Word: jacobinism
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...against the champions of church power. In the words of Father Murray, the Gelasian principle of "two there are" became "one there is"-one increasingly powerful state. From absolutist monarchy, Murray sees a straight line of development to modern "totalitarian democracy" via the French Revolution's Jacobin republic, which put the civil government in almost complete control of church affairs. To this day, French separation of church and state makes Thomas Jefferson's famous "wall" look like a split-rail fence...
Things were different at the beginning of the 19th century. The eventual winner of the class war, the junior executive, had not even been invented. The upper classes of England, alarmed at Jacobin rumblings from France, put down the undeserving poor with vigor. And one of the battlefields on which they did so, in the view of Author Moers, was that of dress. Leading a languid but deadly charge for the aristocracy was a new and resplendent creature, the dandy (whom the author distinguishes from the mere fop by the social forces that created him). Thomas Carlyle wrote unsympathetically that...