Anglo-Irish Patriotism and its European Context

Notes Towards a Reassessment

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8087481
AutoresJOEP TH LEERSEN (autor correspondente)
Ano1988
Volume3
Fascículo1
Páginas7-24
Data de publicação1988-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEighteenth-Century Ireland (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0790-7915 • E-ISSN: 2753-9725
EditoraLiverpool University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3828/eci.1988.3
OpenAlexW3140830274
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas9

OST PEOPLE NOWADAYS will agree that the term 'patriotism' means something like 'love of one's native country, and a willingness to manifest that love in one's political attitude'. In contemporary usage, it seems to be used as a mild, euphemistic alternative to 'nationalism', 'national pride' or 'national loyalty'. It is not this modern usage with which I am concerned here. My present aim is to reconsider the earlier, eighteenth-century usage of the term, and to divest it of those later, post-romantic, nationalistic connotations. I submit that the meaning of 'patriotism' was a wholly different one in the eighteenth century; that those eighteenth-century people who called themselves 'patriots' did not refer to that political stance as being inspired by proto-nationalistic motives. That amounts, to a degree, to kicking in an open door as far as the history of Patriotism on the European Continent, and even in England, is concerned, but it is still useful to point out that what is sauce for the European goose is sauce for the Irish gander. In Ireland, the non-national motivation of eighteenth-century Patriotism (which, as a well-defined political ideology, I distinguish from twentieth-century national enthusiasm by spelling it with a capital P is not immediately self-evident. Did not the Patriots protest against foreign, British control over Irish affairs Did they not defend the constitutional autonomy of Ireland against the hegemonist encroachment of Westminster, in a glorious tradition which started with Molyneux's Case of Ireland Stated, was continued by the Drapier's Letters, and culminated in the efforts of Flood, Grattan and the Volunteers Did not the Patriots, or at least the most enlightened among them, move towards a political and economic conciliation with Ireland's oppressed Catholic majority, and was not this an effort to forge national solidarity out of sectarian divisions Was not Grattan the John the Baptist to the messianic mission of Wolfe Tone It is easy to take that view, and it has traditionally been taken. It can draw on the homonymy of the word 'patriotism' and (as I hope to show, anachronistically interpret its eighteenth-century usage in a nationally coloured, twentieth-century light. Furthermore, it so happens that, in speaking of eighteenth-century Irish Patriots, one refers almost exclusively to a part of the population which is traditionally known as the 'Anglo-Irish': a group pf men whose historical presence

Archaeology · Context (archaeology · Irish · Linguistics · Patriotism · Political science · Irish and British Studies · History · Law · Philosophy