Leon Roth’s famous question “Is there a Jewish philosophy?” has been the subject of an ongoing controversial debate. This paper argues that the concept of a Jewish philosophy—in the sense of an allegedly continuous philosophical tradition stretching from antiquity to early modernity—was created by German Enlightenment historians of philosophy. Under competing models of historiography, Enlightenment philosophy construed a continuous tradition of Jewish thought, a philosophia haebraeorum perennis, establishing a controversially discussed order of discourse and a specific politics (...) of historiography. Within this historiography, historical and systematical paradigms, values, and patterns kept shifting continuously, opening up perspectives for different, even contradictory accounts of what Jewish philosophy was . With Hegel and his successors, this specific discourse came to a close. Hegel attacks “Jewish thought” as a form of metaphysics of substance—a critique countered by several thinkers who can be referred to as “Jewish Hegelians” . The Jewish Hegelians fully accepted, however, Hegel’s account of the “Philonic distinction”: the difference between substance and subject within the conception of the One. This calls attention to the idea that not only the role of the “Mosaic distinction” , the distinction between true and false in religion, should be examined more closely, but also the consequences of the “Philonic distinction” between identity and difference in monotheistic concepts of deity. (shrink)

Whilst Edward Gibbon's Memoirs of My Life comprise a notoriously complex document of autobiographical artifice, there is no reason to question the honesty of its revelation of his attitudes to geography and its relationship to the historian's craft. Writing of his boyhood before going up to Oxford, Gibbon commented that his vague and multifarious reading could not teach me to think, to write, or to act; and the only principle, that darted a ray of light into the indigested chaos, was (...) an early and rational application of the order of time and place. The maps of Cellarius and Wells imprinted in my mind the picture of ancient geography: from Stranchius I imbibed the elements of chronology: the Tables of Helvicus and Anderson, the Annals of Usher [ sic ] and Prideaux, distinguished the connection of events. . . This seems a fairly direct comment on Gibbon's attitude to geography as a historian in that it is confirmed by various of his working documents and commonplace book comments not aimed at posterity and by the practice embodied in his great work that was thus targeted, the Decline and Fall. Taking Gibbon's private documents, the first manuscript we have in his English Essays, for example, is a tabulated chronology from circa 1751 when Gibbon was fourteen years old, which begins with the creation of the world in 6000 BC and runs up to 1590 BC, this being exactly the sort of material which could be commonplaced from the likes of Ussher and Prideaux. Matching this attention to chronology is a concern with geography, and indeed the two are coupled together as in his comment in the Memoirs. Thus in his Index Expurgatoris, Gibbon berates Sallust as “no very correct historian” on the grounds that his chronology is not credible and that “notwithstanding his laboured description of Africa, nothing can be more confused than his Geography without either division of provinces or fixing of towns”. In this regard, Gibbon the author of the Decline and Fall was a “correct” historian, in that he was careful to frame each arena in which historical events were narrated in the light of a prefatory description of the geography of the location under discussion. This is most readily apparent in the second half of the opening chapter of the work, where Gibbon proceeds on what his “Table of Contents” calls a “View of the Provinces of the Roman Empire”, starting in the West with Spain and then proceeding clockwise to reach Africa on the other side of the Pillars of Hercules, a pattern of geographical description directly mirroring ancient practice in Strabo's Geography and Pomponius Mela's De Situ Orbis. But this practice of prefacing a historical account with geographical description repeats itself at various points in the work, as when, approaching the end of his grand narrative, Gibbon reaches the impact of “Mahomet, with sword in one hand and the Koran in the other” on “the causes of the decline and fall of the Eastern empire”. Before discussing the birth of Islam, Gibbon treats his readers to a discussion of the geography of Arabia, beginning with its size and shape before moving on to its soils, climate and physical–geographic subdivisions. (shrink)

