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Joe McCarthy
03-12-2011, 07:32 PM
It was also the turning point for secularism. Since pious Portugal would be God's last choice for a country to destroy, enlightened thinkers considered more seriously the possibility that if there is a god, he is no longer actively involved in our affairs so maybe we should take responsibility for our fate.

Unfortunately, those 'enlightened thinkers' brought us something far more destructive than the Lisbon earthquake - the French Revolution.

The Lawspeaker
03-12-2011, 07:42 PM
Unfortunately, those 'enlightened thinkers' brought us something far more destructive than the Lisbon earthquake - the French Revolution.
It's a shame that there is no such thing as a time machine because it would have been a good idea to inoculating you (yes it would have been liking going to the Third World for you) and dumping you in the era before the French Revolution for 1 day and then you would come back and you would understand why that Revolution (however sad and bloody) came and why in the 19th century Socialism came about.

It must have gone too far but it all came about for a bloody good reason.

Joe McCarthy
03-12-2011, 07:46 PM
It's a shame that there is no such thing as a time machine because it would have been a good idea to inoculating you (yes it would have been liking going to the Third World for you) and dumping you in the era before the French Revolution for 1 day and then you would come back and you would understand why that Revolution (however sad and bloody) came and why in the 19th century Socialism came about.

It must have gone too far but it all came about for a bloody good reason.


The French Revolution is the story of most revolutions - they make things worse than they were previously. Our modern Robespierres should keep that in mind.

Turkophagos
03-12-2011, 07:59 PM
The French Revolution is the story of most revolutions - they make things worse than they were previously.

lol.


Everything you know today, in terms of politics and society, comes from the bing bang that the French revolution was. Remember that when you call yourself a nationalist.

Joe McCarthy
03-12-2011, 08:05 PM
lol.


Everything you know today, in terms of politics and society come from the bing bang that the French revolution was.

It's fair to say that everything that is bad about those things came from the revolution, yes. The positive currents that were developing prior to 1789 could have been handled in an orderly fashion, and even conservatives like Maistre initially supported the revolution. Unfortunately, it got so extreme and caused so much violence that it has to be seen as a negative.


Remember that when you call yourself a nationalist.

Not every nationalist thinks the French Revolution was a good thing - not even in France.

The Lawspeaker
03-12-2011, 08:05 PM
He isn't one - he just has a chip on his shoulder. The French Revolution was a bloody yet nationalist revolution that came from the people aimed against a thoroughly corrupted monarchy and empire yet was taken over, abused and corrupted by some very wrong people - the kind of Machiavellians that Joe would certainly appreciate.

Joe McCarthy
03-12-2011, 08:09 PM
He isn't one - he just has a chip on his shoulder. The French Revolution was a bloody yet nationalist revolution that came from the people aimed against a thoroughly corrupted monarchy and empire yet was taken over, abused and corrupted by some very wrong people - the kind of Machiavellians that Joe would certainly appreciate.

Kooks like Hebert and Robespierre weren't Machiavellians. If only. Machiavellians are much less dangerous than utopian idealists who think the guillotine is the means to bring about paradise.

Anyway, this thread is getting derailed. Start another thread if you insist on defending Jacobin fanatics.

The Lawspeaker
03-12-2011, 08:14 PM
Kooks like Hebert and Robespierre weren't Machiavellians. If only. Machiavellians are much less dangerous than utopian idealists who think the guillotine is the means to bring about paradise.

Anyway, this thread is getting derailed. Start another thread if you insist on defending Jacobin fanatics.
Rather a Jacobin with faulty ideals that is willing to fight for them then someone without any ideals that thinks that tyranny is good, Joe.

I can find more admiration for a communist with ideals then someone like you without any ideals. Cynical people never inspired me, Joe, and if you take that personal then I believe that's all the better. Your ancestors died fighting for freedom- and now it may be our generation's turn and frankly, no matter how much I love life, I would be willing to go and fight it because I love my future too much to bear the thought that they would be brought up under any form of tyranny.

Turkophagos
03-12-2011, 08:26 PM
Not every nationalist thinks the French Revolution was a good thing - not even in France.

They owe their ability to be able to grasp what a nation is to the French Revolution, them and the rest of nationalists today.


Start another thread if you insist on defending Jacobin fanatics.

