A Revolutionary Conscience

Theodore Parker was one of the most controversial theologians and social activists in pre-Civil War America. This book argues that Parker's radical vision and contemporary appeal stemmed from his abiding faith in the human conscience and in the principles of the American revolutionary tradition.

Examining works by well-known figures of the English Revolution, including John Milton, Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Fell Fox, Lucy Hutchinson, Thomas Hobbes, and King Charles I, Giuseppina Iacono Lobo presents the first comprehensive study of conscience during this crucial and turbulent period. Writing Conscience and the Nation in Revolutionary England argues that the discourse of conscience emerged as a means of critiquing, discerning, and ultimately reimagining the nation during the English Revolution. Focusing on the etymology of the term conscience, to know with, this book demonstrates how the idea of a shared knowledge uniquely equips conscience with the potential to forge dynamic connections between the self and nation, a potential only amplified by the surge in conscience writing in the mid-seventeenth-century. Iacono Lobo recovers a larger cultural discourse at the heart of which is a revolution of conscience itself through her readings of poetry, prose, political pamphlets and philosophy, letters, and biography. This revolution of conscience is marked by a distinct and radical connection between conscience and the nation as writers struggle to redefine, reimagine, and even render anew what it means to know with as an English people.

Martin Luther King, Jr. developed a philosophical logic of nonviolence in terms of equality, structure, nonviolent direct action, and love. Here we look at the way King's analysis makes use of each concept with a special view to the context of other Black activist intellectuals. This ebook is a slightly edited version of earlier print editions.

Libertarian-conservative solutions to the political, social, economic and tax issues facing the United States from a 2012 Third Party Presidential contender, as well as one of America's leading Tea Party political leaders In today's uncertain economy, people are growing more and more concerned about their financial future, and looking for common sense, limited government solutions. In The Conscience of a Libertarian: Empowering the Citizen Revolution with God, Guns, Gold & Tax Cuts, 2008 Libertarian Party Vice Presidential nominee Wayne Allyn Root presents a passionate case for smaller government; dramatically reduced spending and taxes; States' Rights; free markets; adherence to the Constitution; an end to the Fed; a ban of bailouts, stimulus, earmarks, pork and corporate welfare; economic and personal freedom; and a return of power to the people, just as the Founding Fathers intended. The book Explains why Obama's big government solutions are leading to a Great Depression II and a coming Citizen Revolution Proposes a one year "Income Tax Vacation," a permanent end to capital gains taxes, and detailed spending freezes and cuts across all levels of government Proposes dramatic education reform centered on school choice, home-schooling, charter schools, teacher accountability, and parental freedom Proposes unique reforms in the areas of health care, energy and the public sector (government employee unions) The Conscience of a Libertarian reveals how Americans can take back their country from big government, big unions, big corporations, corrupt politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers and lobbyists.

Religious liberty is usually examined within a larger discussion of church-state relations, but Thomas Kselman looks at several individuals in Restoration France whose high-profile conversions fascinated their contemporaries. Exploring their reasons and the repercussions they faced, Kselman demonstrates how this expanded sense of liberty informs our secular age.

Available for the first time, Victor Serge's intimate account of the last decade of his life gives a vivid look into the Franco-Russian revolutionary's life, from his liberation from Stalin's Russia to his "Mexico Years," when he wrote his greatest works. In 1936, Victor Serge—poet, novelist, and revolutionary—left the Soviet Union for Paris, the rare opponent of Stalin to escape the Terror. In 1940, after the Nazis marched into Paris, Serge fled France for Mexico, where he would spend the rest of his life. His years in Mexico were marked by isolation, poverty, peril, and grief; his Notebooks, however, brim with resilience, curiosity, outrage, a passionate love of life, and superb writing. Serge paints haunting portraits of Osip Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig, and “the Old Man” Trotsky; argues with André Breton; and, awaiting his wife’s delayed arrival from Europe, writes her passionate love letters. He describes the sweep of the Mexican landscape, visits an erupting volcano, and immerses himself in the country’s history and culture. He looks back on his life and the fate of the Revolution. He broods on the course of the war and the world to come after. In the darkest of circumstances, he responds imaginatively, thinks critically, feels deeply, and finds reason to hope. Serge’s Notebooks were discovered in 2010 and appear here for the first time in their entirety in English. They are a a message in a bottle from one of the great spirits, and great writers, of our shipwrecked time.

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty documents a forgotten truth: the word “democracy” is nowhere to be found in either the Constitution or the Declaration. But it is the overemphasis of democracy by the legal community–rather than the primacy of liberty, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence–that has led to the growth of government power at the expense of individual rights. Now, more than ever, Sandefur explains, the Declaration of Independence should set the framework for interpreting our fundamental law. In the very first sentence of the Constitution, the founding fathers stated unambiguously that “liberty” is a blessing. Today, more and more Americans are realizing that their individual freedoms are being threatened by the ever-expanding scope of the government. Americans have always differed over important political issues, but some things should not be settled by majority vote. In The Conscience of the Constitution, Timothy Sandefur presents a dramatic new challenge to the status quo of constitutional law.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world's most resolute, intellectually driven, and philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots of their alienation from existing society and determination to change it extend back to the very heart of the Enlightenment, when Spinoza and other philosophers living in a rigid, hierarchical society colored by a deeply hostile theology first developed a modern revolutionary consciousness. Leading intellectual historian Jonathan Israel shows how the radical ideas in the early Marx's writings were influenced by this legacy, which, he argues, must be understood as part of the Radical Enlightenment. He traces the rise of a Jewish revolutionary tendency demanding social equality and universal human rights throughout the Western world. Israel considers how these writers understood Jewish marginalization and ghettoization and the edifice of superstition, prejudice, and ignorance that sustained them. He investigates how the quest for Jewish emancipation led these thinkers to formulate sweeping theories of social and legal reform that paved the way for revolutionary actions that helped change the world from 1789 onward--but hardly as they intended.

From the American Revolution that led to the Civil War that provided a new outlook for the Western world and a powerful new nation, to Mao's Red Revolution that began with the uprisings of student groups in Xiangtan, Hunan Province and spread throughout the country mobilizing the masses to fight and end the national division, the dying empire of the Qing dynasty and its last emperor PuYi, as well as the fight against the Chinese secessionists in that case, the Guo Ming Tang, who they ended up exiled to Taiwan until today and, above all, the struggle and triumph against the Japanese invasion. The revolution is not a chance event, nor can its emergence be prevented, since it is the result of events in the history of each nation. Oppressors can always kill, murder, imprison, shoot, lie and cheat, manipulate and destroy, buy and bribe, because that has been their role throughout history, ... their archetype, rather; but they can never prevent or impede revolution. At most, they can delay it, nothing more. The most maliciously intelligent, like the Romans already in the second millennium, adopted the revolution of the Jewish insurgents and took possession of it and built on it the survival and extension of their empire, turning it into the Holy Roman Empire as they were called. But when all the parties do not join the People and their revolution, then they easily end up in the chair of the accused and judged by their peoples and history.