Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment

by Ralph Lerner

Overview

In this elegant extended essay, Ralph Lerner concentrates on the politics of enlightenment--the process by which those who sought to set minds free went about their work. 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. 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.

Originally published in 1994.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807862865
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	11/09/2000
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	152
Lexile:	1320L (what's this?)
File size:	2 MB

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.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

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

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

Editorial Reviews

Revolution ``first must be made, in institutions, thinking and expectation and then defended against overt enemies without and covert enemies within,'' writes Lerner. Through the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexis de Tocqueville, Lerner (Univ. of Chicago) presents a ``retrospective'' study of the politics of the American and French revolutions. He chose these men because they had the clearest understanding of the crises in their respective countries. The strongest feature of this work is Lerner's examination and explanatoin of the writing of Lincoln and de Tocqueville in defense of their revolutions; the weakest is the segment on Franklin. The selections chosen from Franklin's early writings fail to prove Lerner's contention because they do not clearly show Franklin's revolutionary ideas. This work is designed for scholars in the field.-- Richard Hedlund, Ashland Community Coll., Ky.

Library Journal

"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"

From the Publisher