Jacobins were only one group of the revolutionaries and they came in power only during the second phase of the revolution.

Turkophagos
03-12-2011, 08:31 PM
We wrote a short essay about the French Revolution with Jerney a few months ago, she should post it here if she still has it saved somewhere.

The Lawspeaker
03-12-2011, 08:35 PM
We wrote a short essay about the French Revolution with Jerney a few months ago, she should post it here if she still has it saved somewhere.
Yes.. please ask her to post it if she still has it. :)

Joe McCarthy
03-13-2011, 03:10 AM
As Aemma was nice enough to split the thread I'll note that it's interesting that the French Revolution's civic nationalist ethos in conferring citizenship on all members of the nation irrespective of race, religion, or creed is where anti- racism originated. This is ironic as academic treatments of nationalism tend to impugn it with Hitlerian racism, when in truth what is often seen as the first modern nationalist revolution was an anti-racist revolution. Herder too is cited as an anti-racist, even as he was the formative philosopher of ethnic nationalism.

Groenewolf
03-13-2011, 07:21 AM
He isn't one - he just has a chip on his shoulder. The French Revolution was a bloody yet nationalist revolution that came from the people (...)

From the people, that is a big joke. :rolleyes2: At most some rabble lowlifes from certain parts of Paris and other cities. With dubious intellectuals as their leaders. A large part of the population did not agree with the revolution. And there where counter-revolutionary forces being formed from among the peasant populations, the largest part of the population.

Now here is one of the leaders of the counter revolution (http://madmonarchist.blogspot.com/2009/05/monarchist-profile-jacques-cathelineau.html) :


http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_-HE1lR1mlb8/ShjXe9BssOI/AAAAAAAAAR4/LHEqQtynd6o/s320/Cathelineau.jpg

Jacques Cathelineau, known as the Saint of Anjou, was one of the leaders of the great royalist counterrevolution in the Vendee region of France. The revolutionaries like to speak of themselves as the champions of the "common man" against elitist tyranny and yet it was the common people who suffered most from their bloodlust and it was often common people who were prominent in fighting against the horrors of the revolution. Jacques Cathelineau was one of them. He was born in what is now Maine-et-Loire and he was a well known peddler or what we might call a travelling salesman in Anjou. He was known for being very physically strong, very handsome and popular but also extremely pious.

When the revolution broke out and the First Republic was established Cathelineau rallied a small, ragged army of peasants and waged a guerilla war against the revolutionaries. As time went on his strength grew and soon his forces were capturing villages and castles in some of the most fierce fighting. His troops fought out of loyalty to the monarchy and the Church and also out of righteous anger caused by the horrid, absolutely grissly atrocities committed by the republicans against the innocent people of the Vendee; including women, children, the elderly and even animals. They left nothing alive. Actions such as these, over time, prompted some of Cathelineau's men into reprisals but former salesman himself always behaved with the utmost gallantry.

(...)

And that genocide happened on the 12th of March. If I remember correctly.

jerney
03-13-2011, 09:11 AM
Yes.. please ask her to post it if she still has it. :)

I'll paste it here if someone really wants to see it. Anyway, just ignore the last part, I wrote this for my German literature class and I had to write about how the shift from classical to romantic thought in Germany correlated with the French Revolution


Introduction
The French Revolution marked Europe’s transition into modernity. It overthrew social and political structures and played a determining role in the transformation social and political systems of not only the French, but of most of Western Europe. Centralized monarchies were transformed into nation-states and constitutional monarchies and ultimately the political power would shift from the aristocracy to the common people.

The French Revolution
The economic and social state of France was in ruins by the middle of 18th century. Fiscal mismanagement and feudal oppression, as well as the ideas introduced by the recent Enlightenment, created a society that was ready for revolt. France’s strict class system consisted of a three-layer system which included the nobility at the top, the clergy and then common people at the bottom. The first two classes retained all the power and much of the wealth and because titles could only be passed down from one generation to the next, they were decided at birth and became a permanent fixture, and this in turn made it impossible to move up within class system. Although the third class was mostly comprised of poor farmers and laborers, it also included the Bourgeois which were made up of rich merchants and traders. Because the Bourgeois were often wealthier than the nobility and clergy, they were becoming increasingly frustrated by the abuse of power and unfair taxation by the first two classes, as well the inability to gain any political power themselves. There was also an increasing unrest among the lower urban and rural commoners of the third class and they were growing tired of the constant food shortage and poverty. By the end of the 18th century this created an atmosphere for revolt against the only social and political structures known to Europe at the time. There had also been competition taking place within the ranks of the aristocracy for some time, which resulted in weakening of the aristocracy and this was something that the common people would use to their advantage.

