Agrégation Externe : annales des sujets de leçon de littérature

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Ces annales proviennent des rapports de jury de concours.

Sommaire

Littérature

Roman/nouvelles

Austen

  • Repetition in Pride and Prejudice
  • Interference in Pride and Prejudice
  • Design in Pride and Prejudice
  • Trust in Sense and Sensibility
  • Pleasure in Sense and Sensibility
  • Theatricality in Sense and Sensibility
  • Affection and affectation in Sense and Sensibility
  • Intimacy in Sense and Sensibility
  • "The business of self-command" (p. 79) in Sense and Sensibility
  • "[T]he appearance of secrecy" (p. 181) in Sense and Sensibility

Brontë

  • Erring in Jane Eyre
  • The didacticism of Jane Eyre
  • Reading the other and writing the self in Jane Eyre
  • “They were under a yoke: I could free them” (p.328) in Jane Eyre
  • Giving “furious feelings uncontrolled play” (p.31) in Jane Eyre
  • "Conducting one's narrative and one's life"
  • Voices in Jane Eyre

Burney

  • Conversation in Evelina
  • Confusion in Evelina
  • "Romance and nature" (p. 10) in Evelina
  • Art and artlessness in Evelina
  • Authority in Evelina
  • Agitation in Evelina
  • Address and Subtlety in Evelina
  • "I cannot journalisze" (p. 255)
  • Innocence and ignorance in Evelina
  • ["W]riting with any regularity" (p. 23)

Chaucer

  • Le profane et le sacré dans The Canterbury Tales
  • "Teche us yonge men of youre praktike" (The Wife of Bath's Prologue, l. 187): innocence et expérience dans The Canterbury Tales

Conrad

  • L'autre dans Lord Jim
  • Quête et enquête dans Lord Jim
  • "It is impossible to see him clearly - especially as it is through the eyes of others that we take our last look at him." (Lord Jim, p. 201)
  • Le secret dans Lord Jim
  • "The power of sentences has nothing to do with their sense" (Lord Jim)

Cooper

  • Marks and scars in The Last of the Mohicans
  • "The signs of the forest" (p. 264) in The Last of the Mohicans
  • Wildness in The Last of the Mohicans
  • Staging war in The Last of the Mohicans
  • Guides and guidance in The Last of the Mohicans

DeLillo

  • La désintégration dans Falling Man
  • The art of remembering in Falling Man
  • Ordinariness in Falling Man
  • Stillness in Falling Man
  • Intimacy in Falling Man
  • Testimony in Falling Man
  • The aesthetics of destruction in Falling Man

Desai

  • Rituals in In Custody
  • Vicariousness in In Custody
  • The lofty and the lowly in In Custody
  • Decay in In Custody
  • Absent texts in In Custody
  • Alienation in In Custody

Dickens

  • "A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other." (p. 16), in A Tale of Two Cities
  • "A Tale Two Cities as a "profound meditation on strangeness, on the principle of reconciliation, and on the meaning of resurrection” (Andrew Sanders, Charles Dickens, Oxford, OUP, 2009(2003), p. 35).
  • "What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!" (Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Chapter 16, London, Penguin, 2003 (1853), p. 256)
  • "[T]he reality of mist and rain" (p. 19)
  • "[U]nseen force[s]" (p. 235)
  • "The substance of the shadow" (p. 306)
  • “The popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time", Preface to A Tale of Two Cities, 2008 (1859), p.3
  • Seeing in A Tale of Two Cities
  • "The murmuring of many voices" (p. 360) in A Tale of Two Cities
  • Roles and disguises in A Tale of Two Cities
  • "Sublime and Prophetic" (p. 360) in A Tale of Two Cities

Eliot

  • Le mélodrame dans The Mill on the Floss
  • L'inné et l'acquis dans The Mill on the Floss
  • La dérive dans The Mill on the Floss
  • La servitude volontaire dans The Mill on the Floss
  • L'histoire naturelle dans The Mill on the Floss
  • "Things have got so twisted round and wrapped up i' unreasonable words" (p. 20): mots et maux dans The Mill on the Floss

Faulkner

  • Figures de l'absence dans The Sound and the Fury

Ford (Ford Maddox)

  • Identité et identification dans The Good Soldier
  • Silences dans The Good Soldier
  • L'écriture de la mémoire dans The Good Soldier
  • "It is difficult to give an all-round impression of any man" (The Good Soldier, p. 101)
  • Affaires de coeur dans The Good Soldier
  • Le corps à l'oeuvre dans The Good Soldier
  • La duplicité dans The Good Soldier

Ford (Richard)

  • Expectations in A Multitude of Sins
  • Opacity in A Multitude of Sins

Frame

  • The art of conversation in The Lagoon and Other Stories
  • Narrative frames and textual spaces in The Lagoon and Other Stories
  • "[T]he wrong way of looking at Life" (p.183) in The Lagoon and Other Stories
  • "[P]utting a wise ear to the keyhole of [the] mind" (p.131) in The Lagoon and Other Stories
  • Finding a voice in The Lagoon and Other Stories
  • Self-consciousness in The Lagoon and Other Stories

Gaines

  • "There had to be a story" (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, p. V)
  • Pères et fils dans The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
  • L'émancipation dans The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
  • Story and History in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
  • The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman - an epic?
  • "I have tried my best to retain Miss Jane's language" (p. vii)
  • Narrating Miss jane's inner life in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

Greene

  • Passion in The Power and the Glory
  • Pleasure and pain in The Power and the Glory

Hardy

  • Récit et déterminisme dans Far From the Madding Crowd
  • Taming nature in Far from the Madding Crowd
  • "feeling balanced between poetry and practicality" (p. 28) in Far from the Madding Crowd
  • "a world made up so largely of compromise" (p. 34) in Far from the Madding Crowd
  • "[T]he coarse meshes of language" (p. 21) in Far from the Madding Crowd
  • "The "silent workings of an invisible hand" (p.217)in Far from the Madding Crowd
  • "The exuberant ideological confidence of the opening [of Far from the Madding Crowd] is chastened along with its characters in the course

of the narrative." (Penny Boumelha, "The Patriarchy of Class", in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, Dale Kramer ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p.140. Discuss, with reference to the novel and the film

  • The "poetry of motion" (p. 12) in Far From the Madding Crowd

Hawthorne

  • Ethique et esthétique dans The Scarlet Letter
  • Miroirs et reflets dans The Scarlet Letter
  • Masques dans The Scarlet Letter
  • Obliquity in The Scarlet Letter
  • Perception in The Scarlet Letter
  • Reversibility in The Scarlet Letter

