Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Reviving Liberty PDF full book. Access full book title Reviving Liberty by Joan S. Bennett. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Joan S. Bennett Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674766976 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
Milton's Great Poems--Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes--are here examined in the light of his lifelong commitment to the English revolutionary cause. The poems, Joan Bennett shows, reflect the issues Milton had dealt with in theological and public policy debate, foreign diplomacy, and propaganda; moreover, they work innovatively with these issues, reaching in epic and tragedy answers that his pamphlets and tracts of the past twenty years had only partially achieved. The central issue is the nature and possibility of human freedom, or "Christian liberty." Related questions are the nature of human rationality, the meaning of law, of history, of individuality, of society, and--everywhere--the problem of evil. The book offers a revisionist position in the history of ideas, arguing that Renaissance Christian humanism in England descended not from Tudor to Stuart Anglicanism but from Tudor Anglicanism to revolutionary Puritanism. Close readings are offered of texts by Richard Hooker, Milton, and a range of writers before and during the revolutionary period. Not only theological and political positions but also political actions taken by the authors are compared. Milton's poems are studied in the light of these analyses. The concept of "radical Christian humanism" moves current Milton criticism beyond the competing conceptions of Milton as the poet of democratic liberalism and the prophet of revolutionary absolutism. Milton's radical Christian humanism was built upon pre-modern conceptions and experiences of reason that are not alien to our time. It stemmed from, and resulted in, a religious commitment to political process which his poems embody and illuminate.
Author: Joan S. Bennett Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674766976 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
Milton's Great Poems--Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes--are here examined in the light of his lifelong commitment to the English revolutionary cause. The poems, Joan Bennett shows, reflect the issues Milton had dealt with in theological and public policy debate, foreign diplomacy, and propaganda; moreover, they work innovatively with these issues, reaching in epic and tragedy answers that his pamphlets and tracts of the past twenty years had only partially achieved. The central issue is the nature and possibility of human freedom, or "Christian liberty." Related questions are the nature of human rationality, the meaning of law, of history, of individuality, of society, and--everywhere--the problem of evil. The book offers a revisionist position in the history of ideas, arguing that Renaissance Christian humanism in England descended not from Tudor to Stuart Anglicanism but from Tudor Anglicanism to revolutionary Puritanism. Close readings are offered of texts by Richard Hooker, Milton, and a range of writers before and during the revolutionary period. Not only theological and political positions but also political actions taken by the authors are compared. Milton's poems are studied in the light of these analyses. The concept of "radical Christian humanism" moves current Milton criticism beyond the competing conceptions of Milton as the poet of democratic liberalism and the prophet of revolutionary absolutism. Milton's radical Christian humanism was built upon pre-modern conceptions and experiences of reason that are not alien to our time. It stemmed from, and resulted in, a religious commitment to political process which his poems embody and illuminate.
Author: Randy E. Barnett Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691159734 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 448
Book Description
The U.S. Constitution found in school textbooks and under glass in Washington is not the one enforced today by the Supreme Court. In Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy Barnett argues that since the nation's founding, but especially since the 1930s, the courts have been cutting holes in the original Constitution and its amendments to eliminate the parts that protect liberty from the power of government. From the Commerce Clause, to the Necessary and Proper Clause, to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, to the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has rendered each of these provisions toothless. In the process, the written Constitution has been lost. Barnett establishes the original meaning of these lost clauses and offers a practical way to restore them to their central role in constraining government: adopting a "presumption of liberty" to give the benefit of the doubt to citizens when laws restrict their rightful exercises of liberty. He also provides a new, realistic and philosophically rigorous theory of constitutional legitimacy that justifies both interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning and, where that meaning is vague or open-ended, construing it so as to better protect the rights retained by the people. As clearly argued as it is insightful and provocative, Restoring the Lost Constitution forcefully disputes the conventional wisdom, posing a powerful challenge to which others must now respond. This updated edition features an afterword with further reflections on individual popular sovereignty, originalist interpretation, judicial engagement, and the gravitational force that original meaning has exerted on the Supreme Court in several recent cases.
Author: Thomas S Kidd Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0465022774 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
A "thought-provoking, meticulously researched" testament to evangelical Christians' crucial contribution to American independence and a timely appeal for the same spiritual vitality today (Washington Times). At the dawn of the Revolutionary War, America was already a nation of diverse faiths-the First Great Awakening and Enlightenment concepts such as deism and atheism had endowed the colonists with varying and often opposed religious beliefs. Despite their differences, however, Americans found common ground against British tyranny and formed an alliance that would power the American Revolution. In God of Liberty, historian Thomas S. Kidd offers the first comprehensive account of religion's role during this transformative period and how it gave form to our nation and sustained it through its tumultuous birth -- and how it can be a force within our country during times of transition today.
Author: Filippo Falcone Publisher: James Clarke & Company ISBN: 022790379X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 212
Book Description
What is true liberty? Milton labors to provide an answer, and his answer becomes the ruling principle behind both prose works and poetry. The scholarly community has largely read liberty in Milton retrospectively through the spectacles of liberalism. In so doing, it has failed to emphasize that the Christian paradigm of liberty speaks of an inward microcosm, a place of freedom whose precincts are defined by man's fellowship with God. All other forms of freedom relate to the outer world, be they freedom to choose the good, absence of external constraint and oppression, or freedom of alternatives. None of these is true liberty, but they are pursued by Milton in concert with true liberty. Milton's Inward Liberty attempts to address the bearing of true liberty in Milton's work through the magnifying glass of seventeenth-century theology.
Author: Donald Alexander Downs Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521689717 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
This book deals with the decline of respect for free speech, academic freedom, and civil liberty that has swept higher education in America over the last decade and a half and with what needs to be done to reverse this trend. Drawing on personal experience as well as research, Downs analyzes the origins and development of the problem, and shows how political organization of students and faculty can lead to constructive change. He presents four case studies that illustrate this thesis.
Author: John Phillip Reid Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226708966 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
"Liberty was the most cherished right possessed by English-speaking people in the eighteenth century. It was both an ideal for the guidance of governors and a standard with which to measure the constitutionality of government; both a cause of the American Revolution and a purpose for drafting the United States Constitution; both an inheritance from Great Britain and a reason republican common lawyers continued to study the law of England." As John Philip Reid goes on to make clear, "liberty" did not mean to the eighteenth-century mind what it means today. In the twentieth century, we take for granted certain rights—such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press—with which the state is forbidden to interfere. To the revolutionary generation, liberty was preserved by curbing its excesses. The concept of liberty taught not what the individual was free to do but what the rule of law permitted. Ultimately, liberty was law—the rule of law and the legalism of custom. The British constitution was the charter of liberty because it provided for the rule of law. Drawing on an impressive command of the original materials, Reid traces the eighteenth-century notion of liberty to its source in the English common law. He goes on to show how previously problematic arguments involving the related concepts of licentiousness, slavery, arbitrary power, and property can also be fit into the common-law tradition. Throughout, he focuses on what liberty meant to the people who commented on and attempted to influence public affairs on both sides of the Atlantic. He shows the depth of pride in liberty—English liberty—that pervaded the age, and he also shows the extent—unmatched in any other era or among any other people—to which liberty both guided and motivated political and constitutional action.
Author: Joan S. Bennett
Author: Joan S. Bennett
Author: Randy E. Barnett
Author: Joan S. Bennett
Author: Stephen R. Christiansen
Author: Richard Seth Hayden
Author: Thomas S Kidd
Author: Filippo Falcone
Author: Donald Alexander Downs
Author: Mark R. Levin
Author: John Phillip Reid