This essay is written on the following premises and argues for them. “Enlightenment” is a word or signifier, and not a single or unifiable phenomenon which it consistently signifies. There is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as “the Enlightenment,” but it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided. In studying the intellectual history of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, we encounter a variety of statements made, and assumptions proposed, to (...) which the term “Enlightenment” may usefully be applied, but the meanings of the term shift as we apply it. The things are connected, but not continuous; they cannot be reduced to a single narrative; and we find ourselves using the word “Enlightenment” in a family of ways and talking about a family of phenomena, resembling and related to one another in a variety of ways that permit of various generalizations about them. We are not, however, committed to a single root meaning of the word “Enlightenment,” and we do not need to reduce the phenomena of which we treat to a single process or entity to be termed “the” Enlightenment. It is a reification that we wish to avoid, but the structure of our language is such that this is difficult, and we will find ourselves talking of “the French” or “the Scottish,” “the Newtonian” or the “the Arminian” Enlightenments, and hoping that by employing qualifying adjectives we may constantly remind ourselves that the keyword “Enlightenment” is ours to use and should not master us. (shrink)

I begin with a diagnosis. Present-day scholarly work on the Scottish Enlightenment is bifurcated: it is either focused on the areas of moral philosophy or of natural philosophy, broadly construed in both cases. The aspiration to combine these inquiries is rare and unsystematic. This paper makes a case for the need and possibility of a perspective that conceives moral and natural inquiry as integrated enterprises in the period. It also suggests that potentially useful interpretive devices can be adopted from (...) the historiography of science and philosophy, as well as science studies. (shrink)

Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism brings together ten innovative contributions by outstanding scholars working across a wide array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Interdisciplinary in its methodology and compass, with a strong comparative European dimension, the volume examines discourses ranging from literature, historiography, music and opera to anthropology and political philosophy. It makes an original contribution to the study of 18th-century ideas of universal peace, progress and wealth as the foundation of future debates on cosmopolitanism. At the same (...) time, it analyses examples of counter-reaction to these ideas and discusses the relevance of the Enlightenment for subsequent polemics on cosmopolitanism, including 21st-century debates in sociology, politics and legal theory. (shrink)

This article examines and compares Adam Ferguson's and Guillaume-Thomas Raynal's analyses of modern commercial states by reconstructing their accounts of the history and politics of the Dutch Republic. For both writers, the Dutch case stood as a clear instance of the political dangers implicit in a particular type of commercial polity, and both sought to apply its lessons to an understanding of the future of their own states. Although Ferguson's and Raynal's arguments about the decline of the Dutch trading state (...) overlapped, their analyses reflected different evaluations of the relationship between modern states and modern economic institutions (trading companies and public debts). The broader purpose of the article is to shed light on the distinctive theories of commerce and models of European development that informed the major works of Enlightenment historiography and political thought produced by Ferguson and Raynal in the 1760s and 1770s. (shrink)

Arguably the most decisive shift in the history of ideas in modern times was the complete demolition during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - in the wake of the Scientific Revolution - of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophy and the philosophes, culminating in Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. In this revolutionary process which effectively overthrew all justicfication for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as well as man's dominance over woman, theological dominance of education, (...) and slavery, substituting the modern principles of equality, democracy, and universality, the Radical Enlightenment played a crucially important part. Despite the present day interest in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have been astonishingly little studied doubtless largely because of its very wide international sweep and the obvious difficulty of fitting in into the restrictive conventions of 'national history' which until recently tended to dominate all historiography. The greatest obstacle to the Radical Enlightenment finding its proper place in modern historical writing is simply that it was not French, British, German, Italian, Jewish or Dutch, but all of these at the same time. In this novel interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment down to La Mettie and Diderot, two of its key exponents, particular stress is placed on the pivotal role of Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism. (shrink)

This article seeks to combine two lines of thought that have been little studied: a model history of early modern historiography, and a theory of the impact of historiography on a political society. Under the former heading, it traces the growth of a narrative of European history as a series of sequels to the Roman empire, and a history of historiography as passing from classical narrative to antiquarian study and Enlightened philosophy. Under the latter, it considers the (...) effect on political life of being narrated in a plurality of contexts, and asks whether a modern society can survive if deprived of the capacity for debating its history. (shrink)

