Displays

'All opponents of globalization should carry it in their luggage.'Le MondeRaoul Vaneigem is an iconic figure in French philosophy. One of the founding fathers -- along with Guy Debord -- of the Situationist movement, his writings helped trigger the events of May 1968. After the inevitable Situationist split, Vaneigem pursued his own interests, and he has since established a unique place in the world of French political thought.In this new book, he sets out quite literally to create a new declaration of human rights, by updating earlier declarations -- from the French Revolution to the UN declaration in 1948 -- on the grounds that 'we can no longer make do with the liberties derived from free exchange, while the free circulation of capital is establishing a tyranny that reduces humankind and the earth to a commodity'.By turns playful, poetic and provocative, this is a remarkable book that makes a profoundly serious point about the way in which human rights have been eroded by globalization.

That the Enlightenment shaped modernity is uncontested. Yet remarkably few historians or philosophers have attempted to trace the process of ideas from the political and social turmoil of the late eighteenth century to the present day. This is precisely what Jonathan Israel now does. In Democratic Enlightenment, Israel demonstrates that the Enlightenment was an essentially revolutionary process, driven by philosophical debate. The American Revolution and its concerns certainly acted as a major factor in the intellectual ferment that shaped the wider upheaval that followed, but the radical philosophes were no less critical than enthusiastic about the American model. From 1789, the General Revolution's impetus came from a small group of philosophe-revolutionnaires, men such as Mirabeau, Sieyes, Condorcet, Volney, Roederer, and Brissot. Not aligned to any of the social groups represented in the French National assembly, they nonetheless forged "la philosophie moderne"-in effect Radical Enlightenment ideas-into a world-transforming ideology that had a lasting impact in Latin America, Canada and Eastern Europe as well as France, Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. In addition, Israel argues that while all French revolutionary journals powerfully affirmed that la philosophie moderne was the main cause of the French Revolution, the main stream of historical thought has failed to grasp what this implies. Israel sets the record straight, demonstrating the true nature of the engine that drove the Revolution, and the intimate links between the radical wing of the Enlightenment and the anti-Robespierriste "Revolution of reason."

This brief documentary history includes 38 documents that explore the issue of rights and citizenship in Revolutionary France and the movement that helped define modern notions of civil rights.

This original and important book examines the paradoxical yet fundamental relationship between revolutions and the discourse of human rights as it has developed over the last four centuries. In a multidisciplinary collection of essays, which includes pieces by activists as well as scholars, contributors compare times and places as remote from each other as seventeenth-century England and contemporary Kosovo, bringing to bear ideas and methodologies associated with disciplines ranging from cultural history to political philosophy. In doing so, they seek to shed light on a crucial conundrum: on the one hand, revolutionary regimes often have been responsible for horrific human rights abuses, and yet on the other, revolutionary struggles often serve as a crucible to elevate appreciation for the importance of human rights.

The French Revolution embodied, in the eyes of subsequent generations, the emergence of the modern political world. It made possible a new understanding of class politics, secular ideology and revolutionary transformation which inspired, argues Iain Hampsher-Monk, the whole world-wide communist experiment of the twentieth century. In this authoritative anthology of key political texts exploring the impact of this period on the British experience, Hampsher-Monk examines the variety, influence and profundity of major thinkers such as Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine and Godwin, along with the impact of other less celebrated contemporary writers.

This fully revised and extended edition of James Nickel's classic study explains and defends the contemporary conception of human rights. Combining philosophical, legal and political approaches, Nickel explains international human rights law and addresses questions of justification and feasibility. New, revised edition of James Nickel's classic study. Explains and defends the conception of human rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and subsequent treaties in a clear and lively style. Covers fundamental freedoms, due process rights, social rights, and minority rights. Updated throughout to include developments in law, politics, and theory since the publication of the first edition. New features for this edition include an extensive bibliography and a chapter on human rights and terrorism.

In the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, French revolutionaries proclaimed the freedom of speech, religion, and opinion. Censorship was abolished, and France appeared to be on a path towards tolerance, pluralism, and civil liberties. A mere four years later, the country descended into a period of political terror, as thousands were arrested, tried, and executed for crimes of expression and opinion. In Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution, Charles Walton traces the origins of this reversal back to the Old Regime. He shows that while early advocates of press freedom sought to abolish pre-publication censorship, the majority still firmly believed injurious speech - or calumny-constituted a crime, even treason if it undermined the honor of sovereign authority or sacred collective values, such as religion and civic spirit.With the collapse of institutions responsible for regulating honor and morality in 1789, calumny proliferated, as did obsessions with it. Drawing on wide-ranging sources, from National Assembly debates to local police archives, Walton shows how struggles to set legal and moral limits on free speech led to the radicalization of politics, and eventually to the brutal liquidation of "calumniators" and fanatical efforts to rebuild society's moral foundation during the Terror of 1793-1794. With its emphasis on how revolutionaries drew upon cultural and political legacies of the Old Regime, this study sheds new light on the origins of the Terror and the French Revolution, as well as the history of free expression.

