the greycat blog

The most-read article on greycat.org over the last week has been ‘Dresden: the making of a baroque city’.

Baroque cities have been described as representing ‘the cosmic-dynastic grand illusion’ with the great palace acting as the focus, ‘sending its surveillance and benevolence into the far corners of the geometrically disciplined urban universe’. This vision is perhaps most dramatically expressed in completely new cities such as Karlsruhe and St Petersburg; but it is fully present, on a smaller scale, but nonetheless in the grand manner, in the development of Dresden during the baroque period.

Most-read article on greycat.org over the last week: ‘The shadow of Stonehenge: paganism, fate and redemption in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles’. For more, see the post from the last time it reached most-read status.

The first ‘most-read’ of the new year, and the new favourite essay at greycat.org is ‘Burke and revolution: reform, revolution and constitutional conservatism in the thought of Edmund Burke’. Many of the visitors who have been interested in this essay have been from the United States - appropriately enough, for Burke was a friend of American independence.

A comparison between Burke’s reaction to the American Revolution and his response to the French Revolution is instructive in revealing the grounds of his opposition to the latter. In that the French Revolution was an attempt at the wholesale and instantaneous social and political transformation of society on abstract, rationalist principles, it presented a challenge to Burke’s world-view quite unlike that offered by the American Revolution, which Burke saw as essentially a problem in imperial constitutional and administrative relationships. The social and political ideas which Burke marshalled against the French Revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France were not new; his rejection of abstract political theorising and concepts such as universal rights, his belief in inheritance and slow historical development and his respect for the gradually evolving national society, his belief that the current generation is obliged to maintain what previous generations have created in the way of institutions and practices, his insistence that prejudice rather than reason holds society together, all are present in his speeches, addresses and letters on America. Yet there is nothing in Burke’s comments on America which foreshadows the violence of his reaction to the Revolution in France and the anger with which he denounced the French revolutionaries and their works.

Read ’Burke and revolution’ by clicking here. Other essays on eighteenth-century topics can be found here.

Picture: Edmund Burke, engraving after Joshua Reynolds. [Source]

See earlier posts here, here, here and here.

The most popular essay on greycat.org over the past week has been ‘Hobbes and liberty: the subject’s sphere of liberty in Leviathan‘.

Hobbes’s assertion that ‘Feare and Liberty are consistent’ (II: xxi, 262) has caused a certain amount of puzzlement and confusion: how freely can a person robbed at gunpoint really be said to be acting when he hands over his wallet? Yet it is consistent with Hobbes’s view that liberty can only be restricted by an external agent. If the robber knocks his victim to the ground and restrains him physically while extracting his wallet from his pocket, then the victim’s freedom has been restricted; but if the victim reaches into his own pocket and hands the robber his wallet out of fear that he will be shot if he does not, he has chosen that course of action freely, while others, no matter how unpalatable, remain open to him; and he has removed his wallet and surrendered it with his own hands and of his own volition. This is an important point for understanding the nature of the covenant which gives rise to Hobbes’s Commonwealth, for its ultimate motivation is fear (‘The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Feare of Death’ (I: xiii, 188)), and yet it is freely arrived at by all concerned.

Hobbes’s Leviathan is commonly seen as an argument for absolute despotism on the part of the sovereign and absolute submission on the part of the subject; yet Hobbes asserts that individual liberty is inalienable. How can these positions be reconciled? This is the question explored in ’Hobbes and liberty: the subject’s sphere of liberty in Leviathan‘. Click here to read the essay, in full and for free.

Picture: Frontispiece from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, 1651 (detail). [Source]

‘Most-read’ may not be strictly accurate; ‘most-visited’ is perhaps closer to the mark. The statistics for greycat.org show that ‘Representing the Victorian railway: the aesthetics of ambivalence’ has received far more visitors than any other essay over the last week, almost all of them over the last 24 hours. This essay always receives a good number of visitors but the recent surge is solely down to the fact that the page has just been ’stumbled’ - i.e. recommended and shared within the StumbleUpon community.

StumbleUpon brings in a lot of visitors, but, at least for a site like this, most of them aren’t worth having. It’s like a hose that soaks your site in visitors, most of whom rapidly drain away. In the case of this page, only 12% of Stumblers stayed for more than 30 seconds, and 41% stayed less than 5 seconds. Lots of traffic, not much real interest. Still, every visitor is welcome and if even one person who comes here via StumbleUpon takes the time to read the essay and finds it interesting and/or useful then it’s worthwhile.

‘Representing the Victorian railway’ is derived from my doctoral research and was originally written for an academic conference in 1998. It has been much updated and revised since.

