Bax Ernest Belfort
Ernest Belfort Bax (July 23, 1854 – November 26, 1926) was a British socialist journalist and philosopher, associated with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). Born into a nonconformist religious family in Leamington, he was first introduced to Marxism while studying philosophy in Germany. He combined Karl Marx's ideas with those of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann. Keen to explore possible metaphysical and ethical implications of socialism, he came to describe a "religion of socialism" as a means to overcome the dichotomy between the personal and the social, and also that between the cognitive and the emotional. He saw this as a replacement for organised religion, and was a fervent atheist, keen to free workers from what he saw as the moralism of the petty bourgeoisie. Bax moved to Berlin and worked as a journalist on the Evening Standard. On his return to England in 1882, he joined the SDF, but grew disillusioned and in 1885 left to form the Socialist League with William Morris. After anarchists gained control of the League, he rejoined the SDF, and became the chief theoretician, and editor of the party paper Justice. He opposed the party's participation in the Labour Representation Committee, and eventually persuaded them to leave. Almost throughout his life, he saw economic conditions as ripe for socialism, but felt this progress was delayed by a lack of education of the working class. Bax supported Karl Kautsky over Eduard Bernstein, but Kautsky had little time for what he saw as Bax's utopianism, and supported Theodore Rothstein's efforts to spread a more orthodox Marxism in the SDF. Initially very anti-nationalist, Bax came to support the British in World War I, but by this point he was concentrating on his career as a barrister and did little political work. Bax was an ardent antifeminist, and wrote many articles in The New Age and elsewhere opposing women's suffrage. In 1908 he wrote The Legal Subjection of Men[1] as a response to John Stuart Mill's 1869 essay "The Subjection of Women." In 1913 he published an essay, The Fraud of Feminism,[2] detailing feminism's adverse effects. Section titles included "The Anti-Man Crusade," "The 'Chivalry' Fake," "Always The 'Injured Innocent,'" and "Some Feminist Lies and Fallacies." He wrote the following books on various subjects:
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the religion of socialism being essays in modern socialist criticism
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About the author Ernest Belfort Bax (1854-1926), was an English Socialist, journalist, economist, and philosopher; who helped William Morris found the Socialist League, co-edited its organ 'Commonweal'; joined the Social Democratic Federation after the League became anarchist, and edited the paper 'Justice.' His parents were strict Nonconformists who came from families that had suffered religious persecution. Ernest was educated at home by private tutors and as a young man been encouraged to read John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. In his books The Religion of Socialism (1887) and Ethics of Socialism (1889), Bax argued that Christian ethics was gradually being replaced by the Utilitarian idea that ethical change was produced by the needs of society rather than from a supernatural level. Bax believed that this would develop into a "new ethic" called socialism. The highest expression of this new ethic was "self-sacrifice for the cause of true social change and human consciousness". Bax was one of the ablest, and in literary terms at least, most aggressive exponents of English socialism. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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the last episode of the french revolution being a history of gracehus babeuf a
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Book list
the religion of socialism being essays in modern socialist criticism
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About the author Ernest Belfort Bax (1854-1926), was an English Socialist, journalist, economist, and philosopher; who helped William Morris found the Socialist League, co-edited its organ 'Commonweal'; joined the Social Democratic Federation after the League became anarchist, and edited the paper 'Justice.' His parents were strict Nonconformists who came from families that had suffered religious persecution. Ernest was educated at home by private tutors and as a young man been encouraged to read John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. In his books The Religion of Socialism (1887) and Ethics of Socialism (1889), Bax argued that Christian ethics was gradually being replaced by the Utilitarian idea that ethical change was produced by the needs of society rather than from a supernatural level. Bax believed that this would develop into a "new ethic" called socialism. The highest expression of this new ethic was "self-sacrifice for the cause of true social change and human consciousness". Bax was one of the ablest, and in literary terms at least, most aggressive exponents of English socialism. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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the last episode of the french revolution being a history of gracehus babeuf a
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the ethics of socialism being further essays in modern socialist criticism et
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rise and fall of the anabaptists
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By the historian of the Anabaptist movement, Ernest Belfort Bax, a British socialist journalist and philosopher of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This book became the third volume of Bax’s work “The Social Side of the Reformation in Germany”, preceded by “German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages” and “The Peasants’ War in Germany”.
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reminiscences and reflexions of a mid and late victorian
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III ON CENTURY-END LITERATURE, ART, AND PHILOSOPHY The expression fin de siecle, which sprang up originally, if I remember rightly, in the early eighties, became very popular as the century more nearly approached its close. It had, indeed, an actual significance. As already observed in a previous chapter, the early eighties did undoubtedly mark the culmination of a great change in English popular thought. Perhaps the year 1884 may be specially mentioned in this connexion. It was in this year that the modern English Socialist movement really began to take root and excite interest in the country. With this, however, I propose to deal at length in another chapter. But in other ways also the advent of the mind of a new generation showed itself about this time. The old English Puritanism ceased to concern itself primarily with theological dogma, but turned its principal attention to practical issues and questions of conduct. Its view of moral problems of course centred in the old bourgeois Puritan notions. The circumference of morality still mainly circled round the question of sex relations : sexual abstention under the name of " Social Purity " bulked largely, as it has always donewith this type of mind, as the great moral achievement. The late W. T. Stead was its chief literary and journalistic coryphaeus, and the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes its prophet and priest in pulpit and on platform. The movement was also mixed up with Feminism, with which I intend also to deal in a later chapter. Now was the time of the great Browning " boom." Browning clubs sprang up in all cultured middle-class circles. Robert Browning was proclaimed as the poet of the age, and the study of his poems was declared by many enthusiasts as a liberal education in itself. Altogether, in the years...
