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:
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“From the beginning, the placement of [Clarence] Thomas on the high court was seen as a political end justifying almost any means. The full story of his confirmation raises questions not only about who lied and why, but, more important, about what happens when politics becomes total war and the truth—and those who tell it—are merely unfortunate sacrifices on the way to winning.”
—Jane Mayer, U.S. journalist, and Jill Abramson b. 1954, U.S. journalist. Strange Justice, p. 8, Houghton Mifflin (1994)
“In politics people throw themselves, as on a sickbed, from one side to the other in the belief they will lie more comfortably.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)