Revolutions Revisited

152 pp., 6 x 9

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-5742-7
Published: May 2011
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-6286-5
Published: November 2000
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-6517-5
Published: November 2000

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In this elegant extended essay, Ralph Lerner concentrates on the politics of enlightenment--the process by which those who sought to set minds free went about their work. Eighteenth-century revolutionaries in America and Europe, Lerner argues, found that a revolution aimed at liberating bodies and minds had somehow to be explained and defended. Lerner first investigates how the makers of revolution sought to improve their public's aspirations and chances. He pays particular attention to Benjamin Franklin, to the tone and substance of revolutionaries' appeals on both sides of the Atlantic, and to the preoccupations of first- and second-generation enlighteners among the Americans. He then unfolds the art by which later political actors, confronting the profound political, constitutional, and social divisions of their own day, drew upon and reworked their national revolutionary heritage. Lerner's examination of the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexis de Tocqueville shows them to be masters of a political rhetoric once closely analyzed by Plato and his medieval student al-Farabi but now nearly forgotten.

Originally published in 1994.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

About the Author

Ralph Lerner is professor, Committee on Social Thought, at the University of Chicago. He is author of The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic and coeditor of The Founders' Constitution.
For more information about Ralph Lerner, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Lerner has written an extraordinary, thought-provoking book. His essays on Burke, Lincoln, and Tocqueville are as stimulating and fresh as any in recent memory."--Journal of American History

"Lerner has written a thematically unified work on a genre of political and historical rhetoric hitherto unnoticed in modern scholarship. . . . The writing is crisp, the research is thorough, and the argument is both novel and arresting."--Paul A. Rahe, University of Tulsa