The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815

Synopsis

"This new volume in the Penguin History of Europe series is a wonderful achievement, particularly so considering the mammoth amount of specialist material that required synthesizing into digestible portions for general consumption. Blanning, professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge, has performed the miracle of balancing and blending traditional political and diplomatic accounts with the newer fields of social, economic and intellectual history. A prime example of this is the author's treatment of the impact of the new "public sphere." As people discoursed through coffeehouses, Masonic organizations or periodicals, "a new source of authority emerged to challenge the opinion-makers of the old regime: public opinion." Countries where this public sphere was left free, as in Britain or the Dutch Republic, tended to be more politically stable than, say, France, where suppression ended in bloody revolution. Blanning narrates the story of Europe from the end of the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Napoleonic wars, when secularization and the primacy of state sovereignty were recognized as the key attributes of the coming era. What the Europeans would eventually get was the secular, martial religion of nationalism. But this is the subject for a subsequent volume—which will be hard-pressed to match this splendid one." [Publishers Weekly] "The elevation of the state to be the ‘master-noun’ of eighteenth-century political discourse had been long prepared. In his classic study The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Quentin Skinner showed how the main elements of the modern concept of the state were gradually acquired between the late thirteenth and late sixteenth centuries: The decisive shift was made from the idea of the ruler ‘maintaining his state’–where this simply meant upholding his own position–to the idea that there is a separate legal and constitutional order, that of the State, which the ruler has a duty to maintain. One effect of this transformation was that the power of the State, not that of the ruler, came to be envisaged as the basis of government." [Blanning: Pursuit of Glory, p. 286-7]

RefTags

Blanning: Pursuit of Glory

Released

2007

Location

Europe

Setting