Excerpt from Germany and the French Revolution While the political history of the era of the French Revolution has been written by Sybel and Sorel and a crowd of lesser men, the influence of its ideas and of the moving drama of blood and tears on the mind and soul of the different countries of Europe has never been thoroughly explored. The universal significance of the upheaval was grasped at the outset both by actors and spectators. 'Your laws will be the laws of Europe, if you are worthy of them, ' declared Mirabeau to the Constituent Assembly; 'so strong is the influence of great States, and, above all, of France.' 'Whoever regards this Revolution as exclusively French, ' echoed Mallet du Pan, 'is incapable of pronouncing judgment upon it.' Friends and foes beyond the frontiers were at one in emphasising the power of its appeal; and men like Burke and Paine, Kant and de Maistre, who agreed in nothing else, were convinced that the problems which it raised concerned humanity as a whole. 'When France has a cold, ' remarked Metternich bitterly, 'all Europe sneezes.' The verdict of contemporaries has been ratified by succeeding generations, and has now become an established commonplace. The object of this book is to measure the repercussion of the French Revolution on the mind of Germany. The story of diplomacy and war in the closing decade of the eighteenth century has been told with ever-increasing knowledge by two generations of historians; and the atmospheric difference between the heated polemics of Hausser and the cool serenity of Heigel registers a welcome advance in the arts of interpretation. But no panoramic survey of the intellectual ferment has been attempted. It is scarcely necessary to remark that this chapter of German history, like every other, has been the theme of innumerable monographs; and to some learned specialists a synthetic treatment may appear to be premature. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

These essays On Hegel's political philosophy are taken from Ritter's influential Metaphysik and Politik. They discuss the importance of Hegel's evaluation of modernity by focusing upon his unique conceptions of property relations, morality, civil society, and the state.Ritter's work has played a seminal role in rekindling interest in Hegel's social and political philosophy. Ritter's clarity of expression makes Hegel's concepts accessible to a wide audience of philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and others concerned with the legitimacy of modernity, the relation of society and the state, or in Hegel's relation to Marx and other later thinkers.Joachim Ritter (deceased) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Istanbul. This book is in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.

In the last generation the classic Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution has been challenged by the so-called revisionist school. The Marxist view that the Revolution was a bourgeois and capitalist revolution has been questioned by Anglo-Saxon revisionists like Alfred Cobban and William Doyle as well as a French school of criticism headed by François Furet. Today revisionism is the dominant interpretation of the Revolution both in the academic world and among the educated public. Against this conception, this book reasserts the view that the Revolution - the capital event of the modern age - was indeed a capitalist and bourgeois revolution. Based on an analysis of the latest historical scholarship as well as on knowledge of Marxist theories of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the work confutes the main arguments and contentions of the revisionist school while laying out a narrative of the causes and unfolding of the Revolution from the eighteenth century to the Napoleonic Age.

A New York Review Books Original During the eighteenth century, from the death of Louis XIV until the Revolution, French culture set the standard for all of Europe. In Sweden, Austria, Italy, Spain, England, Russia, and Germany, among kings and queens, diplomats, military leaders, writers, aristocrats, and artists, French was the universal language of politics and intellectual life. In When the World Spoke French, Marc Fumaroli presents a gallery of portraits of Europeans and Americans who conversed and corresponded in French, along with excerpts from their letters or other writings. These men and women, despite their differences, were all irresistibly attracted to the ideal of human happiness inspired by the Enlightenment, whose capital was Paris and whose king was Voltaire. Whether they were in Paris or far away, speaking French connected them in spirit with all those who desired to emulate Parisian tastes, style of life, and social pleasures. Their stories are testaments to the appeal of that famous “sweetness of life” nourished by France and its language.