Hemingway

  • L'art de la perte dans Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
  • "[P]urity of line" (p.146) in Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
  • Dereliction in Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
  • Potency in Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
  • Celebration and lament in Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
  • "I don’t film well" (p. 44) in Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
  • Artlessness in Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
  • Immediacy in Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
  • Ceremonial action in Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
  • Disenchantment in Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
  • Emotions and sensations in Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises

Millhauser

  • Le jeu dans The Knife Thrower and Other Stories

Munro

  • Narrator and Narratee in Dance of the Happy Shades
  • The signs of invasion in Dance of the Happy Shades
  • "Darkening and turning strange" in Dance of the Happy Shades
  • Thresholds in Dance of the Happy Shades
  • Surface and depth in Dance of the Happy Shades
  • The individual and the community in Dance of the Happy Shades
  • Transgression in Dance of the Happy Shades
  • Houses in Dance of the Happy Shades
  • "The ordinary world" (p. 160) in Dance of the Happy Shades
  • Naming in Dance of the Happy Shades

Nabokov

  • The lyricism of Lolita
  • Enchantment in Lolita
  • Pictorialism in Lolita
  • “Lolita is a tragedy”. Vladimir Nabokov, Letter to Morris Bishop, 6 March, 1956
  • Monsters in Lolita

O'Connor

  • Une dialectique de la condamnation et du pardon
  • L'inhumain
  • La grâce et le grotesque
  • L'écriture du moment
  • L'animalité
  • Le mystère
  • La confrontation
  • L'imprévu
  • L'être et le néant
  • La conversion

Okri

  • « [A] delirium of stories » (p. 213).
  • « [T]he winds of recurrence » (p. 220).
  • « [I]nterstitial realities » (Ato Quayson, “Means and Meanings: Methodological Issues in Africanist Interdisciplinary Research”, History in Africa 25, 1998, p. 318).
  • « It is terrible to remain forever in-between” (p. 6).
  • Possession in The Famished Road
  • « Like a strange fairyland in the real world. », (p. 242).
  • « Time is not what you think it is », (p. 554).
  • «[W]eird delirium » (p. 228).
  • Interruption in The Famished Road

Quincey

  • Erudition et imagination dans Confessions of an Opium-Eater
  • Progression et digression dans Confessions of an Opium-Eater
  • Marges et vagabondages dans Confessions of an Opium-Eater
  • La dualité dans Confessions of an Opium-Eater
  • Confessions of an Opium-Eater : les illuminations
  • "Familiar objects" dans Confessions of an Opium-Eater
  • L'écriture de la chute dans Confessions of an Opium-Eater
  • Vagabondages dans Confessions of an Opium-Eater

Roth

  • Heroes and hero worship in American Pastoral
  • Wasteland and wonderland in American Pastoral
  • "Reprehensible" lives (p. 423) in American Pastoral
  • "[A] biography in perpetual motion" (p.45) in American Pastoral
  • “[G]enealogical aggression” (pp. 382-383) in American Pastoral
  • « [A]ll that rose to the surface was more surface » (p. 23) in American Pastoral
  • « The man within the man » (p. 30) in American Pastoral
  • « Layers and layers of misunderstanding » (p. 64) in American Pastoral
  • « Of course I was working with traces » (p. 76).
  • The curse of perfection in American Pastoral
  • Introspection and retrospection in American Pastoral
  • Opacity in American Pastoral

Roy

  • L'obscurité dans The God of Small Things
  • Les enjeux de pouvoir dans The God of Small Things
  • Progresser, transgresser, régresser dans The God of Small Things
  • Le suintement du secret dans The God of Small Things

Smollett

  • Theatricality in The Adventures of Roderick Random
  • The Contrivance of Plot in The Adventures of Roderick Random
  • « Monsters of the imagination » (John Cleland, The Monthly Review 4, March 1751, p. 355) in The Adventures of Roderick Random
  • Appearances in The Adventures of Roderick Random
  • Progress in The Adventures of Roderick Random
  • “The knavery of the world” (p. 47) in The Adventures of Roderick Random

Steinbeck

  • "maybe that is the Holy Sperit - the human sperit" in The Grapes of Wrath
  • Storytelling in The Grapes of Wrath
  • Preaching and teaching in The Grapes of Wrath
  • Authority in The Grapes of Wrath

Sterne

  • High and low in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
  • Digressions, interruptions, disconnection in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
  • Intelligibility in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
  • Laughter in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Stoker

  • Les codes de la représentation dans Dracula
  • Signes et symptômes dans Dracula

Styron

  • L'impensable dans Sophie's Choice
  • Le corps dans Sophie's Choice

Swift

  • L'humanisme de Gulliver's Travels
  • La curiosité dans Gulliver's Travels
  • L'inventaire dans Gulliver's Travels
  • L'étrange et l'étranger dans Gulliver's Travels

Wharton

  • "The dramatic contrasts of life" (p. 119) in The House of Mirth
  • Night and day in The House of Mirth
  • "Ever-narrowing perspective(s)" (p. 248) in The House of Mirth
  • Transitions in The House of Mirth
  • "A structure of artifice" in The House of Mirth
  • "This picture of loveliness in distress" in The House of Mirth
  • "A kind of permanence" in The House of Mirth

Théâtre

Beckett

  • "I simply cannot understand why some people call me a nihilist. There is no basis for that." (Samuel Beckett) Discuss with reference to Endgame.
  • The end of art in Endgame
  • Seeing and being seen in Endgame
  • “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness” (p.20) in Endgame
  • "Technique, you know" (p.36)
  • Redefining the tragic in Endgame

Everyman

  • Théâtre et théologie dans Everyman
  • Form and reform in Everyman
  • Individuality and exemplarity in Everyman
  • Humour in Everyman

