Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 A politics of emergency in the reign of Elizabeth I
- Chapter 2 Richard Overton and radicalism: the new intertext of the civic ethos in mid seventeenth-century England
- Chapter 3 Radicalism and the English Revolution
- Chapter 4 ‘That kind of people’: late Stuart radicals and their manifestoes, a functional approach
- Chapter 5 The divine creature and the female citizen: manners, religion, and the two rights strategies in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications
- Chapter 6 On not inventing the English Revolution: the radical failure of the 1790s as linguistic non-performance
- Chapter 7 Disconcerting ideas: explaining popular radicalism and popular loyalism in the 1790s
- Chapter 8 Henry Hunt's Peep into a Prison: the radical discontinuities of imprisonment for debt
- Chapter 9 Jeremy Bentham's radicalism
- Chapter 10 Religion and the origins of radicalism in nineteenth-century Britain
- Chapter 11 Joseph Hume and the reformation of India, 1819–33
- AFTERWORDS
- Afterword: Radicalism revisited
- Afterword: Reassessing radicalism in a traditional society: two questions
- Index
Afterword: Reassessing radicalism in a traditional society: two questions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 June 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 A politics of emergency in the reign of Elizabeth I
- Chapter 2 Richard Overton and radicalism: the new intertext of the civic ethos in mid seventeenth-century England
- Chapter 3 Radicalism and the English Revolution
- Chapter 4 ‘That kind of people’: late Stuart radicals and their manifestoes, a functional approach
- Chapter 5 The divine creature and the female citizen: manners, religion, and the two rights strategies in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications
- Chapter 6 On not inventing the English Revolution: the radical failure of the 1790s as linguistic non-performance
- Chapter 7 Disconcerting ideas: explaining popular radicalism and popular loyalism in the 1790s
- Chapter 8 Henry Hunt's Peep into a Prison: the radical discontinuities of imprisonment for debt
- Chapter 9 Jeremy Bentham's radicalism
- Chapter 10 Religion and the origins of radicalism in nineteenth-century Britain
- Chapter 11 Joseph Hume and the reformation of India, 1819–33
- AFTERWORDS
- Afterword: Radicalism revisited
- Afterword: Reassessing radicalism in a traditional society: two questions
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
The most obvious functionality of radicalism is that it challenges the status quo, whether in its language, legitimations, objectives, institutions, processes, dispositions of power or achievements – or all of these. These are, after all, the instrumentalities of governance, of rule, and it is, at one end of a spectrum or the other, the transformation of rule which radicalism seeks.
Such an apparently unexceptional statement, or definition, belies the problems immediately confronting the historian. The essays in this collection circulate – sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly – around two of the most important of these problems or questions. The first concerns the transformation of rule implicitly envisaged by radicalism and the ambivalent status which attaches to it. Is it a question of substance or imagination, of fact or of fiction and might there be continuous histories of either of these? Should radical ideas, groups, movements and actions be depicted as existing in a ‘real’ world and is their history to be juxtaposed in counterpoint with the hard ‘facts’ of political, legal, constitutional, social and economic history? Yet, as an alternative to the status quo, radicalism appears to shift from the real world to the imagined, from reality to ideality, from description to fiction. But, of course, we also recognize that realities are themselves constructed and, in some sense, imaginatively constructed.
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- Information
- English Radicalism, 1550–1850 , pp. 338 - 372Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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