An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland is a political and intellectual biography of Sir Archibald Alison (1792-1867), historian, social critic, criminal lawyer, and sheriff of Lanarkshire. The first author to examine the full range of Alison's writings and activities, Michael Michie reveals a significant link between the Scottish Enlightenment and Victorian conservatism.

As a historian of the Renaissance and the rise of Christianity, Burckhardt was concerned with periods of social, political, and cultural transformation. Writing in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolutions and in the long shadow cast by the French Revolution of 1789, he observed the rise of industrial capitalism and mass politics with trepidation. He especially lamented the fate of the individual, whose creativity had shaped the glories of the Renaissance and ancient Greece but who was increasingly domesticated and commodified in modern society. Unlike conventional accounts, which characterize...

In The Distant Relation Eoin Thomson presents innovative readings of canonical philosophic and literary texts, focusing on the distance that mediates the relation between word and thing, past and present, I and you. Through a novel convergence, itself arising from a field of philosophic and literary experimentation, he challenges previous traditions while demonstrating that his strategy is appropriate to the texts considered.

George Campbell (1719-1796) has long been regarded as a seminal figure in the development of modern theories of persuasion, but modern students of rhetoric seldom look beyond his Philosophy of Rhetoric to his equally important religious writings. Campbell is portrayed as a secular figure, and his contributions to eighteenth-century Christian apology have been largely forgotten. In his own time, however, Campbell had an international reputation as a champion of the Gospel miracles against the sceptical assaults of the philosopher David Hume and as a respected biblical scholar and authority on...

Relying on both Chenu's previously unpublished materials and his many publications, Christophe Potworowski examines the role of faith and contemplation in the Dominican life and in theology as well as considering the historical and social dimensions of the human situation in terms of individual and ecclesial existence. He discusses the prophetic role of the theologian and some of the problems this involves. Potworowski raises the question of how incarnation as an overall structure is related to the particularities of Christology and provides insights into the development of Catholic theology...

Nineteenth-century French scholars, during a turbulent era of revolution and industrialization, ranked intelligence and character according to facial profile, skin colour, and head shape. They believed that such indicators could determine whether individuals were educable and peoples perfectible. In Labeling People Martin Staum examines the Paris societies of phrenology (reading intelligence and character by head shapes), geography, and ethnology and their techniques for classifying people. He shows how the work of these social scientists gave credence to the arrangement of races in a...

Experience remains a politically charged and semantically ambiguous concept that arouses as much passion as it does suspicion, especially as it relates to agency and identity. Craig Ireland focuses on the eighteenth-century historical developments that led to the conceptualization of experience as a modern problem. Combining historical findings with discourse analyses and diagnostic readings of recent subaltern and aesthetic inquiry, Ireland reveals that the term experience has been incorrectly understood. Since the 1970s, persistent appeals to experience in identity politics and cultural...

Experience remains a politically charged and semantically ambiguous concept that arouses as much passion as it does suspicion, especially as it relates to agency and identity. Craig Ireland focuses on the eighteenth-century historical developments that led to the conceptualization of experience as a modern problem. Combining historical findings with discourse analyses and diagnostic readings of recent subaltern and aesthetic inquiry, Ireland reveals that the term experience has been incorrectly understood. Since the 1970s, persistent appeals to experience in identity politics and cultural...

How do Christians keep from losing their faith when they discover that other faiths are as justified as theirs? Mark McLeod-Harrison draws from his training in analytic philosophy and his knowledge of Christian mysticism to provide a compelling analysis of, and unique solution to, the problem religious diversity poses for realist Christians. In

F.M. Barnard goes beyond the seventeenth-century understanding of the social contract by making national self-enactment contingent on public reasons for individual liberty within civic mutuality. He examines the possibilities and limits for a self-enacting, principled politics, acknowledging reason and self-enactment as central concepts of historical and political thinking. But he qualifies each by viewing the former as practical reason that only indirectly acts as a cause and the latter as operating in relation to reciprocity with the other. Accordingly, enactment is opposed to...