The meaning of ‘moderate enlightenment’ has been monopolised by Jonathan Israel. In this guise, ‘moderate enlightenment’ is built atop a compromise between authority and innovation, between reason and revelation, and amounts to an intellectually subordinate counterpart to the Radical Enlightenment. This ‘negative’ definition obstructs serious interpretation of what ‘moderate enlightenment’ can mean. This essay progresses instead an enquiry into a ‘positive’ definition of ‘moderate enlightenment’ – an enlightenment defined by moderation. It does so by (...) surveying key lineaments within a century of historiography on the enlightenment, from the 1920s to the present. It focuses on the contributions to that historiography by two titanic figures of twentieth-century scholarship and political thought: Leo Strauss and J.G.A. Pocock. Strauss and Pocock are shown to have advanced equally substantive, if fundamentally distinct, concepts of ‘moderate enlightenment’. Searching for ‘moderate enlightenment’, aided by Strauss and Pocock, raises new vistas in both eighteenth century intellectual history and twentieth century historiography – and the pertinence of both for the history of political thought. It also brings into question the political-philosophical substance of the ‘moderation’ which underpins a positively defined ‘moderate enlightenment’. (shrink)

For Augustin Thierry, rewriting the story of the past was, until 1830, explicitly a way of making the future, and after 1830, implicitly a way of justifying the present. In subverting traditional historiography perceived as a legitimation of royal authority Thierry did not follow the Enlightenment strategy of opposing history and reason. Writing after 1789, he discovered reason in history. Constant and the Saint-Simonians had already distinguished two ages of history an age of conquest or violence, and an (...) age, just beginning, of commerce and reason but these appeared as discontinuous. Thierry's aim, especially after 1830, was to reveal history as a continuous, providential unfolding of reason, culminating in the bourgeois nation state. The violence of history was thus to be subsumed by reason. Historiographically, narrative and commentary were not to be discontinuous, as in Enlightenment historiography; meaning was to emerge instead from the narrative itself. Correspondingly, the historian's role was to be construed as a mediating, not a constructive one. The historian is the mouthpiece of history, as the bourgeois, the true hero of history, uniting in himself conquered and conqueror, re-presents what in history was divided the nation. In neither case is control to be viewed as a mark of division or violence; historian and hero are alike agents or representatives of totality . Violence reasserts itself thematically, however, in the stark, unresolved opposition of conquered and conqueror, subject and lord, female and male, victim and executioner, which structures Thierry's most successful historical narratives. (shrink)

The nineteenth-century British historian Lucy Aikin's ambitious four-part poem Epistles on Women (1810) marks both her first important contribution to women's historiography and a compelling example of Enlightenment feminist historiography. To some extent, Aikin is building on the work of male Enlightenment historians who had evaluated the status of women in different times and places and correlated it to social progress. However, she not only restricts her focus exclusively to women, but also makes a concerted effort (...) to resolve some of the tensions apparent in previous accounts of the relationship between women and social progress. Especially striking is her mediation of two distinct historical models of femininity, which I have called the republican and commercial models of femininity, the outlines of both of which we can trace in the work of male Enlightenment historians. By suggesting that through proper education women might combine the best aspects of each model, Aikin strategically advances the project of controversial feminists like Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, who had taken inspiration from the republican model of femininity in their demands for improvements to female education. ☆ Revised for the History of European Ideas, October 2, 2004 by Kathryn Ready. (shrink)

This paper examines the way in which Cassirer implicitly commented on current issues in his historical studies, proposing a case study on his monograph The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, published in November 1932. It begins with a general overview of a few famous and a few neglected instances of Cassirer’s position-takings through historical studies, before discussing briefly the context in which this monograph was written and examining how the Enlightenment is presented in the monograph from 1932. The paper (...) claims that at the centre of Cassirer’s engagement with the Enlightenment was his concern with the autonomy of reason. The way in which Cassirer elaborated on this further shows that his defense of the Enlightenment was not just directed against the threats of totalitarian politics, but also had the aim of clarifying the nature of philosophy and its place in culture. This, however, the paper concludes, does not refute the notion that Cassirer was concerned with current politics when writing The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. The point is rather that he comprehended philosophy as political just in virtue of its exercising the autonomy that characterizes reason. (shrink)

