Reason,ridicule and religion: The age of enlightenment in England 1660–1750

Abstract

Montesquieu and Adam Smith undertook deep analyses of the structural laws of agrarian civilizations and described the traps and tendencies which would prevent any final escape from constant toil and inequality. David Hume's work in certain of his ‘Essays’ complements their work. He shows the social, political, religious and economic conditions which had made England the most free and wealthy nation in the world by his time. Simultaneously he shows the strong forces which would ultimately lead to stasis even in the English case. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.     

For the Wealth of the Realm: the transformation of the public sphere in Swedish politics,c. 1434–1650

This article addresses the transformation of the representative public in late medieval and early modern Sweden. While recognizing the importance of Habermas' theory of the public sphere, the focus is on the progressive character of the royal administration and on how the interaction within the administrative setting eventually came to serve as a basis for political opinion. The interplay between local bargaining over taxes and political action at the national level is of critical importance. The state formation process served to empower new groups such as peasants and burghers, who eventually learned how to wield rational arguments in defence of their interests. This is demonstrated here by focusing on the interaction between local officeholders and the tax-paying peasantry.     

Radical politics and gay activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1974–1990

The recent success of the Marriage Equality campaign in the Republic of Ireland has highlighted the underdeveloped historiography of the Irish LGBT movement. Current historical narratives of the movement focus almost exclusively on David Norris’ legislative campaign, an initiative that was criticised by contemporary activists for isolating other voices in the community, such as those of feminist, socialists and republicans. The present study examines the influence of radical politics in the early movement for gay rights through oral history and documents from the Irish Queer Archive. In doing so, the study seeks to illuminate the historical darkness surrounding the movement’s emergence in the early 1970s and a period of demobilisation in the late 1980s, a trajectory that has been occluded in narratives that conclude with the 1993 decriminalisation of male homosexuality. The study argues that the movement was marked throughout its history by a lack of homogeneity and the persistence of internal conflicts.     

The exorcist? John Gray,apocalyptic religion and the return to realism in world politics

This review article discusses John Gray's new book, Black mass: apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia, against the background of the evolution of Gray's thought and in the context of contemporary world politics. In particular, it examines his account of the role of apocalyptic religion in world politics and his claim that to manage this we need to revert to the insights of political realism in international affairs.     

The golden and the brazen world: Papers in literature and history, 1650–1800

From the seventeenth century onwards, English Reformed ministers engaged in lively correspondence and publishing exchanges with men from different countries and Protestant traditions. In the eighteenth century, appreciation of their shared intellectual and cultural heritage and a desire to sustain the patterns for religious living it encouraged inflected the content and style of textual interactions among Halle Pietists, English dissenters and New England Congregationalists. Interest in the present state of religious life was also important, and therefore news about awakenings and materials for pastoral care circulated around Europe and North America through existing channels and by new means. Their encounters and the texts that they produced were mutually generative, and the language and manner of the participants' personal interactions were important features of published works. These personal associations, publishing activities and discursive styles can be understood as aspects of the literary sociology of a religious culture that valued intellectual and emotional engagements and sought to inculcate religion through education and friendship.     

Divided loyalties: Sovereignty,politics and public service in the Rhineland under French occupation, 1792–1801

In April 1792 the French Legislative Assembly declared war on the Habsburg Emperor Francis II. Within three years the forces of the Republic conquered the German‐speaking region to the west of the Rhine. Native public officials in the occupied areas faced the dilemma of whether or not to ‘collaborate’ with the invader. They confronted incompatible demands on their loyalties from the exiled Rhenish governments, the French, and the Rhineland's one‐and‐a‐half million inhabitants. The continuation of the revolutionary wars, and failure to reach an international settlement, placed public officials in the occupied areas in a state of limbo. Lacking any legal framework as a point of reference for their actions, and buffeted by the changing fortunes of war abroad and ideological conflict at home, Rhenish communities and the local officials who became their representatives were instead forced to rely on their own resources and strengths. Public officials in particular lived with the possibility of a return of the old regime and the threat of future investigation into their actions under occupation. These fears were only removed with the Treaty of Lunéville in 1801 and subsequent legal annexation of the left bank of the Rhine to the French Republic. Later attempts at assimilating the ‘New Frenchmen’ into the fabric of the Napoleonic state were nevertheless obstructed by continuing ties that bound former public officials to the German powers across the Rhine. The sovereign state's demand for an exclusive monopoly on the loyalty of all its subjects conflicted fundamentally with the Rhenish tradition of employment in the civil and military services of the major German dynasties and other European powers.     

Asymmetry of power and attention in alliance politics: the US–Republic of Korea case

While power asymmetry typically defines security relationships between allies, there exist other forms of asymmetry that influence alliance politics. In order to illustrate how they can shape policy outcomes that cannot be explained solely through the lens of power capabilities, the authors examine the role of relative attention that each side pays to the alliance. It is their central argument that since the client state has a greater vested interest in the alliance and given that attention depends on interest/need, the client state can leverage attention to get its way. By analysing two specific cases, the 2002 South Korean schoolgirls tragedy and the 2008 beef protests—instances where the South Koreans succeeded in compelling US concessions—the authors show that because the alliance was more central to the client state's agendas, there existed an asymmetry of attention that offered leveraging opportunities for the weaker ally. In this study, the authors emphasise the role of media attention as a key variable, and seek to contribute to debates on weaker party leverage in asymmetrical alliances.     

The growth of the pottery industry in England, 1660–1815

This paper summarizes the author's attempts to quantify the growth of the pottery industry in England before 1815. It begins by considering the nature and limitations of the large body of miscellaneous data about trade, including the exports of glass and earthware and the imports of china-ware. It continues by presenting some new calculations of the growth of the industry based on a count, at five-yearly intervals, of the numbers of potteries at work and their sizes. The results of these estimates are presented in nine tables in the appendix. The third part of the article uses this new evidence to analyse the patterns of growth from 1660–1815 and concludes that this provides a framework for further, and more detailed, studies.