Shakespeare

  • L'économie de l'amour dans A Midsummer Night's Dream
  • Ordre et désordre des passions dans A Midsummer Night's Dream
  • "Wand'ring in the wood" (II. 2. 41) dans A Midsummer Night's Dream
  • The lamentable tale of me dans Richard II
  • La perspective dans Richard II
  • La mystification dans Richard II
  • Langage et violence dans Richard II
  • Le mensonge des mots dans Richard II
  • "His words come from his mouth, ours from our breast" : rhétorique et sincérité dans Richard II
  • Langage et trahison dans Richard II
  • Guerre et paix dans Richard II
  • "Thus play I in one person many people" (V, 5)
  • Le public et le privé dans The Tragedy of Coriolanus
  • Language and silence in The Tragedy of Coriolanus
  • The one and the many in The Tragedy of Coriolanus
  • Words and swords in The Tragedy of Coriolanus
  • Dismemberment in The Tragedy of Coriolanus
  • "Reason in madness" in King Lear
  • Contradictions and paradoxes in King Lear
  • Order, rule and hierarchy in King Lear
  • “The promised end” (V, 3, 261) in King Lear
  • Erring in King Lear
  • Hierarchies in King Lear
  • Sight and insight in King Lear
  • Kingship and kinship in King Lear
  • The Winter’s Tale and the « poetics of incomprehensibility » (Stephen Orgel, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 4, 1991, p. 431-437)
  • "Th’ argument of Time" in The Winter’s Tale (IV, 1, 29)
  • "recreation" (III, 2, 238) in The Winter’s Tale
  • "Seeming and savour all the winter long" (IV, 4, 75) in The Winter's Tale
  • In The Winter's Tale, "Nature is made better by no mean / But Nature makes that mean" (IV, 4, 89-90)
  • "[T]ransformations" (IV, 4, 31) in The Winter's Tale
  • « [F]iguring diseases » (I, 2, 49) in Measure for Measure
  • « [D]evilish mercy » (III, 1, 64) in Mesaure for Measure
  • « [T]he liberty of the prison » (IV, 2, 145-146) in Measure for Measure
  • Power and authority in Measure for Measure
  • Exposure and concealment in Measure for Measure
  • Confessions in Measure for Measure
  • « My business is a word or two » (III, 1, 48) in Measure for Measure
  • Excess in Measure for Measure
  • Subordination in Measure for Measure
  • Resistance in Measure for Measure
  • Shadows in Measure for Measure
  • Fast and Feasting in Love's Labour's Lost
  • The scene of foolery in Love's Labour's Lost
  • Melancholy in Love's Labour's Lost
  • Studying and learning in Love's Labour's Lost
  • "Living art" in Love's Labour's Lost
  • The "judgement of the eye" (II, 1, 15) in Love's Labour's Lost
  • " Heavenly rhetoric" (IV, 3, 52) in Love's Labour's Lost
  • Diplomacy in Love's Labour's Lost
  • Scripts in Love's Labour's Lost

Stoppard

  • The staging of ideas in Arcadia
  • Vistas in Arcadia
  • "Nothing is impressive but the scale" (p.3) in Arcadia
  • Landscapes of the mind in Arcadia
  • Designs in Arcadia
  • Transformation in Arcadia
  • "To make sense of nature’s senselessness" in Arcadia (Stephen Schiff, « Full Stoppard », in Tom Stoppard in Conversation, Paul Delaney & Ann Arbor (eds.), The University of Michigan Press, 2001 (1994), p. 224)
  • "[C]rossing boundaries between scandal and propriety" in Arcadia (Russell Twisk, "Stoppard Basks in Late Indian Summer", in Tom Stoppard in Conversation, Paul Delaney & Ann Arbor (eds.), The University of Michigan Press, 2001 (1994), p. 253)
  • "The exaltation of knowledge" (p. 108) in Arcadia
  • Music and silence in Arcadia

Wilde

  • Identity in The Importance of Being Earnest
  • "Adopting a strictly immoral attitude to life" in The Importance of Being Earnest
  • "Style, not sincerity, is the vital thing" in The Importance of Being Earnest
  • Positions and displacements in The Importance of Being Earnest
  • Modern culture in The Importance of Being Earnest
  • "Romantic origin" (p. 23)
  • Imitation in The Importance of Being Earnest
  • Inversion in The Importance of Being Earnest
  • Codes in The Importance of Being Earnest
  • Excess in The Importance of Being Earnest
  • Repetition in The Importance of Being Earnest

Williams

  • Le paradis perdu dans A Streetcar Named Desire

Poésie

Burns

  • L'art du chant et du conte dans les Selected Poems
  • L'impertinence dans les Selected Poems

Dickinson

  • "The Universe is the externization of the soul." (R.W. Emerson, "The Poet" [1847], Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, New York and London: Norton, 2001, p. 185) in The Complete Poems
  • "Earthquake Style" in The Complete Poems (p. 295)
  • Dramatizing the Self in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.
  • “Trust in the Unexpected” (p. 270) in The Complete Poems
  • “Gem-Tactics” (p.151) in The Complete Poems
  • Liminality in The Complete Poems
  • Mindscape in The Complete Poems
  • The Lyrical in The Complete Poems
  • "[O]nly Mutability certain"

H.D.

  • “We are the keepers of the secret” (p. 24) in Trilogy
  • “Collect[ing] the fragments of the splintered glass” (p. 63) in Trilogy
  • "It was not a dream/ yet it was a vision, / it was a sign", "Tribute to the Angels", [23], p. 87
  • "I testify", "Tribute to the Angels" [43]
  • Initiation in Trilogy
  • Beginnings and endings in Trilogy
  • Voices in Trilogy
  • The "inquiring soul"in Trilogy
  • "A new sensation" in Trilogy

Lais bretons

  • Disenchantment in Sir Launfal
  • Voices in the Middle English Breton Lays and The Franklin’s Tale
  • Quest(s) in Sir Degare
  • Text and textiles in the Middle English Breton Lays
  • Transgression in the Middle English Breton Lays and The Franklin's Tale
  • Deliveries in the Middle English Breton Lays
  • Returning in the Middle English Breton Lays
  • Narrative enchantment in the Middle English Breton Lays

MacNeice

  • Voices and Traces in The Burning Perch
  • Forgetting and Remembering in The Burning Perch
  • "[A] living language" (p. 9) in The Burning Perch
  • "a small I Am" ("Budgie", p. 37) in The Burning Perch
  • "[M]y far-near country, my erstwile" (p. 38) in The Burning Perch
  • "[M]oments caught between heart-beats" (p. 47) in The Burning Perch

Walcott

  • "either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation"
  • L'hybridité dans The Collected Poems
  • Crossing the gulf in The Collected Poems
  • Landscape and seascape in The Collected Poems

Wordsworth et Coleridge

  • "[A]wakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom" in Lyrical Ballads (S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chap. XIV)
  • Anecdotes in Lyrical Ballads
  • Simplicity in Lyrical Ballads
  • « Strange power of speech » p. 77, l. 620.
  • « [T]he sympathies of men » (Preface to Lyrical Ballads [1800], 2005, (p. 290).
  • The sense of community in Lyrical Ballads
  • Dramatic narrative in Lyrical Ballads
  • Motion and Emotion in Lyrical Ballads
  • The Poetics of Discovery in Lyrical Ballads

