In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting the role and representation of women under the Old Regime with their status during and after the Revolution. Basing her work on a wide reading of current historical scholarship, Landes draws on the work of Habermas and his followers, as well as on recent theories of representation, to re-create public-sphere theory from a feminist point of view.Within the extremely personal and patriarchal political culture of Old Regime France, elite women wielded surprising influence and power, both in the court and in salons. Urban women of the artisanal class often worked side by side with men and participated in many public functions. But the Revolution, Landes asserts, relegated women to the home, and created a rigidly gendered, essentially male, bourgeois public sphere. The formal adoption of "universal" rights actually silenced public women by emphasizing bourgeois conceptions of domestic virtue.In the first part of this book, Landes links the change in women's roles to a shift in systems of cultural representation. Under the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime, political culture was represented by the personalized iconic imagery of the father/king. This imagery gave way in bourgeois thought to a more symbolic system of representation based on speech, writing, and the law. Landes traces this change through the art and writing of the period. Using the works of Rousseau and Montesquieu as examples of the passage to the bourgeois theory of the public sphere, she shows how such concepts as universal reason, law, and nature were rooted in an ideologically sanctioned order of gender difference and separate public and private spheres. In the second part of the book, Landes discusses the discourses on women's rights and on women in society authored by Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Gouges, Tristan, and Comte within the context of these new definitions of the public sphere. Focusing on the period after the execution of the king, she asks who got to be included as "the People" when men and women demanded that liberal and republican principles be carried to their logical conclusion. She examines women's roles in the revolutionary process and relates the birth of modern feminism to the silencing of the politically influential women of the Old Regime court and salon and to women's expulsion from public participation during and after the Revolution.

Collating key texts at the forefront of new research and interpretation, this updated second edition adds new articles on the Terror and race/colonial issues, and studies all aspects of this major event, from its origins through to its consequences.

Anti-Muslim voices have become louder in many places in the midst of ongoing atrocities undertaken in the name of Islam. As a result, much of the creative participation of Western Muslims in the public sphere has become overshadowed. This tendency is not only visible in political discussions and the media landscape, but it is also often reflected in academia where research about Muslims in the West is predominantly shaped by the post 9/11 narrative. In contrast, European Muslims Transforming the Public Sphere offers a paradigm shift. It puts forward a new approach to understanding minority public engagement, suggesting that we need to go beyond conceptualisations that look at Muslims in the West mainly through the minority lens. By bringing into dialogue minority-specific and non-minority specific concepts, the book offers a relevant complement. Using young German Muslims engaged in media, the arts and culture and civil society as ten case studies, this book utilises the concepts of counterpublics and participatory culture to re-examine Muslims' engagement within the European public sphere. It presents a qualitative analysis, which has resulted from two years of ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation, in-depth interviews and primary source analysis of material produced by the research participants. This book is a unique insight into the outworking of multiculturalism in Western Europe. It illustrates the many-sidedness of young Muslims’ public contributions, revealing how they transform European public spheres in different ways. Therefore, it will be a vital resource for any scholar involved in Islamic Studies, the Sociology of Religion, Religious Studies, Cultural Studies and Media Studies.

This collection of essays breaks new ground in its interdisciplinary study of the way Jews redefined their identity in the changing societies of modern eastern Europe. Sensitively treating the drama of east European Jewry from cultural and political vantage points, prominent scholars provide fresh insights into the complex issues facing the Jewish world. The multifaceted essays in this volume reflect the influence of the pioneering work of the historian Ezra Mendelsohn.

