt enemies without and covert enemies within," writes Lerner. Through the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexis de Tocqueville, Lerner (Univ. of Chicago) presents a "retrospective" study of the politics of the American and French revolutions. He chose these men because they had the clearest understanding of the crises in their respective countries. The strongest feature of this work is Lerner's examination and explanatoin of the writing of Lincoln and de Tocqueville in defense of their revolutions; the weakest is the segment on Franklin. The selections chosen from Franklin's early writings fail to prove Lerner's contention because they do not clearly show Franklin's revolutionary ideas. This work is designed for scholars in the field.
- Richard Hedlund, Ashland Community Coll., Ky.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807821365
• ISBN 13: 9780807821367
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 152