Richard Congreve, Positivist Politics, the Victorian Press, and the British Empire

Richard Congreve, Positivist Politics, the Victorian Press, and the British Empire – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 9783030834388,3030834387

Product detail:

• ISBN 10: 3030834387
• ISBN 13: 9783030834388
• Author: Matthew Wilson

This book is about the life and times of Richard Congreve. This polemicist was the first thinker to gain instant infamy for publishing cogent critiques of imperialism in Victorian Britain. As the foremost British acolyte of Auguste Comte, Congreve sought to employ the philosopher’s new science of sociology to dismantle the British Empire. With an aim to realise in its place Comte’s global vision of utopian socialist republican city-states, the former Oxford don and ex-Anglican minister launched his Church of Humanity in 1859. Over the next forty years, Congreve engaged in some of the most pressing foreign and domestic controversies of his day, despite facing fierce personal attacks in the Victorian press. Congreve made overlooked contributions to the history of science, political economy, and secular ethics. In this book Matthew Wilson argues that Congreve’s polemics, ‘in the name of Humanity’, served as the devotional practices of his Positivist church.

Table of contents:

1. 1. Prelude: ‘Who Is RICHARD CONGREVE?’ It Will Be Asked
2. 2. Things About a Highly Strung Evangelist, 1818–1838
3. 3. Once Timorous, Now a ‘Very Dangerous’ Infidel, 1838–1845
4. 4. A ‘Man of Fiery Temperament’, 1845–1852
5. 5. Leader of a ‘Slightly Terrorist School of Philanthropists’, 1852–1857
6. 6. Comtist ‘Vicar’ and ‘Accuser of the Nation’, 1857–1866
7. 7. On a ‘Sort of Celebrity or Peculiarity’ of an ‘Atheistical Monastery’, 1866–1877
8. 8. ‘Pope’ of Back-Parlour ‘Ambiguities and Illusions’, 1877–1899

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