Revisiting Burke's Critique of Enthusiasm

Edmund Burke is often considered an arch-critic of enthusiasm in its various religious and secular forms. This article complicates this understanding by situating Burke's writings against the backdrop of eighteenth-century treatments of enthusiasm as a disturbance of the imagination. The early Burke, this article shows, was actually sympathetic to attempts by the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and others to rehabilitate enthusiasm for politics and rescue it from popular derision. Next, the author reveals how Burke firmly resisted attempts to frame anti-Protestant violence in Ireland in terms of religious delusion or enthusiasm, and was alert to the political dangers posed by policies legitimated by that framing. Finally, the article calls into question the close association often posited between the enthusiasm Burke saw in the French Revolution and earlier religious enthusiasms of the seventeenth century

Extreme empiricism: John Howard, poetry, and the thermometrics of reform

This essay examines an outpouring of printed poems and biographical publications in the 1780s and 1790s that sought to shape the public image of the celebrated prison reformer John Howard. These materials, we argue, reveal the ways in which reform, empiricism, and Christian charity reinforced each other in late eighteenth-century popular imagination, and how this conjunction provoked a new vision of Britain’s empire and a backlash against mixing the scientific and the miraculous. As we show, Howard used the language of temperature to turn empirical data into evidence for the necessity of prison reform. This same thermometric language underwrote panegyric poems that represented Howard as global emissary of British benevolence—the icon of a new kind of empire whose power was symbolized by nearly miraculous capacity to temper inhospitable climates. This body of exuberant poetry transmuted data-based reform and technological advances in ventilation into proselytical triumph, a conjunction that was met, after Howard’s dramatic, self-inflicted death, with charges of overheated religious enthusiasm. As a result, Howard’s medical acquaintance and collaborators posthumously defended the temperateness of Howard’s empirical methods while also labeling him an amateur data collector, the lowly helpmeet of the professional man of science. By tracing Howard’s appearance in printed poetry and periodical writing, this essay illuminates the uneasy yet potent imbrication of reform culture, colonialism, medicine, and discipline formation in the final decades of the eighteenth century

Participatory politics, environmental journalism and newspaper campaigns

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Studies, 13(2), 210 - 225, 2012, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1461670X.2011.646398.This article explores the extent to which approaches to participatory politics might offer a more useful alternative to understanding the role of environmental journalism in a society where the old certainties have collapsed, only to be replaced by acute uncertainty. This uncertainty not only generates acute public anxiety about risks, it has also undermined confidence in the validity of long-standing premises about the ideal role of the media in society and journalistic professionalism. The consequence, this article argues, is that aspirations of objective reportage are outdated and ill-equipped to deal with many of the new risk stories environmental journalism covers. It is not a redrawing of boundaries that is needed but a wholesale relocation of our frameworks into approaches better suited to the socio-political conditions and uncertainties of late modernity. The exploration of participatory approaches is an attempt to suggest one way this might be done

Musil's idea of poetic mastership and responsibility or "Törless" as his first attempt to become a serious writer

Musil uses the word 'Dichter', 'poet', as a dignified title reserved for artists of great achievement (different from 'Schriftsteller', 'writer'). His use of the word emphasizes the importance of the specifically poetic qualities of literature (and of the poetic sensibility of criticism,) not as an idle objection to the contemporary merging of literary works with either pure sensation and feeling, or with other forms of discourse. Focusing on "Törless", as well as on Musil's notebooks and essays, this article shows how Musil understands the relationship between rational thinking and the latent ideas and thoughts that emerge within the poetic dimension (the 'other state of mind' or 'other condition.') This approach illuminates Musil's conception of "precision and soul" - the interlocking of sensitive perceptiveness and intellectual rigor - as a necessary pre-condition for valuable literature and valuable life.Musil costuma usar o termo 'Dichter', poeta, como um título de maior dignidade para grandes mestres (opondo esse termo à palavra mais contemporânea 'Schriftsteller', escritor). Esse uso sustenta a ideia das qualidades especificamente poéticas da literatura (e da sensibilidade poética da crítica), reagindo contra as tendências contemporâneas de fundir os discursos literários ou com a pura sensação, ou com outras formas discursivas. Partindo de "Törless" e de alguns ensaios de Musil, esse artigo mostra como Musil entende a relação entre o pensamento racional e as ideias latentes que emergem da dimensão poética (do "outro estado da mente" ou da "outra condição"). A abordagem ilumina a concepção musiliana de "precisão e alma", isto é, o entrelaçamento entre percepção sensitiva e rigor intelectual como uma condição para a busca de valores literários e existenciais

Kitchener\u27s Volunteers

The fourth of August 1914 was a day of jubilation throughout Britain. German armies, numbering in the millions, had overrun Belgian border stations the previous day and were advancing unchecked across the frontier. As the morning progressed, a buzz of enthusiasm began to grow. News placards throughout Britain broadcast the news of the German invasion to the eager public from every street corner. Those British in the big cities were first to hear. From London to Birmingham, Manchester to Cardiff, and Edinburgh to Belfast, people gathered to hear the news. By noon, Trafalgar Square was packed end to end with Londoners. The war that Europe had been waiting for had finally arrived. Within hours thousands were gathering outside local recruiting stations. The queues consisted of men young and old, rich and poor, covering the spectrum of Britain’s class society. These men were here for many reasons but all wanted in before their chance had passed

Internet Safety: Positioning VCU as a National Leader in Internet Safety

While a multitude of information from a host of sources exists on how to keep children safe on the Internet, there is not a unified effort to combine it all and get it to the right people. This is not a plan to teach college students about Internet safety. This is a proposal to begin much earlier, targeting middle-school aged children and their parents, many of whom have no idea of the dangers – and opportunities – that exist in cyberspace

A Happiness Approach to Cost-Benefit Analysis

Subjective well-being (SWB) surveys ask respondents to quantify their overall or momentary happiness or life-satisfaction, or pose similar questions about other aspects of respondents\u27 mental states. A large empirical literature in economics and psychology has grown up around such surveys. Increasingly, too, scholars have advanced the normative proposal that SWB surveys be used for policymaking—for example, by using survey results to calculate monetary equivalents for nonmarket goods (to be incorporated in cost-benefit analysis), or to calculate gross national happiness. This Article skeptically evaluates the policy role of SWB data. It is critical to distinguish between (1) using SWB surveys as evidence of preference utility versus (2) using them as evidence of experience utility. Preference utility is a measure of the extent to which someone has realized her preferences; experience utility, a measure of the quality of someone\u27s mental states. The two are quite different because individuals can have preferences regarding non-mental occurrences. Having drawn this distinction, the Article then argues, first, that SWB surveys are poor evidence of preference utility—given problems of preference and scale heterogeneity, as well as other difficulties. Stated-preference surveys are a much better survey format for eliciting preference utility. Second, in considering SWB surveys as an experience-utility measure, we should recognize that experientialism about well-being—the view that well-being is simply a matter of good experiences—is highly controversial. More plausibly, an experience-utility measure might be seen as an indicator of one aspect of well-being. However, even constructing this weak experience-utility measure is not straightforward—as the Article demonstrates by discussing Daniel Kahneman\u27s detailed proposal for such a metric

FOREIGN AGRICULTURAL POLICY AND THE EUROPEAN MARKET

Agricultural and Food Policy,