The railways constituted one of the most significant technological phenomena of the nineteenth century and, contrary to what some historians have argued, it took many years for the emotions they stirred up to become submerged in a general indifference; as Jack Simmons has noted, expressions of fear and alarm did not come to an end in the 1840s, but continued to be felt far into the Victorian age. As a presence in the nineteenth-century landscape, the railway was a source of a highly significant collective experience of technology, and of a powerful, liberating and disturbing vision of what technology could symbolize, offer, and threaten. Railways could be seen as a symbol of progress, promising economic and social betterment, freedom from old restrictions, democracy, energy, all the benefits and opportunities of modern mechanized civilization. Yet they were also associated with pollution, destruction, disaster and danger, bringing about the destabilization and corruption of social order, the vulgarization of culture, the defilement of natural beauty.

The essay uses two case studies to illuminate the ambiguities of nineteenth-century attitudes to the railway: J. M. W. Turner’s painting Rain Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1843-4) and Michael Reynolds’s book Engine Driving Life: Stirring Adventures and Incidents in the Lives of Locomotive Engine-Drivers (1889). To read more, visit ‘Representing the Victorian railway: the aesthetics of ambivalence’.

Picture: Great Western Railway locomotive, c.1880 [Source]

The most-read essay on greycat.org over the past week has been ‘Cold War sub-texts: the submarine and the popular imagination in post-war Britain’. This particular essay, along with several others, has recently been indexed by Intute, a service which finds, evaluates and categorizes freely-available scholarly material from across the web, and this seems to have brought it to a wider audience. Which is nice. The essay was originally written for an academic conference at the University of London’s Institute for Contemporary British History in September 2003. The Institute has since been utterly transformed and revolutionized by its renaming as the Centre for Contemporary British History.

On both sides of the Cold War the details of submarine missions were naturally concealed behind varying degrees of secrecy, but the legacy of wartime experience, combined with what was publicly known about contemporary submarine activities, ensured that these vessels retained a highly significant place in Cold War culture, not least in maritime-minded, culturally navalist Great Britain. The submarine combined advanced technology with the timeless human virtues of courage and daring; it operated in the front line of the Cold War, on the enemy’s doorstep; it had the allure of secrecy and stealth; it possessed global reach; and, in the form of the SSBN – ‘this killer whale in our midst’, as The Times put it in 1967 – it symbolized the balance of terror that ultimately embodied the Cold War confrontation.

The essay goes on to examine two popular novels by British writers from different periods of the Cold War that can be seen as embodying important aspects of the place of the submarine in contemporary culture: Alistair MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra (1963) and Craig Thomas’s Sea Leopard (1981). To read the whole of ‘Cold War sub-texts’, click here.

Picture: Soviet Sierra II class nuclear-powered attack submarine. [Source]

I didn’t post a ‘most-read’ article last week because it was Aristotle yet again. The latests stats indicate that, barring a last minute rush of interest, Aristotle will not be topping the charts this week, so that’s a relief.

The most-read essay on greycat.org over the last week has been ‘Dresden: the making of a baroque city’. Aristotle remains popular, and for the first time Rousseau has featured in the top three, but Dresden was the clear people’s choice.

The single most important factor in the architectural development of Dresden during the late seventeenth and early- to mid-eighteenth centuries was its role as capital of the Electorate of Saxony, and the location there of the Saxon court. From 1694 to 1733, the ruler of Saxony was Frederick Augustus I, known as ‘Augustus the Strong’, whose ambitions for himself and his state determined the development of his capital; in particular, his acquisition of the crown of Poland in 1696 was the spur to a large-scale programme of architectural improvements in Dresden which were intended to express the power prestige and glory of Saxony and her ruler. … In order to become King of Poland, Augustus I converted to Catholicism, and the presence in the capital of Protestant Saxony of a Catholic court provides an important context for the prolonged flourishing in Dresden of the baroque style.

To read more from this essay, which includes illustrations and maps, pay a visit to ‘Dresden: the making of a baroque city’.

Picture: Portrait of Augustus the Strong by Louis de Silvestre. [Source]

Everyone loves Aristotle. This week’s web statistics report reveals that once again the most popular paper on greycat.org is ‘Aristotle and citizenship: the responsibilities of citizenship in the Politics’. If you’re not already among this essay’s countless fans, you are hereby invited to read and enjoy.

Picture: Plato and Aristotle, representing ‘Philosophy’, marble panel (1437) by Luca della Robbia, from the exterior of the campanile of Florence cathedral. [Source]