This pathbreaking work reports on the methods, and some of the results, of a content analysis of the cahiers de doléances, the well-known lists of grievances in which, in 1789, the French people expressed their dissatisfactions with the state of their society and their hopes for a better future. The analysis is an outgrowth of a larger research project, "Quantitative Studies of the French Revolution," conducted by the authors and others over a thirty-year period. The central data of the research for this book are a coding of a national sample of documents representing the views of rural parishes, the Nobility, and the Third Estate. These codes, together with data on the economic, social, and political conditions of the regions of France under the Old Regime and data on political behavior during the revolutionary period, form a computerized data archive to be made available to researchers. The book is in four parts. Part I describes content analysis as a method and its varieties, controversies, and problems. Part II discusses the cahiers and their authenticity and usefulness as a historical source. Part III considers the coding procedures, information about the sample, and studies bearing on the evaluation of the coding process. Part IV, the largest part of the book, presents some of the authors' findings to date, including a summary of the concerns expressed by the nation in 1789, a study of the attitudes toward the monarchy, an analysis of consensus and conflict among the Estates, and the influence of social mobility upon political radicalism. Appendixes provide details of the coding, the national frequencies of many grievance categories, lists of sources of coded cahiers, and maps indicating the data's coverage of France.

The French Revolution provided Bentham with what appeared to him to be an exciting opportunity to influence the reconstruction of the French state. Drawing on his knowledge of English political and constitutional practice, as well as the theoretical resources he had developed in his own work, he suggested imaginative and innovative measures to achieve the peaceful and constitutional reform in France. In discussing the nature of representation he produced the earliest utilitarian justification of political equality and representative democracy, even recommending women's suffrage. Moreover, he provided a major critique of the dominant constitutional theory of the division of power, including both the doctrine of the balance of powers and that of the separation of powers. Turning his attention to Britain, for a time he advocated measures of parlimentary reform, but becoming disenchanted with the course of the Revolution he produced the celebrated 'Nonsense upon Stilts' (hitherto known as 'Anarchical Fallacies'), the most devastating attack on the theory of natural rights ever written, in which he argued that natural rights provided an unsuitable basis for stable legal and political arrangements. All the essays published in this volume, with the exception of Emancipate your Colonies!, an important early critique of colony-holding, are based on the original manuscript sources, many of which have not been previously published in any form.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, has become the moral backbone of more than two hundred human rights instruments that are now a part of our world. The document has been a source of hope and inspiration to thousands of groups and millions of oppressed individuals." "Johannes Morsink offers a behind-the-scenes account of the Declaration's origins and development. He reports on the detailed discussions that took place in the United Nations, tells us which countries argued for or against each provision of the Declaration, explains why certain important amendments were rejected, and shows how common revulsion toward the Holocaust provided the consensus needed to adopt this universal code of ethics.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed on 10th December 1948. It was compiled after World War Two to declare and protect the rights of all people from all countries. This beautiful collection, published 60 years on, celebrates each declaration with an illustration by an internationally-renowned artist or illustrator and is the perfect gift for children and adults alike. Published in association with Amnesty International, with a foreword by David Tennant and John Boyne. Includes art work contributions from Axel Scheffler, Peter Sis, Satoshi Kitamura, Alan Lee, Polly Dunbar, Jackie Morris, Debi Gliori, Chris Riddell, Catherine and Laurence Anholt and many more!

Mary Wollstonecraft, often described as the first major feminist, is remembered principally as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and there has been a tendency to view her most famous work in isolation. Yet Wollstonecraft's pronouncements about women grew out of her reflections about men, and her views on the female sex constituted an integral part of a wider moral and political critique of her times which she first fully formulated in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). Written as a reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), this is an important text in its own right as well as a necessary tool for understanding Wollstonecraft's later work. This edition brings the two texts together and also includes Hints, the notes which Wollstonecraft made towards a second, never completed, volume of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Hufton examines the motivations of two groups of women during the Revolution, the strategies they used to advance their respective causes, and the bitter misogyinistic legacy of the republican tradition which persisted into the twentieth century.

200 years ago, the women of revolutionary Paris were demanding legal equality in marriage; educational opportunities for girls, including vocational training; public instruction, licensing, and support for midwives; guarantees for women's rights to employment; and an end to the exclusion of women from certain professions. The editors have uncovered, translated, and annotated sixty documents which shed light on these and other socioeconomic struggles by women and their impact on the French Revolutionary era. This work makes a significant contribution to the growing appreciation of the role of women in history, politics, ideology, and social change.   "This unique collection of documents will be a boon to teachers of history and to scholars of the French Revolution. . . . Recommended." -- Library Journal