First Phase – King Louis XVI realized France needed a new taxation system in order to save it from complete financial ruin and in 1787 during the Assembly of Notables he unsuccessfully suggested to the nobility that they be taxed. Without the nobility taxed France’s financial ruin seemed inevitable. As a last resort, he called the “Estate’s General”, a medieval institution which had not met for 175 years and consisted of 3 “estates” representing the 3 different classes in France. The outdated rules originally implemented gave a vote to each Estate, even though the Third Estate, which consisted of the general population, was far larger than the other two. Taking advantage of its numbers the Third Estate broke away and formed the revolutionary and sovereign “National Assembly”. Swearing to continue in their efforts until a new constitution was agreed upon, the members took the Tennis Court Oath.

This revolutionary movement sent a shockwave through France and soon people all over the country were being inspired by it. Parisians accessed arms by storming a prison, peasants and farmers revolted against their feudal contracts and were ultimately freed of them after the issue of the August Decrees. Some of the other important landmarks of this revolutionary process were the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a text which greatly influenced the course of modern Europe and which secured civil liberties and rights, and the French constitution of 1791, which founded the governmental system of constitutional monarchy.

Second Phase - There was only short lived peace in France, however. Problems were slowly growing between radical and conservative members of the National Assembly and the common laborers began to feel overlooked completely and this began to create a divide between all of the members. The more moderate Girondins were in favor of keeping constitutional monarch whereas the more radical Jacobins wanted to do away with the monarchy completely.

The Girondins led the newly named National Convention and abolished the monarchy and declared France a Republic. During the same period France was doing poorly in its war against Austria and Prussia, a war which had been declared by France after bordering nations issued the “Declaration of Pillnitz” asking them to return their king to the throne, a statement which France considered hostile, angry citizens upset over the war overthrew the National Convention. Maximillien Robespierre, led by the Jacobins, soon took control. He approved a new constitution in 1793 which included laws to help stabilize the economy. Robespierre, however, became increasingly suspicious of counterrevolutionaries and embarked on The Reign of Terror, killing 15,000 people. In 1794 when France had been cleared of its foreign invaders and the economy finally began to stabilize, Robespierre was executed for his involvement in Reign of Terror.

Third Phase - The era following the execution was called the Thermidorian Reaction lasted from 1795-1799 and led to the new Constitution of 1795 and a more conservative National Convention. A group called the Directory was formed out of this to take care of the executive responsibilities, but the Directory’s abuse of power was more than France had ever seen from any of its revolutionairies. It was during this period of instability a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the Directory and became leader of Consulate in 1799.

Napoleonic Europe (1799-1815)
Under Napoleon, France became a nationalist power, expanding its territory into Italy and by 1804. Napoleon had become so powerful that he declared himself Emperor.

Defeating the various military coalitions the other powers of Europe threw against him, Napoleon won battle after battle: Marengo (1800), Austerlitz (1805), Jena-Auerstadt, and Friedland (1807). He built a vast empire of dependent states, and eventually controlled the majority of Europe. In 1806 he dissolved the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and in its place created what he called the Confederation of the Rhine. Even though he declared himself Emperor and ruled as a dictator internally, he spread the reforms and ideas of the French Revolution to the countries he conquered or politically controlled during the Napoleonic Wars.

Consequences of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars
Napoleon was eventually defeated in 1813 at the battle of Leipzig by an international coalition, and although there was a restoration of the “Old Regime” in many places he had ruled over, Europe did not revert to the past and the conditions that existed before the French Revolution. Instead the influence of French Revolution promoted reformations that determined the evolution of European societies into what they are today. We saw the formation of centralized governments, secularization, the modernization of economy and the formations of nation-states, the organization of national armies and reformation in education. Huge emphasis was also placed on a bureaucratic state with a central administration imposing laws that were common for all the citizens nationwide. The Enlightenment ideas of equality, liberty, religious tolerance, rationalism and natural law all found a permanent place in Europe.

