History of Ideas

Ruskin often disparaged attempts to alleviate conditions in the cities, yet he financed the pioneering early housing experiments of Octavia Hill in London, and established a museum for working men in Sheffield. At the same time, he strove to promote the rural ideal and inspired the revival of some rural handicrafts. Both a self-proclaimed ‘violent Tory of the old school’ and a ‘communist’, the paradoxical John Ruskin, the leading Victorian art and social critic, inspired a younger generation with his political ideas and social experiments. A wide range of individuals, consciously indebted to him, engaged in social action designed to ameliorate the worst excesses of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British industrial capitalism. Progressive political thinkers and social activists answered Ruskin's challenge to confront the ugliness and corruption of Victorian society, and to reject the hypocrisy of the utilitarian philosophy which underpinned it. This book is the first study to approach Ruskin's legacy in terms of the institutional and organisational contexts in which his ideas flourished. It recreates the associational culture of a network of influence which was united by a shared enthusiasm inspired by one man. The Guild of St. George embodied his social challenge, and provided a point of focus for his most loyal disciples. Many of the Oxford undergraduates inspired by his lectures, and his practical scheme to rebuild the road at Hinksey, helped to found and guide the university settlements. Ruskin societies emerged in the large cities to promote the study of his work and to effect civic reforms on Ruskinian lines. Many of the pioneers of the nascent Labour movement developed their political consciousnesses whilst reading his work. In the early life and career of John Howard Whitehouse, parliamentarian and educationist, these strands of influence combined, helping him to become Ruskin's truest disciple.

The cardinal role of Anglo-Saxon libraries in the transmission of classical and patristic literature to the later middle ages has long been recognized, for these libraries sustained the researches of those English scholars whose writings determined the curriculum of medieval schools: Aldhelm, Bede, and Alcuin, to name only the best known. This book provides an account of the nature and holdings of Anglo-Saxon libraries from the 6th century to the 11th. The early chapters discuss libraries in antiquity, notably at Alexandria and republican and imperial Rome, and also the Christian libraries of late antiquity which supplied books to Anglo-Saxon England. Because Anglo-Saxon libraries themselves have almost completely vanished, three classes of evidence need to be combined in order to form a detailed impression of their holdings: surviving inventories, surviving manuscripts, and citations of classical and patristic works by Anglo-Saxon authors themselves. After setting out the problems entailed in using such evidence, the book provides appendices containing editions of all surviving Anglo-Saxon inventories, lists of all Anglo-Saxon manuscripts exported to continental libraries during the eighth century and then all manuscripts re-imported into England in the tenth, as well as a catalogue of all citations of classical and patristic literature by Anglo-Saxon authors.

The Bhagavadgita has lent itself to several readings to defend or contest various views on life, morality, and metaphysics. It has played an important role in the formation of nationalist discourse in India. The book examines the ways in which the Gita became the central terrain of nationalist contestation, and the diverse ethico-moral mappings of the Indian nation. It also discusses issues such as the relation between the nation and the masses, renunciation and engagement with the world, the ideas of equality, freedom, and common good, in the context of a nationalist discourse. It argues that the commentaries on this timeless text opened up several possible understandings without necessarily eliminating one another. The different applications of the Bhagavadgita in the nationalist discourse can be seen in the works of B.R. Ambedkar, Swami Vivekananda, and Mahatma Gandhi.

Examining the development of a secular, purely material conception of human beings in the early Enlightenment, this book provides a fresh perspective on the intellectual culture of this period, and challenges certain influential interpretations of irreligious thought and the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. Beginning with the debate on the soul in England, in which political and religious concerns were intertwined, and ending with the eruption of materialism onto the public stage in mid 18th‐century France, this book looks at attempts to explain how the material brain thinks without the need for an immaterial and immortal soul. It shows how this current of thinking fed into the later 18th‐century ‘Natural History of Man’, the earlier roots of which have generally been ignored. Although much attention has been paid to the atheistic French materialists, their link to the preceding period has been studied only partially, and the current interest in what is called the ‘Radical Enlightenment’ has helped to obscure rather than enlighten this history. By bringing out the importance of both Protestant theological debates and medical thinking in England, and by following the different debates on the soul in Holland and France, this book shows that attempts to find a single coherent strand of radical irreligious thought running through the early Enlightenment, coming to fruition in the second half of the 18th century, ignore the multiple currents which composed Enlightenment thinking.

In 1842, the German poet, Henrich Heine, wrote that the bourgeoisie, ‘obsessed by a nightmare apprehension of disaster’ and ‘an instinctive dread of communism’, were driven against their better instincts into tolerating absolutist government. Theirs was a ‘politics … motivated by fear’. Over the next 150 years, the middle classes were repeatedly accused by radicals of betraying liberty for fear of ‘red revolution’. The failure of the revolutions of 1848, conservative nationalism from the 1860s, fascist victories in the first half of the twentieth‐century, and repression of national liberation movements during the Cold War — these fateful disasters were all explained by the bourgeoisie’s fear of the masses. For their part, conservatives insisted that demagogues and fanatics exploited the desperation of the poor to subvert liberal revolutions, leading to anarchy and tyranny. Only evolutionary reform was enduring. From the 1970s, however, liberal revolution revived on an unprecedented scale. With the collapse of Communism, bourgeois liberty once again became a crusading, force, but now on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the armed forces of the United States, Britain and NATO became instruments of ‘regime change’, seeking to destroy dictatorship and build free‐market democracies. President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a ‘watershed event in the global democratic revolution’. This was an extraordinary turn‐around, with the middle classes now hailed as the truly universal class which, in emancipating itself, emancipates all society. The debacle in Iraq, and the Great Recession from 2008, revealed all too clearly that hubris still invited nemesis.This book examines this remarkable story, and the fierce debates it occasioned. It takes in a span from the seventeenth century to the twenty‐first, covering a wide range of countries and thinkers.

This study offers a major reinterpretation of medieval political thought by examining one of its most fundamental ideas. If it was axiomatic that the goal of human society should be the common good, then this notion presented at least two conceptual alternatives. Did it embody the highest moral ideals of happiness and the life of virtue, or did it represent the more pragmatic benefits of peace and material security? Political thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to William of Ockham answered this question in various contexts. In theoretical terms, they were reacting to the rediscovery of Aristotle's Politics and Ethics, an event often seen as pivotal in the history of political thought. On a practical level, they were faced with pressing concerns over the exercise of both temporal and ecclesiastical authority — resistance to royal taxation and opposition to the jurisdiction of the pope. In establishing the connections between these different contexts, this book questions the identification of Aristotle as the primary catalyst for the emergence of ‘the individual’ and a ‘secular’ theory of the state. Through a detailed exposition of scholastic political theology, it argues that the roots of any such developments should be traced, instead, to Augustine and the Bible.