TY - JOUR
T1 - The Downfall of All Slavish Hierarchies
T2 - Richard Price on Emancipation, Improvement, and Republican Utopia
AU - Elazar, Yiftah
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020.
PY - 2022/3/1
Y1 - 2022/3/1
N2 - Scholars have been paying increasing attention to the republican theory of liberty developed by the eighteenth-century British radical Richard Price. This article studies his narrative of a revolution of liberty, which consists in the downfall of oppressive powers, the establishment of republican institutions, and the introduction of a utopian age. In distinction from work that has focused on the millennial aspects of Price's narrative of emancipation, I highlight its political contexts and functions, situating its early development in utopian speculations about agrarian equality and population, demonstrating how the American Revolution had transformed it into a rallying cry for revolutionaries, and reconstructing its role as a source of politically mobilizing hope. This study differs from much of the scholarship on Price in looking beyond the Anglo-American context and presenting his work as part of a European conversation on the prospects of republican utopia, a conversation whose participants included Rousseau, Turgot, Mirabeau, and Condorcet.
AB - Scholars have been paying increasing attention to the republican theory of liberty developed by the eighteenth-century British radical Richard Price. This article studies his narrative of a revolution of liberty, which consists in the downfall of oppressive powers, the establishment of republican institutions, and the introduction of a utopian age. In distinction from work that has focused on the millennial aspects of Price's narrative of emancipation, I highlight its political contexts and functions, situating its early development in utopian speculations about agrarian equality and population, demonstrating how the American Revolution had transformed it into a rallying cry for revolutionaries, and reconstructing its role as a source of politically mobilizing hope. This study differs from much of the scholarship on Price in looking beyond the Anglo-American context and presenting his work as part of a European conversation on the prospects of republican utopia, a conversation whose participants included Rousseau, Turgot, Mirabeau, and Condorcet.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85096312815&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/s1479244320000293
DO - 10.1017/s1479244320000293
M3 - ???researchoutput.researchoutputtypes.contributiontojournal.article???
AN - SCOPUS:85096312815
SN - 1479-2443
VL - 19
SP - 81
EP - 104
JO - Modern Intellectual History
JF - Modern Intellectual History
IS - 1
ER -