The most immediate and obvious change in Germany was the remodeling of Germany’s political map. The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation occurred in 1806 and the medieval states/city-states with vague borders scattered throughout the Empire were gone. Out of the 34 German city-states that existed in Germany at the end of the 18th century only four existed (Frankfurt, Lübuck, Hamburg, and Bremen) after 1814. Out of the 234 state “entities” of the Holy Roman Empire, only 39 remained after Napoleon’s conquest. The revolution and the following wars solidified nation states to mean something with “coherent and unbroken territory, with strictly determined borders”(hobsbawm)

The French Revolution destroyed the traditional structures of power in France and the areas which Napoleon had conquered. For the first time the masses/common people had a part in determining political and economic developments. The ideas of liberalism, nationalism and social radicalism that developed during the French Revolution were also something that was completely new to Europe.

The shift from classicism to romanticism and cosmopolitanism to nationalism
As previously stated, at the beginning of the French Revolution, Germany was divided into hundreds of states, which were rather different from each other in size as well as in political structure and religious views. Napoleon’s conquests helped consolidate the German state by eradicating many of the borders within Germany which in turn began to create a German identity partly developed in response to an unwelcomed foreign presence. The revolutionary ideas from the French Revolution also influenced German thought and instilled an even stronger sense of common identity among German people.

This transformation of German thought and identity can be seen in the writings of German authors during the periods before and after the fall of Holy Roman Empire in which there was a shift from cosmopolitanism writings to nationalistic ones.

German classicism of the late 18th century and early 19th century was intensely influence by cosmopolitanism. Lessing called patriotism a heroic weakness. Goethe had said that he felt the joys and sorrows of other nations had the same effect on him as if it were his own. Schiller believed that the cultural mission of Germany was to collect all the achievements of universal thought and transform them into something superior and more sophisticated.

In contrast to the cosmopolitanism often found in German classicism, German Romanticism was the main advocate of nationalism in the 19thcentury. Instead of an interest in universally human ideals there becomes a strong interest in what solely pertained to Germans and German ideals.

The German romantics originally embraced the French Revolution, but as Napoleon conquered most of central Europe, the sense of national consciousness and unity that helped the Revolutionaries in France defeat the aristocratic regimes, had formed in the lands conquered by Napoleon and this national consciousness helped form the resistance to Napoleon’s Empire.

One of the best examples of this shift comes from the German philosopher Johan Gottlieb Fichte. In 1804 he wrote the “The Characteristics of the Present Age” where in one passage he describes one’s home as being the place wherever he feels most right. This attitude is very different from the ones he expresses in 1807 in his speech “Address to the German People”, which was written shortly after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. In it he asks his countrymen to remain faithful to the sacred trust of the ancestral home inherited from the past. He goes from typical cosmopolitan school of thought that everything should be approached universally and since we all belong to a single community, one may have a homeland where he feels most comfortable, to the nationalistic idea that one’s homeland can only be inherited from the people you descend from and that each person’s homeland is found only in the place their ancestors descend from.

Fichte along with the other important Romantic writers of the time, (Kleist, Brentano, von Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hoffmann) break away from this universal cosmopolitanism mindset majorly in response to Napoleon’s foreign rule and because of the political and social developments of the time. Through this they form a kind of national strength and identity with growing interest in folklore, national language and local culture which conflicts with the basic ideas of cosmopolitanism

The Ripper
03-13-2011, 12:41 PM
As Aemma was nice enough to split the thread I'll note that it's interesting that the French Revolution's civic nationalist ethos in conferring citizenship on all members of the nation irrespective of race, religion, or creed is where anti- racism originated. This is ironic as academic treatments of nationalism tend to impugn it with Hitlerian racism, when in truth what is often seen as the first modern nationalist revolution was an anti-racist revolution. Herder too is cited as an anti-racist, even as he was the formative philosopher of ethnic nationalism.

The French revolution and the American revolution have the same source. ;)

Wyn
03-13-2011, 12:47 PM
They owe their ability to be able to grasp what a nation is to the French Revolution, them and the rest of nationalists today.

What makes you say this? England was being described - by Englishmen - as a 'nation' in the late 13th/early 14th century.

