Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment - Hardcover

Lerner, Ralph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807821365 ISBN 13: 9780807821367

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006

Synopsis

What happens after the revolution? In this elegant extended essay, Ralph Lerner explores how suchs enlightened revolutionaries as Franklin, Lincoln, and Tocqueville met the challenge of translating a revolution into lasting political and social change. Eighteenth-century revolutionaries in America and Europe, Lerner argues, found that a revolution aimed at liberating bodies and minds had somehow to be explained and defended. His analysis, anchored in the speeches and writings of profound thinkers who were also prominent and skilled practitioners of politics, broadens and deepens the conventional understanding of the Enlightenment. According to Lerner, revolutionaries in America and Europe brought different degrees of awareness and political savvy to their tasks and reaped highly distinctive results. Lerner first investigates how the makers of revolution sought to improve their public's aspirations and chances. He pays particular attention to Benjamin Franklin, to the tone and substance of revolutionaries' appeals on both sides of the Atlantic, and to the preoccupations of first- and second-generation enlighteners among the Americans. He then unfolds the art by which later political actors, confronting the profound political, constitutional, and social divisions of their own day, drew upon and reworked their national revolutionary heritage. Lerner's examination of the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexis de Tocqueville shows them to be masters of a political rhetoric once closely analyzed by Plato and his medieval student al-Farabi but now nearly forgotten. Theirs might be said to be enlightenment's other face.

About this title

Review:

"Lerner has written a thematically unified work on a genre of political and historical rhetoric hitherto unnoticed in modern scholarship. . . . The writing is crisp, the research is thorough, and the argument is both novel and arresting."--Paul A. Rahe, University of Tulsa

"Lerner has written an extraordinary, thought-provoking book. His essays on Burke, Lincoln, and Tocqueville are as stimulating and fresh as any in recent memory."--"Journal of American History"

About the Author:

Ralph Lerner is professor, Committee on Social Thought, at the University of Chicago. He is author of The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic and coeditor of The Founders' Constitution.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0807821365
• ISBN 13: 9780807821367
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 152