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problems of men mind and morals
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE PROBLEM OF THE EVOLUTION OF SPECULATIVE THOUGHT In the earliest phases of man's social and mental life we find no trace of conscious reflection on the conditions of his existence. His view of the world is a vague fluid mass of assumptions arising without conscious will or intention on his part out of a welter of crude analogies, moulded in the forms in which his mind operated, and accumulating from untold generations. This was the era of mythology, folk-lore, of primitive thought and imagination. It had as its counterpart in the material sphere the world of a common tribal and clan life, to which the individual human being was subordinated, and apart from which he had no significance. As this material side of primitive society yielded to civilisation, by which the old social bonds became loosened and the independence of the individual began to emerge, the intellectual outlook also became gradually modified. The greatfactor in this modification was the awakening of conscious reflection upon himself, his beliefs and surroundings, on the part of the individual. The awakening self-consciousness of the individual took various forms, moral and intellectual, and it passed through many phases, consisting largely in a modification and systematisation of myth and traditional modes of thought, before the conscious attempt to explain the universe on rational principles, as we now term themin other words, before the dawn of philosophy properly so-called. But it was not given to every race of ancient times to inaugurate philosophic inquiry in its true sense. We can trace detached fragments of philosophic thought at an early stage in more than one of the Oriental civilisations of antiquity, while in ancient India something like a definite line of philosophic develop...
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outspoken essays on social subjects
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: "THE EVERLASTING FEMALE," PRESENT AND FUTURE. ij LL parties, all sorts and conditions of politicians, fr0m e fashionable west-end philanthropist to the Radical working-men's clubbite, seem (or seemed until lately) to have come to an unanimous conclusion on one pointto wit, that the female sex is grievously groaning under the weight of male oppression. Editors of newspapers, keen to scent out every drift of public fancy with the object of regaling their " constant readers," with what is tickling to their palates, will greedily print, in prominent positions and in large type letters expressive of the view in question, whilst they will boycott or, at best, publish in obscure corners any communication that ventures to criticize the popular theory or that adduces facts that tell against it. Were I to pen an impassioned diatribe, tending to prove the villainy of man towards woman, and painting in glowing terms the poor, weak victim of despotism, my description would be received with sympathetic approval. Not so, I fear, my simple statement of the unvarnished truth. Now, I think it will be admitted as a general principle, at least by all parties in the present day, that equality before the law, as it is termed, is the first condition of liberty, and that where you have respect of persons in this connection, you are destitute of theprimal elements of personal freedom. According to the popular theory just indicated, respecting the position of women, we might expect to find every law framed in such a way that women should invariably come off less than second best in any dispute with men, in short, that law would be enacted and administered solely to the advantage of men. Is this so in actual fact ? Let us first take our existing marriage laws. We shall find that in England...
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jean paul marat the peoples friend
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Originally published in 1900. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.
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german culture past present
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PREFACEThe following pages aim at giving a general view of the social and intellectual life of Germany from the end of the mediaeval period to modern times. In the earlier portion of the book, the first half of the sixteenth century in Germany is dealt with at much greater length and in greater detail than the later period, a sketch of which forms the subject of the last two chapters. The reason for this is to be found in the fact that while the roots of the later German character and culture are to be sought for in the life of this period, it iscomparatively little known to the average educated English reader. In the early fifteenth century, during the Reformation era, German life and culture in its widest sense began to consolidate themselves, and at the same time to take on an originality which differentiated them from the general life and culture of Western Europe as it was during the Middle Ages.To those who would fully appreciate the later developments, therefore, it is essential thoroughly to understand the details of the social and intellectual history of the time in question. For the later period there are many more works of a generally popular character available for the student and general reader. The chief aim of the sketch given in Chapters IX and X is to bring into sharp relief those events which, in the Author's view, represent more or less crucial stages in the development of modern Germany.For the earlier portion of the present volume an older work of the Author's, now out of print, entitled _German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages_, has been largely drawn upon. Reference, as will be seen, has also been made in the course of the present work to two other writings from the same pen which are still to be had for those desirous of fuller information on their respective subjects, viz. _The Peasants' War_ and _The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists_ (Messrs. George Allen & Unwin)........
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German Culture Past and Present
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Chapters on the sixteenth-century German town, the Reformation, the Anabaptist Movement, Post-Mediaeval Germany, popular literature, the peasant uprising, etc.
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