![]() ![]() ![]() Marina Leslie, for example, asserts that Bacon inverts the spiritual and material worlds, and claims that Bacon transforms spiritual salvation into material well-being accomplished by humans and not by God. Like White and Weinberger, many cultural historians treat Bacon’s manipulation of religious ideas as a way of providing cultural authority for his political agenda. Studies by Charles Whitney, Amy Boesky, and others have analyzed utopian literature as a primary source for understanding the “founding fictions” and political ideologies underpinning nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, and overseas expansion. Recently, considerable attention to Bacon’s “New Atlantis” has also come from the new historical criticism. Weinberger also argues that Bacon’s utopia provides a primary source for understanding the transitional phase from early modern political ideas to those of the modern age, and he maintains that Bacon manipulates religious language and concepts to conceal his secular agenda. White’s work has been highly influential and augmented more recently by another political philosopher, Jerry Weinberger. According to White, Bacon’s purpose is to transform the human quest from the search for the “heavenly city” to the creation of the well-governed country, and to change the philosophical quest from an effort to understand God, God’s Creation, and humanity’s place in it to a pursuit to understand what humans can make of themselves. White devotes considerable attention to Bacon’s use of religious themes and argues that he manipulates them in order to subvert Christian ideas and transform them into a culturally acceptable justification for a preoccupation with luxury and materialism. In developing his argument, White maintains that “New Atlantis” must be read with meticulous care in order to understand Bacon’s complex interweaving and transformation of political iconography, ancient history and fables, religious symbols, scientific methodologies, and pseudo-scientific concepts. White is especially interested in what he regards as Bacon’s secularization of politics and glorification of the power of science to serve the interests of the secular state. White published Peace among the Willows, the first book-length analysis of Bacon’s “New Atlantis.” White, a political theorist who regards Bacon as a principal shaper of modern political ideas, maintains that it is this utopian work and not one of Bacon’s philosophical treatises that provides the fullest statement of Bacon’s political theory. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |