Politics
With regard to politics, the second edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is moderate because the publishers Bell and Macfarquhar curbed Tytler's reformism. Tytler expressed sympathy for the French Revolution of 1789 and called up the British not to pay taxes. He also denounced public officials. One of his pamphlets, in 1792, called the House of Commons 'vile junto of aristocracts' usurping the rights of king and people. Not money but his honest and upright behaviour should qualify a man for being an elector. As a consequence he was convicted in January 1793.
On the ship to America in 1795 Tytler wrote a pamphlet Rising the sun in the west, or the Origin and progress of liberty in which he decounces the elites of the old World. Disappointed with the Scottish and Irish, he praised the Americans and French for fighting against superstition and tyranny. This in spite of the religious politics of revolutional France.
Read more about this topic: James Tytler
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.”
—Philippe Sollers (b. 1936)
“The Germans—once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans distrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things—Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)