The global trend toward democratization of the last two decades has been accompanied by the resurgence of various politics of "identity/difference." From nationalist and ethnic revivals in the countries of east and central Europe to the former Soviet Union, to the politics of cultural separatism in Canada, and to social movement politics in liberal western-democracies, the negotiation of identity/difference has become a challenge to democracies everywhere. This volume brings together a group of distinguished thinkers who rearticulate and reconsider the foundations of democratic theory and practice in the light of the politics of identity/difference. In Part One Jürgen Habermas, Sheldon S. Wolin, Jane Mansbridge, Seyla Benhabib, Joshua Cohen, and Iris Marion Young write on democratic theory. Part Two--on equality, difference, and public representation--contains essays by Anne Phillips, Will Kymlicka, Carol C. Gould, Jean L. Cohen, and Nancy Fraser; and Part Three--on culture, identity, and democracy--by Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig, Fred Dallmayr, Joan B. Landes, and Carlos A. Forment. In the last section Richard Rorty, Robert A. Dahl, Amy Gutmann, and Benjamin R. Barber write on whether democracy needs philosophical foundations.

Winner of the 2019 CEU Award for Outstanding Research This book documents the making of Romanian citizenship from 1750 to 1918 as a series of acts of national self-determination by the Romanians, as well as the emancipation of subordinated gender, social, and ethno-religious groups. It focuses on the progression of a sum of transnational “questions” that were at the heart of North-Atlantic, European, and local politics during the long nineteenth century, concerning the status of peasants, women, Greeks, Jews, Roma, Armenians, Muslims, and Dobrudjans. The analysis emphasizes the fusion between nationalism and liberalism, and the emancipatory impact national-liberalism had on the transition from the Old Regime to the modern order of the nation-state. While emphasizing liberalism's many achievements, the study critically scrutinizes the liberal doctrine of legal-political “capacity” and the dark side of nationalism, marked by tendencies toward exclusion. It highlights the challenges nascent liberal democracies face in the process of consolidation and the enduring appeal of illiberalism in periods of upheaval, represented mainly by nativism. The book's innovative interdisciplinary approach to citizenship in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans and the richness of the sources employed, appeal to a diverse readership.

James Melton examines the rise of the public in 18th-century Europe. A work of comparative synthesis focusing on England, France and the German-speaking territories, this a reassessment of what Habermas termed the bourgeois public sphere.

This volume explores the history of the different means of communication in the West from the invention of printing to the Internet. It discusses issues from the importance of oral and manuscript communication to the development of electronic media.

Eighteenth-century Spanish women were not idle bystanders during one of Europe's most dynamic eras. As Theresa Ann Smith skillfully demonstrates in this lively and absorbing book, Spanish intellectuals, calling for Spain to modernize its political, social, and economic institutions, brought the question of women's place to the forefront, as did women themselves. In explaining how both discourse and women's actions worked together to define women's roles in the nation, The Emerging Female Citizen not only illustrates the rising visibility of women, but also reveals the complex processes that led to women's relatively swift exit from most public institutions in the early 1800s. As artists, writers, and reformers, Spanish women took up pens, joined academies and economic societies, formed tertulias—similar to French salons—and became active in the burgeoning public discourse of Enlightenment. In analyzing the meaning of women's presence in diverse centers of Enlightenment, Smith offers a new interpretation of the dynamics among political discourse, social action, and gender ideologies.

In order to grasp what it means to call Rousseau an "author" of the Revolution, as so many revolutionaries did, it is necessary to take full measure of the difficulties of literary interpretation to which Rousseau's work gives rise, particularly around such a charged term as "author." On Jean-Jacques Rousseau shows that Rousseau's texts consistently generate a division in their own reading, a division both designated and masked by the fiction of authorship. These divisions can occur successively—as in the narrative reversals and discontinuities characteristic of Rousseau's fictional and autobiographical works—or simultaneously, in the form of incompatible attempts to apply the lessons of a single text to an urgent historical moment. Given the structure of these texts, their "influence" can only occur in an equally paradoxical form. Rousseau's contribution to revolutionary thinking lies in his conceptualization of the constitutive function of misunderstanding and narrative discontinuity, in history and political action as well as in literature. Such misunderstandings and discontinuities are particularly well illustrated by the vicissitudes of the reading of Rousseau's texts during the revolutionary period, a moment when "readings" occurred as political programs. The Revolution enacted Rousseau precisely to the extent that revolutionaries could not agree on what action he called for. He is "one of the first authors of the Revolution" not because he was one of its causes, but because he provided the terms in which the logic of the revolutionary process becomes intelligible.