The Lawspeaker
03-13-2011, 01:06 PM
England was one of the exceptions. For most European countries (even in a sense in a sense the Netherlands which didn't have much of a national feeling as people felt themselves men of their town or province first) nationalism only came around after the French Revolution and it made it's final appearance during the Romantic Era. Before that people were the property of a ruler - now they demanded to be citizens of a nation.

Aramis
03-13-2011, 01:10 PM
England was one of the exceptions. For most European countries (even in a sense in a sense the Netherlands which didn't have much of a national feeling as people felt themselves men of their town or province first) nationalism only came around after the French Revolution and it made it's final appearance during the Romantic Era. Before that people were the property of a ruler - now they demanded to be citizens of a nation.

As far as I know, the same state of mind existed among south-eastern European peasants. Regionalism and/or monarchism, no nationalism.

The Lawspeaker
03-13-2011, 01:13 PM
From the people, that is a big joke. :rolleyes2: At most some rabble lowlifes from certain parts of Paris and other cities. With dubious intellectuals as their leaders. A large part of the population did not agree with the revolution. And there where counter-revolutionary forces being formed from among the peasant populations, the largest part of the population.

Now here is one of the leaders of the counter revolution (http://madmonarchist.blogspot.com/2009/05/monarchist-profile-jacques-cathelineau.html) :



And that genocide happened on the 12th of March. If I remember correctly.
Actually - you're wrong. I think that it is elitists that are the most fervent anti-nationalists of them all and why is that ? Before the Revolution a nobleman was a nobleman first- not a Frenchman or a Spaniard but a nobleman and he had more in common with a nobleman somewhere else in Europe then with his own kin and countrymen.

And "rabble" as you call it are your own kin and countrymen. They received faulty education and it should have been helped. I rather side with the rabble then with someone that is principally anti-nationalistic because he has so little in common with it's own people. The nobility and the clergy had been so utterly corrupted over the past 1000 years that they treated their people like cattle.

I think that monarchists (who just run behind a ruler --- who, in the case of the House of Orange aren't DUTCH at all, as they are German) cannot, in principle, be nationalists because a nationalist would demand that the ruler at least be one of their own.

The irony is is that elitists (yes -- you can draw it to today's VVD or the Left in this or any country) are the biggest internationalists around. In today's situation democracy is not to blame (as we have none that is genuine) but elites that brought our country to todays situation and Her Majesty's clear-cut involvement with Bilderberg would be an abomination to any self-respecting nationalist and THAT is what turned me into a Republican in the first place.

The Lawspeaker
03-13-2011, 01:14 PM
As far as I know, the same state of mind existed among south-eastern European peasants. Regionalism and/or monarchism, no nationalism.
While they were under the joke of all sorts of empires are never rose up and only did that after the Revolutions had swept Europe ?

Aramis
03-13-2011, 01:36 PM
While they were under the joke of all sorts of empires are never rose up and only did that after the Revolutions had swept Europe ?


I think Europeans are up to his day foremost regionalists. At a time when empires swallowed the last bits of their identity, nationalism as introduced by the French revolution, seemed as a way out from imperial universalistic atrocities.

The Lawspeaker
03-13-2011, 01:39 PM
Agreed.. even when it comes to here: a lot of Limburgians feel Limburgians first and Dutch second (if at all). I for one (half-Hollandic, half-Brabantic but living in Utrecht) doesn't care much about what happens in the Randstad Holland (in the West) as long as it doesn't touch us here and I only really get active when it does and it when it becomes national.

But I am different then most people, I think.

Aramis
03-13-2011, 01:56 PM
The French revolution and the American revolution have the same source. ;)

Allow me a question, out of sheer curiosity for your opinion.

Despite having the same source, but regarding its outcomes, what would you say on Edmund Burke's opinion as stated in his "Reflections on the Revolution in France (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflections_on_the_Revolution_in_France)"?
Unlike the French revolution who aimed for a whole new society and state, Burke saw the American revolution as "a revolution not made but prevented". The Americans did gain independence from England, but kept hold onto the old liberal judicial tradition, yet through new institutions. He sees the liberal constitutional state as not compatible with Rousseau's idea of popular sovereignty, or rather the way it presented itself in the French parliament.