Kant considered it a scandal that philosophy, unlike science, had been spending its time in fruitless debates, which hindered its progress. In this session, we question Kant’s assessment, and suggest an approach to the history of philosophy that considers controversy as essential in the evolution of philosophical ideas. In his recent work on the Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel has demonstrated the role of the intense debate around radically new philosophical ideas in creating the conceptual underpinnings of revolution and of a (...) new social order. Randall Collins, from another perspective, has highlighted the role of debate in the rise and fall of philosophical schools. Both have thus shown that, without a decidedly ‘dialectical’ approach to intellectual history, especially to the history of philosophy, its understanding and influence can hardly be grasped. As this session will show, this is true not only at the macro-level of relatively long term intellectual conflicts and their effects, but also at the micro-level of detailed analysis and understanding of philosophical texts – their concepts, theses, arguments, theories, and relevance. What we mean by ‘dialectical reframing’ owes much, of course, to the various traditional meanings of ‘dialectics’. Yet, emphasizing the actual activity of debate as the engine of philosophical and intellectual change, permits to investigate how key ideas, such as rationality, emerge through debate, rather than being its given a priori condition. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Between 1796 and 1814, two of late Enlightenment Germany's most prominent historians offered striking revisions to earlier accounts of European history. The renowned journalist, historian, and Slavicist August Ludwig Schlözer published a critical edition and translation of the Old Slavonic Primary Chronicle alongside a detailed historical commentary. This commentary presented Russia as an important protagonist in Europe's emergence from barbarism to Enlightened modernity. By contrast, his colleague Johann Gottfried Eichhorn published several historical works arguing that France had failed (...) to cultivate a mature bourgeoisie and, consequently, had not become a fully modern polity. Building on the work of J. G. A. Pocock and Michael Printy, this article examines the thought of Eichhorn and Schlözer as political responses to the crises of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. It thereby offers both a fresh assessment of the work of two major Enlightenment intellectuals and an analysis of how notions of European modernity were reconfigured in a period of profound political turmoil. (shrink)

This article tackles the political implications of Reinhart Koselleck’s first work, Kritik und Krise, re-questioning its relationship to the ‘Enlightenment’ and the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. Rather than establishing the semantic contents of this pair of antonymic concepts in an abstract way, I believe that we must study the concrete uses to which they are put, that is, the discursive strategies of the actors themselves showing, in each case, the specific adversaries against whom they are mobilized and the specific ends to (...) which they are used. The goal of the present essay is to understand whether the early Koselleck belonged to the tradition of the Enlightenment or the Counter-Enlightenment in the specific context of post-War West Germany intellectual debates. By locating Kritik und Krise in the controversies relating to the political identity of the new German Federal Republic, I show that he was not, in the 1950s, a representative of Cold War Liberalism or anti-totalitarianism but, rather, oscillated between different conservative positions (‘Traditional’ conservatism and ‘Conservative Revolution’) that were typical of the post-War period and, in large measure, hostile to the Enlightenment legacy. (shrink)

In this essay, the author both reviews Scott Sowerby's book Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution and makes a late contribution to, or comment on, the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies”. Sowerby opposes the “Whig interpretation” that James II was attempting to reinstate Stuart “popery and arbitrary government” and instead presents James II's policies as aimed at liberation of the Stuart monarchy from the borough, county, and clerical elites that had brought it back to power and regarded restoration (...) of the Church of England as their instrument and identity. The king thus had his own reasons for upholding the liberty of conscience, and so James II can be found using the language of a skeptical Enlightenment, while at the same time affirming the absoluteness of his authority and incurring the suspicion of popery. How “toleration” of Catholics and dissenters came about in Britain must be told by narrating the “hard” histories of various state structures, but there is a larger and “softer” history of Enlightenment to be extracted from that of the European ancien régime, in whose history and downfall “British history” has a part that can be narrated in both “hard” and “soft” terms. The recent revisionist accounts of James II — of which Sowerby's is said in this review to be among the best — offer the king a new role at that regime's beginnings. This review concludes by arguing that the pursuit of history as it has come to be practiced is among the “softest” modes of explanation — since it consists of the unending and unlimited pursuit of the contexts in which actions, words, and processes have been situated and need to be studied — and that the more there are of these, the more meanings the actions may bear and the fewer reasons there are for the use of Occam's razor. “The notion of ‘fuzziness’ ” does not disturb historians, as it does scholars in some other disciplines, since historians have at their disposal an established contextualist “means of navigating it.”. (shrink)