Yeats

  • « Weaving olden dances » in the Selected Poems
  • Water in the Selected Poems

Civilisation

Civilisation britannique

Débat sur l'abolition de l'esclavage

  • The end of slavery in Britain: Parliament's or the people's victory?
  • "[...] the more the character of the planters is raised, the lower is sunk and depressed the system; for it is a fact sworn to by the planters themselves, that, notwithstanding their merciful conduct, in ten years one-sixth of the whole population has perished not murdered by the planters, but murdered by the system. There is no instance, I am ready to admit, of unnecessary oppression, but there have been instances of necessary oppression; and the system is shewn to be so destructive to human life, that it ought to be abolished." (Mr. Fowell Buxton, in Report of the Debate in the House of Commons, on Friday, the 15th of April, 1831; on Mr. Fowell Buxton's motion to consider and adopt the best means for effecting the abolition of colonial slavery. Extracted from the Mirror of Parliament, Part LXXXIII [London, 1831, p. 7])
  • “Anti-slavery provided the opportunity for elevating Britain by seizing the initiative and restoring the British belief that they, above all others, were a people wedded to liberty. After all, which institution seemed more violent and more thoroughly a denial of liberties than the Atlantic slave trade?”, James Walvin, Britain’s Slave Empire, Stroud: Tempus, 2007 (2000), 96
  • [...] the more the character of the planters is raised, the lower is sunk and depressed the system; for it is a fact sworn to by the planters themselves, that, notwithstanding their merciful conduct, in ten years one-sixth of the whole population has perished not murdered by the planters, but murdered by the system. There is no instance, I am ready to admit, of unnecessary oppression, but there have been instances of necessary oppression; and the system is shewn to be so destructive to human life, that it ought to be abolished." Foxwell Buxton, April 1831
  • "The story of the great humanitarian crusade has been frequently told and as frequently misunderstood. In one of the greatest propaganda movements of all times, the abolitionists had, before 1833, gone far beyond the bounds of British West Indian slavery. They had dreamed of the universal abolition of slavery and the slave trade. They had lobbied at the European Congresses from 1815 to 1820 in favor of an international ban on the slave trade, and were even prepared to go to war for abolition. They had urged the government not to recognize Brazil without an explicit promise to renounce the slave trade. Actually, however, their condemnation of slavery applied only to the Negro and only to the Negro in the British West Indies." Eric Williams

Décolonisation

  • "Decolonization was not a process but a clutch of fitful activities and events, played out in conference rooms, acted out in protests mounted in city streets, fought over in jungles and mountains." Raymond F. Betts, Decolonization, New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 1.
  • "The quintessential problem of the post-1964 period was no longer (except in certain outstanding instances) that of whether and how to decolonize, but rather how to graft the plethora of ‘new’ underdeveloped states into western interests." Robert Holland, European Decolonization, 1918-1981. An Introductory Survey, London: Macmillan, 1985, p.269.
  • Internationalism and nationalism in British decolonisation (1919-1984)
  • "Postwar imperial ideologies remained and remain progressivist and arrogantly ethnocentric; they did not and do not remain specifically colonial." F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler, "Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule", 1989

Dévolution des pouvoir à l'Ecosse et au pays de Galles

  • Regionalism and devolution
  • Devolution and Britishness in the Old and New Labour
  • Comment on the following sentence : "Is Britain a nation-state (one nation and one state) as many politicians and citizens routinely suppose, or is it a union-state (one state uniting four nations, England, Scotland, Wales, and (part of) Ireland), or is it both (one state but five nations with Britain itself the overarching fifth nation)?" (Christopher Bryant, The Nations of Britain)
  • Comment on David McCrone's judgment that "Great Britain is a state-nation masquerading as a nation-state."

Ferguson

  • Discuss the following statement: “Ferguson was neither distrustful of wealth nor did he believe that it invariably retarded social virtue and a free society”. Ronald Hamowy, The Political Sociology of Freedom: Adam Ferguson and F.A. Hayek, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005, p. 83.
  • The State of Nature in Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society
  • The paradox of progress in Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society
  • "Ferguson was well aware of the role of unintended consequences in the process of social change." Craig Smith, "Ferguson and the active Genius of Mankind" in Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature, edited by Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle, London: Pickering & Chatto, n° 4, 2008, p. 165
  • Comment on the following statement: "Civil liberty was the great object of Ferguson's enterprise. And his design was offered to protect the people and their liberty from themselves." (Gary L. McDowell)
  • "Ferguson was no revolutionary; he did not call for radical alterations or changes in the prevailing social structure or form of government, but for a change of heart, vigilance, and liberal sentiments, with which these are perfectly compatible." (introduction de An Essay on the History of Civil Society)


Glorieuse Révolution

  • Discuss the following statement: “Was it [the Glorious Revolution] achieved by what might be termed the most successful confidence trick in British history? One thing is certain: William of Orange did not come over to England by popular demand. The thick smokescreen which became the Whig interpretation was put up very quickly to mask what had really happened.” Eveline Cruickshanks, The Glorious Revolution, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, p. 2.
  • Discuss the following statement: “[...] though this [the Glorious Revolution] cannot be called a revolution by the people, [...] it can be described as a popular revolution.” Edward Vallance, The Glorious Revolution, 1688: Britain’s Fight for Liberty [2006], London: Abacus, 2007, p. 19.
  • Discuss the following statement: “The most striking feature of the Glorious Revolution was its failure to effect any fundamental changes in the English Church or constitution. [...] The changes that came over the constitution between 1689 and 1714 did not originate directly in the legislation or pronouncements made in 1688-9, nor were they envisaged by the architects of the Glorious Revolution. They were instead the direct product of England’s involvement in a major European war.”

Barry Coward, The Stuart Age. A History of England 1603-1714, London; New York: Longman, 1980, p. 312.