Joe McCarthy
03-13-2011, 02:09 PM
The American and French revolutions were superficially similar, Riip, in that both were liberal and republican but Washington was more William the Silent than Marat, and as Gladstone said, it was a conservative revolution. For our purposes though it was far from anti-racist. Our first naturalization law even limited citizenship to free white persons.

The Lawspeaker
03-13-2011, 02:14 PM
William the Silent
Don't use terms you don't understand. What he wanted back then was very progressive in those days: freedom of religion for all and he couldn't back the centralisation of power for both personal, financial reasons (it wasn't a Dutch tradition to have a centralised government to begin with as we had been a hotchpotch of fiefdoms since.. ever with the Burgundians being a brief and hardly successful intermezzo) and out of conviction.

So don't call it a "conservative revolution" because for those days it was a huge step forward and had never been tried before.

Groenewolf
03-13-2011, 02:25 PM
[FONT="Georgia"]
Don't use terms you don't understand. What he wanted back then was very progressive in those days: freedom of religion for all and he couldn't back the centralisation of power for both personal, financial and reasons and out of conviction.

The resistance against centralization was hardly progressive. And the freedom of religion thing is a bit relative. In the beginning it was more about not wanting inquisitors being stationed in the Netherlands and let the local nobility/magistrates continue to deal with such affairs. :coffee:

Joe McCarthy
03-13-2011, 02:28 PM
I see you have no understanding of what Gladstone meant in calling the American Revolution conservative, Civis.

The Lawspeaker
03-13-2011, 02:30 PM
The resistance against centralization was hardly progressive. And the freedom of religion thing is a bit relative. In the beginning it was more about not wanting inquisitors being stationed in the Netherlands and let the local nobility/magistrates continue to deal with such affairs. :coffee:
He literary said as said later on by Viglius:

En hoewel hij [Willem van Oranje] zelf besloot te hechten aan de katholieke godsdienst, kon het hem echter niet behagen, dat vorsten willen heersen over het geweten van mensen, en hen de vrijheid van geloof en godsdienst ontnemen.

For short: I cannot take understanding that princes want to rule over the conscience of people and want to take away their freedom to believe and adhere to religion as they see fit.

Has nothing to do with the inquisition but with the sheer moral point of it all and that point of view was VERY progressive in those days. And I think that William the Silent would never have agreed with the religious strife later on around 1618 if it would have still been around (which of course he wasn't).

The Lawspeaker
03-13-2011, 02:31 PM
I see you have no understanding of what Gladstone meant in calling the American Revolution conservative, Civis.
Very well. But you're not conservative and more a reactionary.

Aemma
03-13-2011, 05:00 PM
The French revolution and the American revolution have the same source. ;)

Perhaps so Riip, but I think the similarities end there.

If one examines the issue from a cultural perspective, I think the United States did a far better job at respecting the more populist elements of cultural regionalism than did France and most likely because the USA established itself as a truer form of a republic early on. Although I have to hand it to some of the French today; some of them do seem intent on keeping their local cultural traditions alive. This is highly commendable imo.

Joe McCarthy
03-13-2011, 09:45 PM
Very well. But you're not conservative and more a reactionary.

As I'm a Comtean I am fundamentally anti-reactionary; not that my position is at issue here.

Gladstone though was speaking to the issue of revolution as an agent to fundamentally transform society, particularly in the realm of social and economic relations. The French version was to attempt to destroy the foundation of the way in which France operated, which is the only sort of revolution that radicals such as Bakunin saw as being truly revolutionary.

In the end, though, the revolutionary government failed in profound ways, just as the early Bolsheviks did; not for lack of effort, but because their schemes were fundamentally at variance with human nature.

The Lawspeaker
03-13-2011, 09:48 PM
So what do you know about human nature ?
Fact: there are stupid nobles and smart peasants. There are also stupid peasants and smart nobles.

Why place the smart peasant under the tyranny of a stupid nobleman ? Why have someone that has inherited money or who has gotten it over the backs of others in complete control of the honest man or woman ?

That was society before the French Revolution.. and to an extent that is society today.

Joe McCarthy
03-13-2011, 09:55 PM
So what do you know about human nature ?
Fact: there are stupid nobles and smart peasants. There are also stupid peasants and smart nobles.

