Dale K. Van Kley

Bio: Dale K. Van Kley is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Politics & Ideology. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 5 publications receiving 284 citations.

The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791

Abstract: Although the French Revolution is associated with efforts to dechristianize the French state and citizens, it actually had long-term religious-even Christian-origins, claims Dale Van Kley in this controversial new book. Looking back at the two and a half centuries that preceded the revolution, Van Kley explores the diverse, often warring religious strands that influenced political events up to the revolution. Van Kley draws on a wealth of primary sources to show that French royal absolutism was first a product and then a casualty of religious conflict. On the one hand, the religious civil wars of the sixteenth century between the Calvinist and Catholic internationals gave rise to Bourbon divine-right absolutism in the seventeenth century. On the other hand, Jansenist-related religious conflicts in the eighteenth century helped to "desacralize" the monarchy and along with it the French Catholic clergy, which was closely identified with Bourbon absolutism. The religious conflicts of the eighteenth century also made a more direct contribution to the revolution, for they left a legacy of protopolitical and ideological parties (such as the Patriot party, a successor to the Jansenist party), whose rhetoric affected the content of revolutionary as well as counterrevolutionary political culture. Even in its dechristianizing phase, says Van Kley, revolutionary political culture was considerably more indebted to varieties of French Catholicism than it realized.

The French idea of freedom : the Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789

Abstract: Acknowledgements Contributors Declaration on the rights of man and of the citizen Introduction Dale Van Kley Part I. Context: 1. Old regime origins of democratic liberty David D. Bien 2. From the lessons of French history to truths for all times and all people: the historical origins of an anti-historical declaration Dale Van Kley 3. Betwixt cattle and men: Jews, blacks, and women, and the declaration of the rights of man Shanti Marie Singham 4. The idea of a declaration of rights Keith Michael Baker Part II. Text: 5. National sovereignty and the general will: the political program of the declaration of rights J. K. Wright 6. Safeguarding the rights of the accused: lawyers and political trials in France, 1716-1789 David A. Bell 7. Religious toleration and freedom of expression Raymond Birn 8. Property, sovereignty, the declaration of the rights of man, and the tradition of French jurisprudence Thomas E. Kaiser Glossary Abbreviations Notes Index.

The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the ANCIEN REGIME, 1750-1770

Abstract: This book examines an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Louis XV of France and the trial of his assailant, Robert-Francois Damiens, revealing the beginnings of the French Revolution in the ecclesiastical controversies that dominated the Damiens affair.Originally published in 1984.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Religion and politics in enlightenment Europe

Abstract: This work shows that the collapse of the post-reformation confessional state was more the result of religious dissent from within, much of it orthodox, than attacks of an anti-religious Enlightenment. In sharp contrast to the Reformation-era religious conflicts which tended to pit Protestant and Catholic confessions and states against each other, the 18th century religious conflicts described in this work took place within the various confessional establishments and states that founded and maintained them, such as Russian Orthodoxy in the East and the Anglican Establishment in England and Ireland. In the course of its analysis, this work destroys the notion of any kind of privileged relationship between "religion" and political or social "reaction". This work reveals the religious roots of modern ideas of individual rights and limitations on government, as well as the imperative of political order and the need for social hierarchy.

From deficit to deluge : the origins of the French Revolution

Abstract: From Deficit to Deluge takes stock of shifts in scholarly investigation of the origins of French Revolution. During the last decade, scholars have moved beyond "revisionist" historians of the 1970s, who highlighted the monarchy's degeneration into despotism, to explore related conflicts in the realms of finance, social relations, religion, diplomacy, the Enlightenment, and colonial policy. In this book, seven established authorities explore some of these critical intersections, and together they make clear the role that unresolved tensions in these realms played in the essentially political narrative told by post-Marxian revisionist historiography.While each chapter of From Deficit to Deluge focuses upon one site of contention-fiscal, social, religious, diplomatic, ideological, and colonial-they all help to explain how long-standing structural problems of the Old Regime caused a fairly "normal" fiscal crisis to metastasize into a revolution. As the editors show in their introduction and conclusion, the growing democratization of politics sparked by the monarchy's clumsy efforts to solve the fiscal crisis put these wide-ranging problems at the epicenter of political debate, thereby sapping the foundations of royal authority and the social hierarchy.

The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy

Abstract: Social scientists tend to ignore religion in the processes of post-Enlightenment modernization. In individual cases and events, the role of religious actors is clear—especially in the primary documents. Yet in broad histories and comparative analyses, religious groups are pushed to the periphery, only to pop out like a jack-in-the-box from time to time to surprise and scare people and then shrink back into their box to lettheimportanthistoricalchangesbedirectedby“secular” actors and forces (Butler 2004). Yet integrating religious actors and motivations into narratives about the rise and spread of both Western modernity and democracy helps solve perennial problems that plague current research.

The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism

Abstract: Most theorists of nationalism are modernists: they regard nationalism as an essentially modern phenomenon. This article takes issue with the modernist position. Drawing on primary and secondary evidence from the Netherlands, England, and other early modern polities, it documents the existence of movements and ideologies that must be classified as national and nationalist by the modernists' own criteria. It is then argued that some nationalist discourses had medieval roots and that they were no less nationalistic than the nationalisms of the French Revolution. In the conclusion, the theoretical premises of the modernist position are subjected to critical examination.

The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism

Abstract: John Calvin developed arresting new teachings on rights and liberties, church and state, and religion and politics that shaped the law of Protestant lands. Calvin's original teachings were periodically challenged by major crises - the French Wars of Religion, Dutch Revolt, the English Civil War, American colonization, and American Revolution. In each such crisis moment, a major Calvinist figure emerged - Theodore Beza, Johannes Althusius, John Milton, John Winthrop, John Adams, and others - who modernized Calvin's teachings and translated them into dramatic new legal and political reforms. This rendered early modern Calvinism one of the driving engines of Western constitutionalism. A number of basic Western laws on religious and political rights, social and confessional pluralism, federalism and constitutionalism, and more owe a great deal to this religious movement. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of history, law, religion, politics, ethics, human rights, and the Protestant Reformation.

The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science

Abstract: Peter Harrison provides an account of the religious foundations of scientific knowledge. He shows how the approaches to the study of nature that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were directly informed by theological discussions about the Fall of Man and the extent to which the mind and the senses had been damaged by that primeval event. Scientific methods, he suggests, were originally devised as techniques for ameliorating the cognitive damage wrought by human sin. At its inception, modern science was conceptualized as a means of recapturing the knowledge of nature that Adam had once possessed. Contrary to a widespread view that sees science emerging in conflict with religion, Harrison argues that theological considerations were of vital importance in the framing of the scientific method.