John Stuart Mill, The Spirit of the Age - (click on the pdf to read an excerpt)Īnd, if you have time, try to take a look at Mill's essay entitled Civilisation in. are in Vol 2 - at the start: Read (in the electronic text there are 2 set of page numbers- one using single square brackets, the other using double ] - the page numbers above refer to those in the former style). Only gradually did a new analysis emerge in which societies came to be seen as going through alternate periods of change and consolidation, and that conception came to exercise an important influence on the further reform of European states in the early to mid-nineteenth centuries.īurke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. And, following the French Revolution, many thought Burke right. But that vision, while it has some room for change and progress, alllows this only very tentatively. At the heart of Edmund Burke's attack on the revolution lies a powerful conception of the fragility of the socio-political order, the importance of religion, hierarchy and authority as the basis for order. There were models for thinking about the rise and fall of states, but many of these sat uncomfortably with the optimism of the enlightenment and the growing confidence in progress. The question of what held communities and their states together - and what could destroy them, was forced upon the philosophers of Europe with the outbreak of the French Revolution and the subsequent descent into the Terror.
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