Many modern conservatives and feminists trace the roots of their ideologies, respectively, to Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, and a proper understanding of these two thinkers is therefore important as a framework for political debates today. According to Daniel O’Neill, Burke is misconstrued if viewed as mainly providing a warning about the dangers of attempting to turn utopian visions into political reality, while Wollstonecraft is far more than just a proponent of extending the public sphere rights of man to include (...) women. Rather, at the heart of their differences lies a dispute over democracy as a force tending toward savagery or toward civilization. Their debate over the meaning of the French Revolution is the place where these differences are elucidated, but the real key to understanding what this debate is about is its relation to the intellectual tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose language of politics provided the discursive framework within and against which Burke and Wollstonecraft developed their own unique ideas about what was involved in the civilizing process. (shrink)

Many modern conservatives and feminists trace the roots of their ideologies, respectively, to Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, and a proper understanding of these two thinkers is therefore important as a framework for political debates today. According to Daniel O’Neill, Burke is misconstrued if viewed as mainly providing a warning about the dangers of attempting to turn utopian visions into political reality, while Wollstonecraft is far more than just a proponent of extending the public sphere rights of man to include (...) women. Rather, at the heart of their differences lies a dispute over democracy as a force tending toward savagery or toward civilization. Their debate over the meaning of the French Revolution is the place where these differences are elucidated, but the real key to understanding what this debate is about is its relation to the intellectual tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose language of politics provided the discursive framework within and against which Burke and Wollstonecraft developed their own unique ideas about what was involved in the civilizing process. (shrink)

Edmund Burke, long considered modern conservatism's founding father, is also widely believed to be an opponent of empire. However, Daniel O'Neill turns that latter belief on its head. This fresh and innovative book shows that Burke was a passionate supporter and staunch defender of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, whether in the New World, India, or Ireland. Moreover--and against a growing body of contemporary scholarship that rejects the very notion that Burke was an exemplar of conservatism--O'Neill demonstrates that (...) Burke's defense of empire was in fact ideologically consistent with his conservative opposition to the French Revolution. Burke's logic of empire relied on two opposing but complementary theoretical strategies: Ornamentalism, which stressed cultural similarities between "civilized" societies, as he understood them, and Orientalism, which stressed the putative cultural differences distinguishing "savage" societies from their "civilized" counterparts. This incisive book also shows that Burke's argument had lasting implications, as his development of these two justifications for empire prefigured later intellectual defenses of British imperialism"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

"A collection of essays that discuss the writings of Carole Pateman, with emphasis on her theories of democracy and feminism"--Provided by publisher.

This article is the first in-depth analysis of the direct intellectual engagement between one of America's most important Founding Fathers, John Adams, and the work of the leading modern feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. It draws on the first complete transcription of Adams's marginalia in his copy of Wollstonecraft's French Revolution to argue that these two thinkers disagreed profoundly in their respective assessments of the watershed event of political modernity due to their divergent interpretations of the relationship between human nature, history, and (...) Revolutionary violence on the one hand, and the appropriate structure of political and social institutions on the other. (shrink)

_ Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader_, 9/e, is a comprehensive compilation of original readings representing all of the major 'isms'.It offers students a generous sampling of key thinkers in different ideological traditions and places them in their historical and political contexts. Used on its own or with _Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal_, the title accounts for the different ways people use ideology and conveys the ongoing importance of ideas in politics.

The question of how to think about the relationship between political theory and empire has recently emerged as an important topic in the history of political thought. In this regard, Edmund Burke, often regarded as the founding father of modern conservatism, has been depicted by a number of contemporary scholars as a staunch anti-imperialist and a strong defender of cultural pluralism and difference. In the present article, I argue against this view in two ways. First, I contend that Burke was (...) not an 'anti- imperial' thinker in the strict sense of that term. The second argument operates within the framework of Burke's commitment to the imperial project -- rightly understood -- and seeks, within that framework, to understand the basis for his criticism of the British Empire in India. This latter analysis comprises the bulk of the paper. Following it, I conclude very briefly by comparing Burke's arguments about empire in India with his arguments about empire in the New World, and suggest that a coherent and consistent Burkean standpoint emerges from such a comparison, albeit one which is deeply conservative, and therefore challenges a good deal of current scholarship on this topic. (shrink)