  • Discuss the following statement: “By the Declaration of Right and the Bill of Rights the tenure of the Crown was made strictly conditional. [...] By this beneficent Revolution, the liberty of the subject and the power of Parliament were finally secured against the power of the Crown.” George Macaulay Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts [1904], London, 1960, p. 430.
  • Discuss the following statement: “[...] there were practical and political reasons of obvious importance why the Glorious Revolution became so preeminently glorious for men of substantial property. This was a revolution both conceived and carried through by representatives of the propertied classes, and if it was not wholly in the interests of these classes that it was effected, it was not to be expected that those interests would be ignored in its aftermath.” Geoffrey Holmes, The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain, 1660-1722, London; New York: Longman, 1993, p. 278.
  • Discuss the following statement: “1689 could both be seen as having changed quite a lot and as having altered very little – as a victory for popular sovereignty or as a miraculous deliverance wrought by God. The ability of the Glorious Revolution in England to appear all things to so many different types of people, of course, goes a considerable way towards explaining its success.” Tim Harris, Revolution. The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy 1685-1720, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007, p. 310.
  • Discuss the following statement: “In a sense, the Glorious Revolution began as an attempt to vindicate Tory principles. Unfortunately for Tory Anglicans, things got out of hand, and they had to concede much more than they would have wanted (most obviously on the central issue of the transfer of the Crown). But they also salvaged much, so that the new regime was established upon principles which were much more conducive to Toryism than is normally thought.”

Tim Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts. Party Conflict in a Divided Society, 1660-1715, London: Longman, 1993, p. 119.

  • Discuss the following statement: “What is [the Bill of Rights], but a bargain, which the parts of the government made with each other to divide powers, profits, and privileges? You shall have so much, and I will have the rest; and with respect to the nation, it said, for your share, You shall have the right of petitioning. This being the case, the bill of rights is more properly a bill of wrongs, and of insult.” Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, part II, London, 1792, p. 52.
  • Discuss the following statement: "If James stretched his powers beyond conventional limits, he did so because he could not achieve his objectives without doing so. In accusing him of trying to establish absolutism, his contemporaries and later historians confused means with ends, treating James's abuses of power as a central rather than incidental feature of his rule." John Miller, James II (1978), New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 128.
  • Dissenting and Resisting in the Glorious Revolution
  • Violence and compromise in the British Isles, 1688-1691
  • Religious Toleration in the Glorious Revolution

Grande Famine en Irlande

  • "It is stated by many practical persons that the management of land under such circumstances becomes impossible, and that an enforcement of the most ordinary legal right is attended with personal risks to life and to property." House of Lords Colonization from Ireland, Report of the Select Committee, session 1847.
  • "There was no conspiracy theory to destroy the Irish nation. The scale of the actual outlay to meet the famine and the expansion of the public relief system are in themselves impressive evidence that the state was by no means always indifferent to Irish needs". Robert Dudley Williams and Thomas Desmond Williams, The Great Irish Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845-52 [1956], ed. Cormac O'Grada. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994
  • "The Christian duty of charity continued to dominate the actions of groups like the Quakers, but for many in Britain, philanthropic feelings existed alongside a strong desire to see the fundamental changes in Ireland they believed would prevent the need for continuous private generosity." Peter Gray, "The Triumph of Dogma: Ideology and Famine Relief", History Ireland, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer 1995), p. 29
  • "... the British authorities could and did make choices, and those were all dictated by the ideologically-based conviction that centralisation of the Irish relief institutions and an open border policy was the best option to achieve the intertwined goals of ending the famine, restructuring [...] Irish society and making the Irish people pay for what was regarded as "their" crisis." Eric Vanhaute, Richard Paping, and Cormac O Grada, "The European subsistence crisis of 1845-1850: a Comparative Perspective" in E. Vanhaute, R. Paping and C. O Grada (eds), When the Potato Failed: Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845 -1850, Turnhout, Brepols, 2007, p.31.
  • “The Poor Law appears to be thoroughly naturalized in Ireland. Your lordship would have been delighted to have heard it spoken of as I have done, and that by persons who did not know me, and who praised it as having been the salvation of the country, exclaiming ‘what should we have done without it!’” Sir George Nicholls to Lord John Russell, letter dated Dublin, 16th September 1853, quoted in Sir George Nicholls, A History of the Irish Poor Law, in connexion with the Condition of the People, first edition London: John Murray, 1856; this reprint New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967, p. 398
  • The Irish Famine of 1847 had results, social and political, that constitute it one of the most important events in Irish history for more than two hundred years. It is impossible for anyone who knew the country previous to that period, and who has thoughtfully studied it since, to avoid the

conclusion that so much has been destroyed, or so greatly changed, that the Ireland of old times will be seen no more.” Alexander Martin Sullivan, New Ireland, London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1877 (Alexander Martin Sullivan was the sole proprietor and editor of The Nation from 1855 to 1876.)

  • “The introduction of the poor laws was followed at no distant interval by the fearful calamity of the Irish famine, a calamity which taught the proprietors what a terrible burthen a numerous tenantry might become. The abolition of the protective duty on corn introduced another element of disturbance in the arrangements of the Irish farms. Never had so many causes combined in so short a time to effect vital changes in the circumstances of the land occupiers of a country.”Isaac Butt, Land Tenure in Ireland; a plea for the Celtic race. Dublin: J. Falconer, 1866 (third edition)
  • “The danger remains that much current and future scholarship on the Famine will make its mark in academic circles but not in the wider world where images of genocide will persist.” Mary Daly, ‘Revisionism and the Great Irish Famine’, in D. George Boyce & Alan O’Day (eds.), The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy, London: Routledge, (1996)
  • The experience of the famine, both then and later, became inextricably linked with the question of the Union and its reality, even its viability.” D. George Boyce, Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The Search for Stability, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, revised ed. 2005, p. 126
  • “The predominant academic view until the early 1990s was that while the official response to the Famine had often been shortsighted, nevertheless, the Famine was an unavoidable Malthusian catastrophe, a view underlying the contemporary official response.”Patrick Maume, “Irish political history: guidelines and reflections”, in M. McAuliffe, K. O’Donnell and L. Lane (eds), Palgrave Advances in Irish History, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 14
  • Poverty and morality in the Great Irish Famine
  • "Esquimaux and New Zealanders are more thrifty and industrious than these people who deserve to be left to their fate instead of the hardworking people of Englang being taxed for their support, but can we do so ? We shall be equally blamed for keeping them alive or letting them die and we have only to select between the censure of the Economists or the Philanthropists - which do you prefer?" Letter from Lord Clarendon to Lord John Russell, 10 Aug. 1847, quoted in Peter Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843-1850, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999, p.292
  • Providence and the Great Famine
  • Reform and revolution in the Great Irish Famine
  • Philanthropy and the Great Irish Famine
  • Entitlement and the Famine
  • Silence during the Great Irish Famine