Economics as a science emerged during the Enlightenment, but the impact of the specific general scientific environment of that era on the transformation of pre-scientific economic knowledge into scientific knowledge has not been adequately covered in the historiography of economic thought. The formation of economic science took place in the period of the scientific revolution of the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries. These were two interrelated but different processes. First of all, the transformation of economic knowledge followed fundamental changes (...) in the economy itself – the formation of a market-type economy. At the same time, the emergence of a new discipline in the structure of scientific knowledge could not help but be guided by established standards of scholarship. However, at the time of the scientific revolution, science was in a state of turbulence: the old medieval norms of scholarship were losing their legitimacy, and the new ideals of scholarship had not yet attained the status of an accepted standard. The scientific programs associated with the names of Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz and Newton, as well as the new socio-philosophical doctrines, played different roles in different countries and at different stages of the scientific revolution. The article analyzes the peculiarities of the intellectual environment, in which scientific economic knowledge was shaped, and shows that it was much more diverse than the standard versions of the history of economic thought and earlier attempts (M. Foucault, F. Mirowski) to identify the influence of scientific ideals on its first schools of science suggest. Thus, the prerequisites for the formation of an alternative picture of the emergence of economic science as a result of the rivalry between its various concepts are created. (shrink)

This paper will contend that we, in the first quarter of the 21st century, need an enhanced Age of Reason based on global epistemology. One reason to legitimize such a call for more intellectual enlightenment is the lack of required information on non-European philosophy in today’s reading lists at European and North American universities. Hence, the present-day Academy contributes to the scarcity of knowledge about the world’s global history of ideas outside one’s ethnocentric sphere. The question is whether we (...) genuinely want to rethink parts of the “Colonial Canon” and its main narratives of the past. This article argues that we, if we truly desire, might create “a better Enlightenment.” Firstly, by raising the general knowledge level concerning the philosophies of the Global South. Thus, this text includes examples from the global enlightenments in China, Mughal India, Arabic-writing countries, and Indigenous North America—all preceding and influencing the European Enlightenment. Secondly, we can rebuild by rediscovering the Enlightenment ideals within the historiography of the “hidden enlightenment” of Europe’s and North America’s past. In Part I, of two parts of this paper, a comparative methodology will be outlined. In addition, examples will be given from the history of ideas in India and China to argue that we need to study how these regions influenced the European history of ideas in the 16th and 17th centuries. Finally, towards the end of this text, a re-reading of the contributions from Egypt and Greece aspires to give a more global and complex context for Western Europe’s so-called Age of Reason. (shrink)

This article discusses the egalitarian ideas of the French Orientalist Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron, showing that they inform his writings on Zoroastrianism and India, his critique of Montesquieu's theory of Oriental Despotism, as well as his later defense of the Arctic peoples of America and Eurasia. It further shows that Anquetil's global egalitarianism was part of his project for a comparative study of world religions and civilizations. Anquetil's case fits into the recent historiography of the Enlightenment, which has underlined (...) the importance of strong currents of critique of European expansion and Eurocentrism in eighteenth-century thought. (shrink)

"The maestry of nature was viewed by eighteenth-century historians as an important measure of the progress of civilization. Modern scholarship has hitherto taken insufficient notice of this important idea. This book discusses the topic in connection with the mainstream religious, political, and philosophical elements of the Enlightenment culture. It considers workd by Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, Herder, Vico, Raynal, Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, and a wide range of lesse- and better-know figures. It also discusses many classical, medieval, and early (...) modern sources which influenced Enlightenment historiography, as well as eighteen-century attitudes toward nature in general". (shrink)

The review demonstrates that there are four main historiographical approaches to explanation of the role of Mendelssohn’s philosophy in the emergence of the Haskalah project: (1) traditional approach (created by the Jewish historiography in the second half of the 19th century; it stressed secular and culture-centered character of Haskalah, making it closer to German intellectual tradition); (2) social historiography (it treated Haskalah as a consequence of and reaction to the processes of global social and political modernization); (3) the (...) approach practiced by researchers of early Jewish proponents of Enlightenment’s (determination of the intellectual foundations of Haskalah in the early Maskilim projects); (4) the researches of Mendelssohn's Jewish texts, the concept of “Political Theology”, and the interpretation of Mendelssohn’s ideas in the works of Leo Strauss (new interpretation of the role of Mendelssohn in the creation of Haskalah). (shrink)

