Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

With the 1790 publication of "Reflections on the Revolution in France", Edmund Burke became the first prominent intellectual to question critically the French Revolution and its course. Published to coincide with the bicentennial of both the Revolution and Burke's antirevolutionary opus, this book features essays by six scholars who approach both subjects from a variety of perspectives and methodologies. Because Burke is often discussed as if his ideas were platonic forms, unsullied by any relation to history, the authors attempt to reconsider him within the tumultuous revolutionary world against which he was writing. Essays written by Christopher Reid, Frans De Bruyn, and Thomas Eric Furniss explore Burke's and the revolutionaries' representations of the Revolution as a theatrical event focusing on their respective interpretations of the "October days" of 1789. These essays consider Burke's use of the conventions of 18th century drama and culminate in a deconstructive reading of "Reflections". Essay by Peter J. Stanis and Daniel Ritchie discuss Burke's controversial contention that Rousseau indirectly contributed to the French Revolution. Steven Blakemore's essay offers an analysis of Burke's antirevolutionary work and an overview of the responses to it by 19th and 20th century writers. Blackmore considers, in the context of both Burke's time and our own. Burke's thesis that the revolution produced the first totalitarian state.

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