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Philosophy Political

Conscience and Its Critics

Protestant Conscience, Enlightenment Reason, and Modern Subjectivity

by (author) Edward Andrew

Publisher
University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Initial publish date
Jan 2001
Category
Political, History & Theory
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802048592
    Publish Date
    Jan 2001
    List Price
    $58.00
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781442614871
    Publish Date
    Dec 2001
    List Price
    $28.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442654303
    Publish Date
    Dec 2001
    List Price
    $31.95

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Description

Conscience and Its Critics is an eloquent and passionate examination of the opposition between Protestant conscience and Enlightenment reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Seeking to illuminate what the United Nations Declaration of Rights means in its assertion that reason and conscience are the definitive qualities of human beings, Edward Andrew attempts to give determinate shape to the protean notion of conscience through historical analysis.

The argument turns on the liberal Enlightenment's attempt to deconstruct conscience as an innate practical principle. The ontological basis for individualism in the seventeenth century, conscience was replaced in the eighteenth century by public opinion and conformity to social expectations. Focusing on the English tradition of political thought and moral psychology and drawing on a wide range of writers, Andrew reveals a strongly conservative dimension to the Enlightenment in opposing the egalitarian and antinomian strain in Protestant conscience. He then traces the unresolved relationship between reason and conscience through to the modern conception of the liberty of conscience, and shows how conscience served to contest social inequality and the natural laws of capitalist accumulation.

About the author

Edward G. Andrew is a professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto.

Edward Andrew's profile page

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