Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Andrews, Naomi J.

Titel

Breaking the Ties: French Romantic Socialism and the Critique of Liberal Slave Emancipation

Ist Teil von

• The Journal of modern history, 2013-09, Vol.85 (3), p.489-527

Ort / Verlag

Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Both within and beyond slavery debates, French socialists were skeptical of Enlightenment narratives of progress and the primacy of the individual. In their associationist proposals for slave emancipation, they offered an account of modernity different from the liberal one of individual rights and freedoms that dominated discussions of slavery. This "alternative modernity" rested on an apprehension of progress that did not take as given the liberal ideals of individual autonomy and self-possession and sought to remedy problems experienced in the modern world in nonliberal ways. Their divergent definition of freedom illustrates the fact that the conquest of autonomous individuality was an uneven, unpredictable, and contested process. Here, Andrews explores the proposals for slave emancipation that socialists developed during the July Monarchy amid contemporary discussions equating workers in metropolitan France and slaves in the French colonies.