Locke

  • La force de l'habitude dans Some Thoughts Concerning Education
  • "Locke, with the general aim of producing a 'sound mind in a sound body' has more particularly in view the 'breeding' of a 'gentleman's son' rather than the rearing of heroes or saints." Basil Willey, The Seventeenth-Century Background, Penguin, 1962 (1934), p. 243.
  • Trouve-t-on une philosophie de l'éducation dans Some Thoughts Concerning Education ?
  • Les vertus de l'expérience dans Some Thoughts Concerning Education
  • The religious dimension in Some Thoughts Concerning Education
  • Child's rights in Some Thoughts Concerning Education
  • Teaching and good government in Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Milton

  • Victoria Kahn : "(...) just as for Milton consent is not meaningful without the possibility of dissent, so the ability to transfer power to the sovereign is evidence of the power to revoke allegiance."
  • Covenant and nation
  • In her book The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution, Elizabeth Skerpan wrote: "Within his domestic audience, Milton repeatedly tries to exhort his readers to regeneration, never a state to be achieved passively or taken for granted. Believing regeneration possible for all, he cannot rhetorically close the door to any and still hope to persuade people to his cause". How may this statement help us understand both Areopagitica and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates?
  • Freedom and knowledge in Milton's Areopagitica
  • "[Milton] appears first as a regicide rather than as a republican." (Thomas N. Corns, 1995)

Morris

  • Culture du peuple et culture de l'élite
  • News from Nowhere : le mariage
  • News from Nowhere : romantisme ou révolution ?
  • Le point de vue masculin et condition féminine dans News from Nowhere
  • Le mariage dans News from Nowhere

Parti libéral

  • “Lloyd George’s attempt to perpetuate the politics of coalitionism and national unity [after the war] was ultimately doomed by developments external to the Coalition and by its disintegration from within”, David Powell, British Politics, 1910-1935: The Crisis of the Party System, London: Routledge, 2004, 90.
  • The Liberal Party, 1906-1924: division and unity
  • Discuss the following statement: “Unless Liberalism is to be sterilized for effective action, it is therefore manifest that Liberals must now

‘face the music’. We have to destroy the power of the Lords to kill, mutilate or unduly delay Liberal measures.” J.A. Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism: New Issues of Democracy, London: P.S. King and Son, 1909, p. 20.

  • “The war and its aftermath uprooted the political world that Liberals had understood and substituted something which seemed by comparison brash, cheap and contemptible”. Michael Bentley, The Liberal Mind 1914-29, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 1.
  • “[Lloyd George and Asquith] may be accused of dividing their party in its later years of decline. Equally clearly, together they generated the authority that transformed the fractious ranks of post-Gladstone Liberals for several years into an incomparable party of government.”

Kenneth O. Morgan, “Asquith and Lloyd George: Architects or Assassins?”, p. 122-136 dans Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, volume 16.2, 2011, p. 136.

Schisme d'Henri VIII

  • "Henricianism was not simply a call to England ti disown Rome's jurisdiction but, in its largest terms, a promise of radical and necessary renewal of the whole commonwealth." J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, Methuen, 1968, p.327.
  • La nation, l'Etat, l'Eglise et la monarchie, acteurs du schisme
  • La résistance au schisme
  • Conservateurs et réformateurs de 1527 à 1549
  • Pragmatisme et dogmatisme dans la Réforme henricienne
  • "So far from attempting to build a despotism in England, Thomas Cromwell was that country’s first parliamentary statesman." (G.R.Elton, England under the Tudors, 1955)
  • Le schisme et la politique étrangère de l'Angleterre (1521-1540)
  • “ I am very sorry to know and hear, how unreverently that most precious jewel the word of God is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern, contrary to the true meaning and doctrine of the same. ” (Henry VIII’s speech to Parliament, December 1545, in Edward Hall, Henry VIII, 1548.)
  • “ The [Henrician] Reformation is part of the laymen’s revolution. For centuries the Church had dominated every part of the nation’s life, even its military activity. Now the laymen were determined to bring that domination to an end. ” (Stephen Neill, Anglicanism, 1958, p. 34.)
  • “ The piecemeal Reformation was a peaceful Reformation. ” (Christopher Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, 1987.)
  • “ The English Reformation was emphatically a political revolution, and its author King Henry VIII resisted, for a time ferociously, many of the religious consequences which accompanied the legal changes everywhere else in Europe. ” (Owen Chadwick, The Reformation, 1964.)
  • “ The Henrician Reformation and the creation of the royal supremacy turned the Church in England (…) into the Church of England. ” (G.R. Elton, England under the Tudors, 1955.)
  • "The Reformation did not produce a Protestant England: it produced a divided England." (Christopher Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, 1987.)
  • La Réforme henricienne : un catholicisme sans le pape ?
  • Via media et raison d’Etat
  • Henri VIII et la raison d'Etat
  • Henri VIII et la propagande

Civilisation américaine

Années Roosevelt

  • Discuss the following statement: “Enough help had been given to enough people to make Roosevelt a hero to millions, but the same system that had brought depression and crisis—the system of waste, of inequality, of concern for profit over human need— remained.” Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, New York: Harper Collins, 2005 (1980), pp. 403-4.
  • Centralization in the Roosevelt years.
  • Discuss the following statement: “Above all, the New Deal gave to countless Americans who had never had much of it a sense of security, and with it a sense of having a stake in their country. And it did it all without shredding the American Constitution or sundering the American people.” David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 379.
  • Discuss the following statement: “Most obviously, the liberalization of the Democratic Party under Roosevelt and the New Deal realignment led to the development of a modern welfare state and a transition from legislative to executive-oriented legislation.” Sidney M. Milkis, “Roosevelt and the Transcendence of Partisan Politics”, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 100, No. 3 Autumn 1985,p. 498.
  • Discuss the following statement: “In making a state of procedures that organized political life at home, and in creating an assertive state that crusaded almost without limit for American power and values, the New Deal proved to be a rejuvenating triumph.” Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, New York: Liveright, 2013, p. 475.
  • Discuss the following statement: “Principal legacies of the New Deal have been a massive expansion of government power and loss of liberty.” Jim Powell, FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and his New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003, p. xiv.
  • Discuss the following statement: “By using the new materials of social justice we have undertaken to erect on the old foundations a more enduring structure for the better use of future generations.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937.
  • Discuss the following statement: “As wartime commander in chief, Roosevelt could exert power over the American economy and society transcending any he had previously wielded, even in the first heady days of the New Deal.” James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: the Soldier of Freedom, New York: Harcourt, 1970, p. 417.
  • Discuss the following statement: “From an ideological standpoint, the New Deal was illogical. But from a political standpoint it was marvelous. Its very inconsistency facilitated its appeal to a broad range of otherwise mutually hostile groups.” Thomas K. McCraw, “The New Deal and the Mixed Economy,” in Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated. Harvard Sitkoff, ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985,p. 63.
  • Inter-partisan conflict in the Roosevelt years.
  • Innovation in the Roosevelt years.
  • "One of the most lasting contributions was to open up the political process to previously excluded groups of interests and voters. As such, historians often speak of a New deal for blacks or labor, or various ethnic groups. Equally, there was a New Deal for women." Susan Ware, "Women and the New Deal", in Fifty Years Ltaer: The New Deal Evaluated, 1985.
  • "The truth is that the experimentatlism of the new deal was an ineffective mess that further tangled the knot of the great depression. After years of unprecedented economic intervention by Roosevelt, competition was stifled, investment plummeted, restrictive cartelization abounded, industrial production stagnated, and budget deficit skyrocketed. Wage controls and new union contracts limited the number of workers private-sector employers could hire, leaving unemployment to hover around 20%." Jay Wiley, "The Nex Deal Myth", American Thinker, October 31st 2010

