Search results for ""Author Ross Carroll""

How the philosophers and polemicists of eighteenth-century Britain used ridicule in the service of religious toleration, abolition, and political justiceThe relaxing of censorship in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century led to an explosion of satires, caricatures, and comic hoaxes. This new vogue for ridicule unleashed moral panic and prompted warnings that it would corrupt public debate. But ridicule also had vocal defenders who saw it as a means to expose hypocrisy, unsettle the arrogant, and deflate the powerful. Uncivil Mirth examines how leading thinkers of the period searched for a humane form of ridicule, one that served the causes of religious toleration, the abolition of the slave trade, and the dismantling of patriarchal power.Ross Carroll brings to life a tumultuous age in which the place of ridicule in public life was subjected to unparalleled scrutiny. He shows how the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, far from accepting ridicule as an unfortunate byproduct of free public debate, refashioned it into a check on pretension and authority. Drawing on philosophical treatises, political pamphlets, and conduct manuals of the time, Carroll examines how David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others who came after Shaftesbury debated the value of ridicule in the fight against intolerance, fanaticism, and hubris.Casting Enlightenment Britain in an entirely new light, Uncivil Mirth demonstrates how the Age of Reason was also an Age of Ridicule, and speaks to our current anxieties about the lack of civility in public debate.

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Few thinkers have provoked such violently opposing reactions as Edmund Burke. A giant of eighteenth-century political and intellectual life, Burke has been praised as a prophet who spied the terror latent in revolutionary or democratic ideologies, and condemned as defender of social hierarchy and outmoded political institutions. Ross Carroll tempers these judgments by situating Burke's arguments in relation to the political controversies of his day. Burke's writings must be understood as rhetorically brilliant exercises in political persuasion aimed less at defending abstract truths than at warning his contemporaries about the corrosive forces ideological, social, and political that threatened their society. Drawing on Burke's enormous corpus, Carroll presents a nuanced portrait of Burke as, above all, a diagnostician of political misrule, whether domestic, foreign, or imperial. Burke's lasting value, Carroll argues, derives less from the content of his specific positions than fro

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How the philosophers and polemicists of eighteenth-century Britain used ridicule in the service of religious toleration, abolition, and political justiceThe relaxing of censorship in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century led to an explosion of satires, caricatures, and comic hoaxes. This new vogue for ridicule unleashed moral panic and prompted warnings that it would corrupt public debate. But ridicule also had vocal defenders who saw it as a means to expose hypocrisy, unsettle the arrogant, and deflate the powerful. Uncivil Mirth examines how leading thinkers of the period searched for a humane form of ridicule, one that served the causes of religious toleration, the abolition of the slave trade, and the dismantling of patriarchal power.Ross Carroll brings to life a tumultuous age in which the place of ridicule in public life was subjected to unparalleled scrutiny. He shows how the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, far from accepting ridicule as an unfortunate byproduct of free public debate, refashioned it into a check on pretension and authority. Drawing on philosophical treatises, political pamphlets, and conduct manuals of the time, Carroll examines how David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others who came after Shaftesbury debated the value of ridicule in the fight against intolerance, fanaticism, and hubris.Casting Enlightenment Britain in an entirely new light, Uncivil Mirth demonstrates how the Age of Reason was also an Age of Ridicule, and speaks to our current anxieties about the lack of civility in public debate.

Read more less

Few thinkers have provoked such violently opposing reactions as Edmund Burke. A giant of eighteenth-century political and intellectual life, Burke has been praised as a prophet who spied the terror latent in revolutionary or democratic ideologies, and condemned as defender of social hierarchy and outmoded political institutions. Ross Carroll tempers these judgments by situating Burke's arguments in relation to the political controversies of his day. Burke's writings must be understood as rhetorically brilliant exercises in political persuasion aimed less at defending abstract truths than at warning his contemporaries about the corrosive forces ideological, social, and political that threatened their society. Drawing on Burke's enormous corpus, Carroll presents a nuanced portrait of Burke as, above all, a diagnostician of political misrule, whether domestic, foreign, or imperial. Burke's lasting value, Carroll argues, derives less from the content of his specific positions than fro

Read more less