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  3. Volney: ‘The Ruins' and ‘Catechism of Natural Law'
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      08 February 2024
      15 February 2024
      ISBN:
      9781108675611
      9781108493109
      9781108717267
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675611
      Dimensions:
      (216 x 140 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.47kg, 270 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (216 x 140 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.34kg, 270 Pages
      • Series:
      Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
      Subjects:
      Area Studies, European History after 1450, History, European Studies, Politics and International Relations, Texts in Political Thought, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
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    • Selected: Digital
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    Series:
    Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
    Subjects:
    Area Studies, European History after 1450, History, European Studies, Politics and International Relations, Texts in Political Thought, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
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    Book description

    Volney was once as influential as Tom Paine, and the author of one of the most popular works of the French Revolutionary era. The Ruins of Empires makes an argument for popular sovereignty, couched in the alluring and accessible form of an Oriental dream-tale. A favourite of both Thomas Jefferson, who translated it, and the young Abraham Lincoln, the Ruins advances a scheme of radical, utopian politics premised upon the deconstruction of all the world's religions. It was widely celebrated by radicals in Britain and America, and exercised an enormous influence on poets from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Walt Whitman for its indictments of tyranny and priestcraft. Volney instead advocates a return to natural precepts shorn of superstition, set out in his sequel, the Catechism of Natural Law. These days Volney enjoys a high profile in African-American Studies as a proponent of Black Egyptianism.

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