Over the course of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, an interior private notion of religion gained wide public recognition. It then spread through settler colonial contexts around the world. It has since been criticized for its abstract, immaterial nature as well as its irrelevance to traditions beyond the European context. However, such critiques obscure the contradiction between religion’s definition as a matter of interior privacy and its public visibility in various printed publications. Firstly, this monograph responds by re-evaluating the cultural (...) impact of the exterior forms in which religious texts were printed, such as pamphlets, broadsheets, books and journals. Secondly, it applies that evidence to critical studies of religion shaped by the crisis of representation in the human sciences. While Jacques Derrida is oft-cited as a progenitor of that crisis, the opposite case is made. Lastly, it draws on Derrida’s thought to reframe the relation between a religious text’s internal hermeneutic interests and its external forms. In sum, a new model is provided of how religion was printed in ways that can be compared to other material cultures around the world. (shrink)

What does it mean to refer to the enlightenment as ‘moderate’? One answer to this question, and the one which abounds in historiography of enlightenment in the past two decades, is that of Jonathan Israel. For Israel, the ‘moderate enlightenment’ is the half-baked counterpart to the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. Where the Radical Enlightenment, in Israel’s version of events, was the crucible within which progressive modernity was forged, the ‘moderate enlightenment’ was the regressive vehicle for (...) accommodating elements of this agenda within the social, political and intellectual structures of the ancien regime. This essay, and the special issue it introduces, seeks alternative ways to understand the prospect of a moderate enlightenment by inviting reflection on currents of moderation in eighteenth-century Europe. Turning the tables on moderate enlightenment, and framing it as an episode in a history of moderation, it proposes a range of lenses onto the intellectual culture of eighteenth-century Europe. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to present and analyze the interpretation of the Enlightenment which has recently been proposed by Jonathan Israel, with the focus on its philosophical aspect as opposed to the historical one. The paper consists of two parts. The task of the first part is reconstructive: it attempts to explore Israel’s most characteristic statements concerning the Enlightenment. The second and more extensive part has a polemical character: it endeavours to furnish the reader with an (...) answer to the question of the degree to which the understanding of the Enlightenment proposed by Israel can be considered a satisfying interpretation of this period. The paper suggests that the main problem which may undermine Israel’s account of the Enlightenment is associated with the unduly selective interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy and its position in the intellectual society of that time. (shrink)

Reviewer surveys barnard's work, approves of main theses, but corrects minor points. he then reflects upon several problems raised by barnard. he relates some of herder's assertions to german proto-romanticism. points discussed are: herder's turning away from cosmopolitanism and his turning toward english literature as an expression of his francophobia, the "superiority" of the gothic style, the concepts of "kunstpoesie" and "naturpoesie", the emphasis on primitivism and the socio-political theories, the theory of language. merlan also comments on the "volk" concept (...) and its significance for historiography, and the debate between herder and kant. he concludes with a statement about the concept of "volk" and the problem of an individual's participation in history. the work reviewed is "herder's social and political thought. from enlightenment to nationalism." by f.m. barnard. oxford: clarendon press 1965. pp. xv, 189. (shrink)

