Choose ONE (1) of the following topics on which you are to write a 3- to 5-page paper.
Your paper should have an introductory paragraph, at least 3 body paragraphs in which evidence is presented to support your points and a concluding paragraph. The more body paragraphs, and the more evidence you present to support your argument, the better. Here are some hints on how to go about writing your paper.
Your answer should be based on both primary sources (on-line documents) and secondary sources (textbook chapters.)
1. The French Revolution raised the question of how to achieve a society of free individuals, equal before the law, and at the same time how to mainain order and unity among those individuals. Leaders of the Revolution, such as Maximillien Robespierre argued that a new culture could both liberate individuals from the traditions of the past and also unite them in a new way. Opponents of the Revolution, such as Edmunde Burke, feared that once a Revolution discarded the traditions of the past, it would open the way for a never-ending cycle of violence and war. For both supporters of the Revolution and opponents, then, the place of violence was central.
Edmunde Burke wrote in the early years of the Revolution to oppose the idea of "the rights of man" as an unworkably abstract ideal and to defend traditional institutions, such as nobility and religion, as necessary to maintain order, prevent chaotic violence and therefore preserve liberty. He thought that without those institutions, society would be ruled by "swinish hordes." In response, Tom Paine's "Rights of Man" defended the idea of a society based upon individuals whose reason leads them to show mutual respect for each other's rights, without the need for tradition.
Several years later, after the establishment of the Republic and during the intense period of "Revolutionary government," the Jacobin leader Robespierre defended the use of the government's power, its monopoly on violence, to overcome the power of the same traditional institutions that Burke had defended and therefore make possible the new society that Paine called for.
From these three documents, what do you perceive to be ideas they shared and how did they differ on this important question: Is violence necessary for the achievement of liberty through Revolution, and if so, what is the source and consequence of that violence?
2. The Enlightenment argued for the capacity of human reason to bring "progress" to human history and that both reason and progress were natural. In response to the impact of the French Revolution, many leaders considered it necessary to re-establish what they considered a Restoration of traditional ideals and institutions. Such writers as Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, the "Holy Alliance", and Clement von Metternich's decree on censorship and his Carlsbad decrees on education call for a return to "legitimate" ideals in opposition to the Enlightenment.
In what ways do each of these conservatives argue against those Enlightenment ideas of reason, progress and nature? To what might one attribute this pessimism? (Be sure to cite specific instances from their texts of their arguments and from the textbook discussion of events each lived through).
3. Some of the documents argue for the benefits of economic industrialization as an extension of the Enlightenment idea of progress (Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Adam Ure's Philosophy of Manufactures). Others point out the negative effect of economic industrialization on workers' families (Hammond on child labor in mills; the testimony of child workers before the Sadler Commission, the recollections of women workers in mills in America;and Frederic Engels on factory towns).
By comparing documents that take opposing points of view (choose at least one from each group), write an essay that assesses to what extent industrialization of the economy seemed to represent social progress in nineteenth-century Britain. What would account for different views about whether or not industrialization of the economy represented social progress?