Why place the smart peasant under the tyranny of a stupid nobleman ? Why have someone that has inherited money or who has gotten it over the backs of others in complete control of the honest man or woman ?

That was society before the French Revolution.. and to an extent that is society today.

I don't care for noblemen. But I care even less for democrats. There is a neglected tradition, originating in France with Saint Simon and Comte, which sought to preserve the best features of the revolution while restraining its excesses. Part of this involved the recognition that rulership must not be based on birth, but merit, and an understanding that liberalism had a role to play in overthrowing medievalism. Unfortunately, while liberalism fulfilled its purpose, it refused to die as it should have, and then mutated into something much worse.

The Lawspeaker
03-13-2011, 09:57 PM
I don't care for noblemen. But I care even less for democrats. There is a neglected tradition, originating in France with Saint Simon and Comte, which sought to preserve the best features of the revolution while restraining its excesses. Part of this involved the recognition that rulership must not be based on birth, but merit, and an understanding that liberalism had a role to play in overthrowing medievalism. Unfortunately, while liberalism fulfilled its purpose, it refused to die as it should have, and then mutated into something much worse.
I asked you a question: so what do you know about human nature ?

I don't care much for your sea of words attacking perceived "liberalism" and it was just as well that some mediĉval ideas got consigned to the dustbin of history.

Wyn
03-15-2011, 08:32 PM
What makes you say this? England was being described - by Englishmen - as a 'nation' in the late 13th/early 14th century.

Allow me to (sort of) correct myself by a few hundred years. The English nation is distinctly referred to (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/bede-book1.html) by Bede, c. 730:


Praeterea omnes, ad quos haec eadem historia peruenire potuerit nostrae nationis [...]
Moreover, I beseech all men who shall hear or read this history of our nation [...]

A word-for-word mention of 'England the nation' appears around 1300, in the prologue to the Cursor Mundi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor_Mundi):


Of Ingeland ŝe nacioun [England the nation],
Es Inglis man [Englishman] ŝar in commun.
Ŝe speche ŝat man with mast may spede,
Mast ŝarwith to speke war nede.

And to think, we owe it all to an 18th Century revolution in France. ;)

The Lawspeaker
03-15-2011, 08:33 PM
I asked you a question: so what do you know about human nature ?

I don't care much for your sea of words attacking perceived "liberalism" and it was just as well that some mediĉval ideas got consigned to the dustbin of history.

I have to ask Joe again: what do you know about human nature ?

Joe McCarthy
03-15-2011, 08:48 PM
Originally Posted by Gospatric
And to think, we owe it all to an 18th Century revolution in France.

The standard explanations from academic sources involve the 18th century as the origins of nationalism, though some will go further than France with Frederick the Great. The basis for this is the concept of citizenship and popular sovereignty, which the French Revolution basically inaugurated. Even Johann Herder sought to redefine social relations as that of a nation consisting of citizens rather than the polarized concepts of noble and commoner.

Joe McCarthy
03-15-2011, 08:49 PM
I have to ask Joe again: what do you know about human nature ?

I know nothing beyond what you teach me, Civis.

The Lawspeaker
03-15-2011, 08:49 PM
Plenty of criticism on "perceived liberalism" but still avoiding a direct question. Alright, colonial, I'll have another kretek and then I expect a straight answer from you and no propaganda and rhetoric.

What... do... you... know... about... human... nature ?

Wyn
03-15-2011, 09:07 PM
The standard explanations from academic sources involve the 18th century as the origins of nationalism, though some will go further than France with Frederick the Great. The basis for this is the concept of citizenship and popular sovereignty, which the French Revolution basically inaugurated. Even Johann Herder sought to redefine social relations as that of a nation consisting of citizens rather than the polarized concepts of noble and commoner.

I have to refer back to the post that I initially quoted:


They owe their ability to be able to grasp what a nation is to the French Revolution, them and the rest of nationalists today.

Now, this is wholly untrue - at least in the case of England/the English. One might choose to argue (as Civis did) that England is a historical exception. Possibly. But the idea that English nationalism owes anything to the French Revolution is absurd. It is born of the English ethnogenesis (8th C. or before) and the formation of the English state (10th C.). We - English nationalists - do not obtain our ability to grasp what a nation is from the French Revolution.