Contre-culture

  • Discuss the following statement: “To start with a banality: a lot happened in the 1960s. And the historiography of the era has come to mirror that banal observation. The Sixties had become a capacious subject, so much so that, I have come to think, we have lost the “Sixties” in writing about the Sixties.” David Farber, review of Robert Cohen’s Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), in Reviews in American History 39 (2011), pp. 712-717.
  • Sexual Politics in the counterculture.
  • Analysez et discutez la citation suivante : “The 1960s [...] legitimized civil disobedience as a tactic on the part of loyal citizens excluded from the conventional channels of power and social change.” John P. Diggins, “Civil disobedience in American political thought”, in Luther S. Luedtke (ed.), Making America. The Society and Culture of the United States, Washington: USIA, 1987, p. 353.
  • "Everyone knows about the peace, love, grass and groovy music but the counterculture was always more complicated – edgier, darker, and more tied to the dominant culture – than most anyone at the time could see." Alice Echols. Shaky Ground, the Sixties and its Aftershocks, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 18.
  • Discuss the following statement: “The counterculture was a way of life, a community, an infrastructure, and even an economy, not just a few lifestyle accoutrements like long hair and an occasional toke on illegal substances.” David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams, America in the 1960s, New York: Hill and Wang, 1994, p. 169.
  • Discuss the following statement: "To one side, there is the mind-blowing bohemianism of the beats and hippies; to the other, the hard-headed political activism of the student New Left. Are these not in reality two separate and antithetical developments [...]?" T. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (1968)
  • Discuss the following statement : "The counterculture of the young tried to combine two impulses at once - the libertarian and the spiritual." Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987)
  • By the time Johnson had become Kennedy's vice presiden he was a moderate advocate of civil rights But once President, he became more thoroughly committed to the struggle, in part because he believed that ending legal discrimination and racism in the US would assure his place among the greatest leaders in American history. Lyndon Johnson, unlike John F. Kennedy, recognized that the civil rights issue was the moral issue facing the nation." David Farber

L'Empire de l'exécutif

  • "The reinvigoration of the written checks in the American Constitution depended on the reinvigoration of the unwritten checks in American society". Discuss this appraisal offered by Arthur M. Schlesinger in the concluding section of his 1973 The Imperial Presidency.
  • "The bottom line, then, is that the Constitution's incomplete contract sets up a governing structure that virtually invites presidential imperialism. Presidents, especially in modern times, are motivated to seek power. And because the Constitution does not say precisely what the proper boundaries of their power are, and because their hold on the executive functions of government gives them pivotal advantages in the political struggle, they have strong incentives to push for expanded authority by moving into grey areas of the law, asserting their rights and exercising them, whether or not the other actors, particularly in Congress, happen to agree." Terry M. Moe and William G. Howell "Unilateral Action and Presidential Power", Presidential Studies Quarterly 29, N°4, December 1999.
  • "In the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co.v Sawyer Supreme court decision of 1952, Justice Jackson wrote: "I have no illusion that any decision by this Court can keep power in the hands of Congress if it is not wise and timely in meeting its problems. A crisis that challenges the President equally, or perhaps primarily, challenges Congress. If not good law, there was worldly wisdom in the maxim attributed to Napoleon that 'The tools belong to the man who can use them'. We may say that power to legislate for emergencies belongs in the hands of Congress, but only Congress itself can prevent power from slipping though its fingers."
  • The Reagan Presidency: restoration, renovation, revolution?
  • "presidents are set too far above the people to be at one with them" (Bruce Miroff, 2006)

Le Sud de l'après-Guerre de Sécession

  • “One reads the truer deeper facts of reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men.” W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, New York: S. AL Russell, 1935), p.728
  • "Of the Reconstruction of the Southern States, from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy, had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well the effort, we would be living today in a different world. The attempt to make black men American citizens was in a certain sense all a failure, but a splendid failure." W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America
  • Violence in the South after the Civil War.
  • Analysez et discutez : “Rather than simply emphasizing conservatism and continuity, a coherent portrait of Reconstruction must take into account the subtle dialectic of continuity and change in economic, social, and political relations as the nation adjusted to emancipation.” Eric Foner, “Reconstruction Revisited,” Reviews in American History, Vol. 10, December 1982, p. 87.
  • “Rather than passive victims of the action of others or simply a ‘problem’ confronting white society, blacks were active agents in the making of the Reconstruction.” Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, New York: Harper and Row, 1988, xxiv
  • Re-visions of Reconstruction

Mencken

  • Mencken: the sage of Baltimore
  • Mencken sociologue
  • H.L. Mencken : un réactionnaire ?

