Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain
- ISBN-10
- 0691182558
- ISBN-13
- 9780691182551
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 280
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2021-04-13
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Author
- Ross Carroll
Description
"Ridicule is a ubiquitous feature of modern politics. Few participants in a political contest can resist the temptation to ridicule their opponents in order to demean them, persuade others to regard them with scorn, or expose their hypocrisy. Yet ridicule also has the potential to undermine the conditions necessary for politics itself, converting disputants into belligerents and debate into the silence of mutual disdain. Unsurprisingly, then, ridicule has not only been common in political debate but has often been at the centre of such debate as well. In contemporary debate, some commentators worry that citizens are reaching for ridicule and contemptuous dismissal at the expense of more earnest forms of political engagement. Theorists of deliberative democracy have warned that there might be something inherently uncivil, trivializing, or morally objectionable about the use of ridicule in political debate. Others are more inclined to accept that a society characterized by vibrant political contestation will not lack for ridiculers deriding, shaming, and insulting each other. They counsel that ridicule is more urgent, and necessary, now than ever, particularly as a weapon against authoritarian personalities who are least able to tolerate it. This book brings some much-needed historical contextualization to this debate by revisiting a moment in which the place of ridicule in politics was subjected to more intense theoretical scrutiny than any other: eighteenth-century Britain. The relaxing of censorship and deregulation of the printing trade in the 1690s led to an explosion of political and religious satires, many of which were mobilized in the political contest over the recently passed Toleration Act. This new vogue for ridicule led numerous critics to warn that indulging in it excessively could disfigure one's character, undermine religion, and sow civil discord. But ridicule also had vocal defenders, none more influential than the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Far from merely accepting ridicule as the unfortunate by-product of free public debate, Shaftesbury defended the "trial of ridicule" as a useful method for exposing the conceitedness of fanatics and overly zealous clerics, the two groups most threatening to toleration. From David Hume to Mary Wollstonecraft, Carroll traces Shaftesbury's impact, examining how the Earl's many followers and critics throughout the eighteenth century responded to the challenge of using ridicule responsibly in political and religious controversy"--
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2022-08-09
- 280 pages
- Paperback
- Princeton University Press
-
- 2021-04-13
- 248 pages
- Ebook
- Princeton University Press
Similar books
-
The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain
By Richard HerrThe general of the Augustinians, the Peruvian Francisco Xavier Vázquez, who had been outraged by the attacks on Noris, cooperated closely with the representatives of Carlos in Rome in procuring the final abolition of the Company of ...
-
An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries
By Emma RothschildAn innovative history of deep social and economic changes in France, told through the story of a single extended family across five generations Marie Aymard was an illiterate widow who lived in the provincial town of Angoulême in ...
-
Elites in French Society: The Politics of Survival
By Ezra N. SuleimanThese editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions.
-
Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790)
By Timothy TACKETTThese editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions.
-
Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815
By Durand EcheverriaThese editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions.
-
The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe
By James BelichThe World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade and technology and set the stage for Europe's global expansion.
-
Francois Hotman: A Revolutionary's Ordeal
By Donald R. Kelley... 180, 181, 187, 207, 216, 231, 233 Montmorency, Anne de, 64, 129, 130, 165 Morel, François de, 106 Morély, Jean de, 124, 125 Morison, Richard, 92 Mornay, Philippe du Plessis, 209, zio, 295, 296, 297, 302, 303 Motley, John Lathrop, ...
-
Parades and Politics at Vichy
By Robert O. PaxtonIn June 1940 the French Army that Europe had known and feared since Louis XIV vanished in the most overwhelming defeat ever suffered by the military force of a modern nation. This is the story of what really happened to that army.
-
Madame le Professeur: Women Educators in the Third Republic
By Jo Burr MargadantA collective biography of France's first generation of female secondary schoolteachers, this book examines the conflict between their public and private lives and places their new professional standing wtihin the political culture of the ...
-
Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the Late Renaissance
By William McCuaigBruto, che in questi studii d'eloquenza è consumato. Oltre che anco il dottissimo Sigonio (come intendo dalle lettere di V. E.) diffende questa medesima opinione, se vi ci aggiunge anco Mons. Mureto et qualch'altro valente Ciceroniano ...