Liberty S Apostle Richard Price His Life And Times

Born in the village of Llangeinor, near Bridgend in south Wales, Richard Price (1723–91) was, to his contemporaries, an apostle of liberty, an enemy to tyranny and a great benefactor of the human race. His friend Benjamin Franklin described aspects of his work as ‘the foremost production of human understanding that this century has afforded us’. A supporter of the American and French Revolutions, Price corresponded with the likes of Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Mirabeau and Condorcet. In November 1789 he publicly welcomed the start of the French Revolution and thus inspired not only Edmund Burke to write his rebuttal in Reflections on the Revolution in France, but also the Revolution Controversy, ‘the most crucial ideological debate ever carried on in English’. Price also brought to world attention the Bayes-Price Theorem on probability, which is the invisible background to so much in modern life, and wrote a fundamental text on moral philosophy. Yet, despite all this and more, he remains little-known beyond academia, a situation that this biography helps to rectify. Liberty’s Apostle tells his life story through his published works and, fully for the first time, his now published correspondence with a host of eighteenth century celebrities. The life revealed is of a truly remarkable Welshman and, as Condorcet remarked, of ‘one of the formative minds’ of the eighteenth century Enlightenment.

This is the first book-length treatment of both the non-positive- and the positive-liberty strands of the republican revival in political and constitutional theory. The republican revival, pursued especially over the last few decades, has presented republicanism as an exciting alternative to the dominant tradition of liberalism. The book provides a sharply different interpretation of liberty from that found in the republican revival, and it argues that this different interpretation is not only historically more faithful to some prominent writers identified with the republican tradition, but is also normatively more attractive. The normative advantages are revealed through discussion of some central concerns relating to democracy and constitutionalism, including the justification for democracy and the interpretation of constitutional rights. The book also looks beyond republican liberty by drawing on the republican device of sortition (selection by lot). It proposes the use of large juries to decide bill-of-rights matters. This novel proposal indicates how democracy might be reconciled with constitutional review based on a bill of rights. Republicanism is not pitted against liberalism: the favoured values and institutions fit with liberal commitments.

A unique account of old London with all its energy, filth and splendour before the city's destruction by the Great Fire in 1666.

"This is a biography of Thomas Jefferson's life and conflicted moral universe. Jefferson has received increasing historical attention since the late 1990s. Much of the focus on Jefferson has concerned topics including his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, the "Jefferson Bible," and bitter political rivalries with Alexander Hamilton and many others. Until now, however, no biography has fully explored Jefferson's spiritual beliefs and ethical precepts, and how those ideas did (or did not) sync up with the way Jefferson actually lived. Encapsulated in Jefferson's privileged but fraught life are themes that suffuse American history itself: religious seeking, racial injustice, inspiring ideals, and squalid realities. Employing fresh research in Jefferson's vast papers, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh shows how deeply the Christian culture of Jefferson's upbringing influenced him. It also reveals how he struggled as an adult to find an adequate replacement for the conventional Christianity of his youth, even as he became more entangled in political feuds, personal debt, and the terrible consequences of slaveowning"--

Edmund Burke’s iconic stance against the French Revolution and its supposed Enlightenment inspiration, has ensured his central role in debates about the nature of modernity and freedom. It has now been rendered even more complex by post-modern radicalism’s repudiation of the Enlightenment as repressive and its reason as illusionary. Not only did Burke’s own work cover a huge range - from aesthetics through history to constitutional politics and political theory - it has generated an enormous literature drawing on many disciplines, as well as continuing to be recruited in a range of contemporary polemics. In Edmund Burke, Iain Hampsher Monk presents a representative selection of articles and essays from the last 50 years of this scholarship. His introduction provides a brief biography and seeks to guide the reader through the chosen pieces as well as indicating its relationship to other and more substantial studies that form the critical heritage of this major figure.