"Hundreds of Years Later, Those Two Competing Views of Freedom Remain Largely Unreconcilable"

"When conservative politicians like Rand Paul and advocacy groups FreedomWorks or the Federalist Society talk about their love of liberty, they usually mean something very different from civil rights activists like John Lewis—and from the revolutionaries, abolitionists and feminists in whose footsteps Lewis walked. Instead, they are channeling 19th century conservatives like Francis Parkman and William Graham Sumner, who believed that freedom is about protecting property rights—if need be, by obstructing democracy."

Annelien de Dijn at Time discusses left and right definitions of freedom.

"Three Revolutions All at Once"

"For Israel, resurrecting the Radical Enlightenment is part of a project designed to save the Enlightenment more generally. Both as a moment and as a political project, he thinks it must be rescued from political relativism under the guise of academic postmodernism. He also wants to salvage the French Revolution and its connections to Radical as well as moderate Enlightenment from generations of Marxist historians who see it simply in terms of class conflict, as well as their revisionist liberal critics, who see the logic of terror inscribed into revolutionary catechisms from the outset."


In the Financial Times, Duncan Kelly reviews Jonathan Israel's Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre.

The World's Greatest Englishman

"In the first years of the 19th century political radicals latched onto Paine's attacks on 'Old Corruption' and how they might dismantle the privileged aristocratic rule inherited from the 18th century. These ideas spoke to artisans and small producers and laid the foundations to 19th-century examinations of wealth and its distribution, even if Paine's analysis which attacked the landed aristocrat would later be replaced by an indictment of the capitalist."

David Nash in History Today recalls Thomas Paine on the bicentennial of Paine's death.