Olmsted

  • Nation, Union and Landscape in Frederick Law Olmsted’s thought and action.
  • Discuss the following statement: “[...] Olmsted’s parks seemed to offer an attractive remedy for the dangerous problem of discontent among the urban masses. In contrast with other reforms put forward by the gentry, they visibly affected the everyday habits of large numbers of people. By providing pleasant and uplifting outlets in the narrow lives of city-dwellers, they promised a measure of social tranquillity”. Geoffrey Blodgett, “Frederick Law Olmsted: Landscape Architecture as Conservative Reform”, Journal of American History, Vol. 62, No. 4, March 1976, p. 877.
  • Discuss the following statement: “Olmsted’s great urban, pastoral-style public parks, from Louisville to Buffalo, from Boston to Brooklyn, stand as living monuments to and embodiment of the idealist proposition that there is a pre-established harmony between the forms of nature and the human heart and mind and that proper character formation as well as individual and collective human happiness are dependent upon that synergism.” George L. Scheper, “The Reformist Vision of Frederick Law Olmsted and the Poetics of Park Design”, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3, September 1989, p. 372.
  • Discuss the following statement: “One of the great ills of modern society, [Olmsted] argued, is a nervous disability caused by the stress of urban life and exacerbated by the artificiality of the city environment. The most effective antidote to this sickness, he was convinced, was a certain kind of scenery. The purpose of the urban park (as opposed to the whole range of other kinds of public recreation grounds that he designed) was to provide the scenery that most effectively counteracts and cures this nervous affliction.” Charles E. Beveridge and Carolyn F. Hoffman, “Introduction” in Charles E. Beveridge and Carolyn F. Hoffman (eds.), The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Supplementary Series, volume I, The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1997, pp. 5-6.
  • Democracy, progress and parks in Frederick Law Olmsted’s thought and action.

"Thus without means are taken by government to withhold them from the grasp of individuals, all places favorable in scenery to the recreation of the mind and body will be closed against the great body of the people. For the same reason that the water of rivers should be guarded against private appropriation and the use of it for the purpose of navigation and otherwise protected against obstruction, portions of natural scenery may therefore properly be guarded and cared for by Government. To simply reserve them from monopoly by individuals, however, it will be obvious, is not all that is necessary. It is necessary that they should be laid open to the use of the body of the people." Frederick Law Olmsted, Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report (1865)

  • "As a park maker, environmentalist, and abolitionist, Olmsted helped shape modern America" - Justin Martin, Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted, Abolitionist, Conservationist, and Designer of Central Park, 2011, p.4.
  • "Parks have plainly not come as the direct result of any of the inventions or discoveries of the century. They are not, with us, simply an improvement on what we had before growing out of a general advace of the arts applicable to them. It is not evident that the movement was taken up in any country from any other however it may have been influenced or accelerated. It did not run lie a fashion It would seem rather to have been a common, spontaneous movement of that sort which we conveniently refer to the "Genius of Civilisation." Frederick Law Olmsted, "A Consideration of the Justifying Value of a Public Park", 1881

Républicains

  • Republicans and the welfare state (1952-2008)
  • The grassroots and the elite
  • Culture Warriors
  • Discuss the following statement: "In talking about his domestic initiatives with me, Nixon insisted that all of them reflected his own background and association with the progressive wing of the Republican party. Aside from the improbability of such an assertion, his domestic reforms were far from conservative by Republican or Democratic standards." Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered, New York, Basic Books, 1994, p. 19.
  • Discuss the following statement: "Because of their confrontation with the civil rights movement, white southern conservatives were forced to abandon their traditional, populist, and often strakly racist demagogueryand instead craft a new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedoms, and individualism. This modern conservatism proved to be both subtler and stronger than the politics that preceded it and helped southern conservatives dominate the Republican Party and, through it, national politics as well." Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 6.
  • Discuss the following statement: "Conservatives' successes, to be sure, were due in no small part to liberalism's foundering on the shoals of race, economic discontent, and its own internal contradictions. But just as significantly, conservatives' ability to build a powerful movement enabled them to pick up the pieces and profit politically from liberal failures." Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 5.
  • Discuss the following statement: "There is perhaps no stronger validation of [George H.W.] Bush's emphasis on incremental policy development than the experiences of the Republican Congress elected in 1994. The conservative wing of the GOP had its "revolution", replete with a large-scale agenda to change the nation's policy direction. However, [...] the Republicans ran into the predictable barriers of an incrementalist policy system. In rejecting the nature of the policy system and trying to work against it, they minimized their influence and ultimately found themselves on the political defensive and heavily divided." Ryan Barilleaux & Mark J. Rozell, Power and Prudence: The Presidency of George H.W. Bush, Texas A&M University Press, College Station, 2004, p. 10.
  • Discuss the following statement: "The compassionate conservatives were quite conscious of conservatism's shortcomings. They worried about the sense of indifference their allies often conveyed toward the poor and to the social pain the budget cuts they championed might create." E.J. Dionne Jr., Why the Right Went Wrong. Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2016, p. 162.
  • Discuss the following statement: "Eisenhower hoped that by enunciating "borad and liberal objectives,"advancing moderate improvements in social programs, and establishing a reputation (and above all a record)for fostering a thriving economy, he could (if he could preserve an untroubled international environment) reconstitute the electoral base of his party. "Twentieth Century Republicanism," he hoped, would deprive the Democrats of their corner on the "common man," especially if his own "broad and liberal" Republican programs (and his personal appeal) helped bring young, attractive leaders into the party - leaders who would modernize the party's organizational procedures as well as its policy stance." Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency. Eisenhower as Leader, New York, Basic Books, 1982, p. 51-52.
  • Discuss the following statement: "In the contemporary conservative vision of history, Reagan dramatically shrank government and earned the public's everlasting affection and gratitude in return. Big Government persists after Reagan, Reagan's contemporary admirers admit, but ony because liberals and Washington elites have used government programs to buy off the public's votes and used allies in the media to cloak their unpopular policies." Jonathan Darman, Landslide. LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America, New York, Random House, 2015, p. 373.

The Federalist Papers

  • The Federalist then was able to claim that the Constitution of 1787 was ‘republican,’ by changing the concept of republicanism from notions of smallness and personal citizenparticipation into an idea of ‘responsibility’ of elected magistrates, into an idea of personal

accountability for all actions committed in office, into an idea of government somehow representative and responsible in all of its parts, not just in its legislature.” Patrick Riley, “Martin Diamond’s View of ‘The Federalist’”, Publius, Vol. 8, No. 3, Dimensions of the Democratic Republic: A Memorial to Martin Diamond (Summer, 1978), p.94.

  • Pragmatism in The Federalist Papers
  • “To the Federalists, the move for a new central government became the ultimate act of the entire Revolutionary era; it was both a progressive attempt to salvage the Revolution in the face of its imminent failure and a reactionary effort to restrain its excesses.” Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969, p.475.
  • Division in The Federalist Papers
  • Representation in The Federalist Papers

Thomas Jefferson et l'ouest

  • L'expédition de Lewis et Clark : une épopée américaine ?
  • L'expédition Lewis et Clark constitue-t-elle, selon l'expression de Bruce Ackerman, 'a constitutional moment' ?
  • Est-ce que l'expédition de Lewis et Clark a donné un nouveau sens au mot Liberté ?
  • The Lewis and Clark Expedition: a new phase in the American process of imperialistic expansion?