John Stuart Mill

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John Ferling

Traces the political disputes that surrounded America's 1776 Declaration of Independence, offering insight into the views of Parliament sympathizers and colonists who stayed loyal to Britain.

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Sandra M. den Otter

'Community' - how to define and to secure it has become a topic of lively discussion. This endeavour also struck a deep chord among Victorians encountering the urban, industrial culture that had emerged by the end of the nineteenth century. In this original and stimulating study, Sandra den Otter explores the idealists' search for 'connection', for a sense of community that fitted the new forms of society, characterized for many concerned observers by dislocation, a loosening of traditional bonds, and intense individualism. Idealist responses to these problems dominated social theory until the Great War. . This book illuminates the idealists' place in the vigorous contemporary debate about a new science of society. Idealist links to German thought, the teaching of philosophy in mid-century Oxford, and idealist criticisms of the naturalist underpinnings of much current social theory are assessed. Dr den Otter argues that idealists constructed an interpretive social theory which adopted various strands of positivist and even naturalist manners in its attempt to frame a social theory suited to the dilemmas of their age. Tracing the dialogue between idealists and sociologists like Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim, the study analyses idealist reinterpretations of the individual, the state, and community.

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Sue Zemka

Victorian Testaments examines the changing nature of biblical and religious authority during the first half of the Victorian period. The book argues that these changes had a profound impact on concepts of cultural authority in general. Among the figures discussed are Coleridge, Thomas Arnold, Ruskin, Dickens, Florence Nightingale, and the missionaries of the British and Foreign Bible Society. In developing its picture of Victorian religious ideology, the book analyzes major works of the period, as well as works and documents that have received little critical attention. Its methods are interdisciplinary, building upon recent ideas in literary theory, cultural criticism, and gender studies. The book proposes that, as the credibility of a supernatural source for the scriptures diminished, the need for certainty in moral and religious matters was increasingly filled by the importance attached to individual character. However, the desire for religious heroes was counterpoised by another and highly sentimentalized model of the spiritual life, one where religious authority was decentered across a social spectrum of fathers, mothers, and children. A large-scale cultural confrontation with the disappearance of God was, to a certain extent, deferred by narratives that picked up the slack in faith, creating performances of sacred power with characters who demonstrated either an awesome religious interiority or a recognizably sentimental display of idealized femininity or childhood innocence.

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Keith Robbins

The twentieth century has not been kind to Britain. The great empire of the Victorian Age now seems a distant echo. The transformation in status and power has inevitably been accompanied by a pervasive questioning about the very nature of 'British' history. How are its characteristics determined? The essays, written over the past twenty-five years, in History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain can all be said, in one way or another, to be concerned with the 'Identity of Britain' in the modern period. They complement and elaborate themes developed in Keith Robbins' books. In the first group, as a former editor of History and President of the Historical Association, the author considers how British historians have themselves reflected and shaped the national understanding of the British past. He discusses the implications of such debates for the present. Have we reached the end of British history in the age of European integration? In the second group, attention is concentrated on beliefs and values, ranging from aspects of Edwardian religion to the problems posed for the churches by the rise of Nazism. This section also includes a discussion of religion and national identity in modern Britain. Another essay takes 1940 as its reference point for a searching enquiry into contemporary understandings of 'Christian Civilization'. What kind of Christian country was Britain? The third group, reflecting the author's teaching experience in England, Scotland and Wales, approaches the puzzling problem of the nature of 'Britishness' from distinct angles.