Philosophy

Thomas D. Mahoney discusses the character, career and present-day importance of the great political philosopher.

In France, Fourier's ideas on social and economic reform have been used as weapons in the battles of the co-operative and syndicalist movements. Today, a new attempt is being made to disinter the man and his thought from traditions and myths.

Educationalist. Co-operator. Capitalist. Utopian. W.H. Oliver describes how Robert Owen was doomed to foster ideas and programmes which caused him considerable distress.

Hotman and Bodin were among those who laid down new lines of political thought in Europe, writes J.H.M. Salmon.

Only in a free political society, declared Lamennais and his followers, could nineteenth-century Catholics hope to evangelize the new age. Complete religious liberty, with disestablishment of the Church, freedom of education and of the press, and the decentralization of governmental authority, writes J.B. Morrall, were among the aims they advocated. His views having been condemned by the Vatican and himself denounced by conservative critics as “Robespierre in a surpliceLamennais at length abandoned the faith to which he had devoted so much talent and energy.

Suspicion and persecution fell upon the lively Philosophical Societies of the late eighteenth century because of their international sympathy with Revolution, writes Eric Robinson.

“What is the American, this new man?,” Franklin seemed to provide the answer to this question first asked in 1784.

Gifted, energetic, passionate, unruly, Hamilton was perhaps the most creative figure thrown up by the American Revolution, argues Esmond Wright.

The legend that Babeuf had created and the doctrines of Babouvism became a powerful force in nineteenth-century Europe. W.J. Fishman writes how, among those whom it inspired, were the authors of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Michael D. Biddiss describes one of the chief originators of the pernicious racist doctrines that have played so malevolent a part in the history of modern Germany. Gobineau was a French historian whom a nineteenth-century German professor once described as a ‘God-inspired hero’.