Ce bilan historiographique porte sur la nouvelle conception du sexe qui se dessine au siècle des Lumières et ses liens avec le développement d’un type inédit de rapports entre humains et animaux dans les espaces métropolitains et coloniaux. Depuis une trentaine d’années, l’histoire des émotions et l’histoire des sciences de l’homme ont contribué à éclairer les conditions historiques dans lesquelles s’est constitué le paradigme anthropologique des Lumières. L’article identifie un certain nombre de thématiques – la domestication, l’émergence de l’animal de (...) compagnie, la pratique de l’élevage sélectif – dont l’étude a permis de reconfigurer les approches du genre. En portant une attention nouvelle aux relations entre genre et animalité, ces travaux ont apporté une contribution décisive à la compréhension des débats savants et politiques des Lumières sur les frontières de l’humain et le binôme nature-culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Images of Ancient Rome in Late Eighteenth-Century Neapolitan HistoriographyMelissa CalaresuThe case of the late Neapolitan enlightenment, the variety and sophistication of which has been little recognized outside of Italian scholarship, illustrates the significance of particular regional concerns and intellectual traditions in the development of enlightened movements in Europe. 1 This becomes apparent when examining how Neapolitans looked to their own past in relation to the unique set of (...) political and social problems of the Kingdom of Naples. In this article I shall examine a number of historical writings published in the 1780s. This was a decade of intense intellectual activity which saw the publication of the defining works of the later Neapolitan enlightenment, such as Gaetano Filangieri’s Scienza della legislazione from 1780 and Francesco Mario Pagano’s Saggi politici between 1783 and 1785. 2 It was also the decade in which Giuseppe Maria Galanti’s Storia filosofica e politica delle nazioni antiche e moderne [End Page 641] introduced in translation important texts of the British and French Enlightenments, and the journal Scelta miscellanea briefly became an important focal point of collaboration and intellectual exchange for reform-minded intellectuals in Naples. 3 The impetus which bound together these many projects of the 1780s was twofold: on one hand, the growing awareness of the particular problems of Neapolitan society and of the urgent need for reform, expressed through the language and concerns of the wider enlightened movement; and at the same time a revived sense of a distinct cultural and political identity. The writing of history, even of the most remote age, did not escape these concerns.The cultural renewal of the 1780s brought new histories of the Kingdom, and in these Rome played an essential role. As Naples’s most powerful neighbor in ancient times, Rome defeated the Samnites, the tribe which had inhabited the Kingdom, and brought the region under Imperial control. From the Middle Ages the universal pretensions of the Roman papacy had continually threatened the temporal authority of Neapolitan rulers, and the symbol of these pretensions had survived into the eighteenth century with the offering each year of a feudal homage, the Chinea, to Rome. It was against this threat which Pietro Giannone’s anti-clericalism in the Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (1723) was directed. 4 The symbol of Rome, ancient and modern, served as an effective foil for Neapolitan intellectuals who believed that the development of good government in the Kingdom had been frustrated by the interference of outside powers.This interference was perceived as having broken the natural bond between the rulers of Naples and their subjects. The Spanish viceroys already had an established and especially reviled place in this history of misgovernment in Naples. 5 The arrival of Charles III in 1734 and the establishment of an autonomous monarchy in the Kingdom broke this history and brought a new optimism for the possibility of reform. As regalisti, the reformers of the end of the [End Page 642] eighteenth century continued their efforts to strengthen the jurisdictional rights of the now autonomous Bourbon monarchy against both the Papacy and the feudal nobility within the Kingdom. 6 Within these historiographical and political traditions Rome was clearly recognized as a recurring symbol of oppression and obstacle to Naples’s sovereignty, and late eighteenth-century historians looked back to a period before the arrival of the ancient Romans to find a native tradition which could inform contemporary reform and upon which a cultural identity could be constructed.Italian writers, from the Renaissance, had charted the early history of the various city-states, duchies, and kingdoms in the Italian peninsula relative to the rise and fall of ancient Rome. Despite the local patriotism which these histories expressed, Rome remained a powerful symbol and model of civilization, and it was from such a model that both politics and culture were discussed and compared in Europe. Consequently, interest in pre-Roman Italy most often related to the reconstruction of the origins and early history of Rome, and it was towards this which most antiquarians and historians worked in their attempts to understand the causes for its rise. 7 In any case antiquarian interest in pre-Roman... (shrink)

In the traditional historiography of the Enlightenment in which historians regard it as a rather narrow, exclusively intellectual movement, the voice of women is almost, if not entirely, non-existent. However, a more inclusive interpretation of the Enlightenment, which adds cultural and social dimensions to it, allows for a place for her-story. In this essay, various roles that women played during the era of the Enlightenment are explored.

DIVUses C.L.R. James’sThe Black Jacobins as a jumping-off point for a reconsideration of colonial and postcolonial concepts of history, politics, and agency./div.

Ten of the twelve essays in this fine collection treat subjects that are relevant to any reasonably comprehensive understanding of the nature of the history of science. The first four essays are either completely or largely historiographical. Each explores the extent to which the natural sciences have been, or should be, seen as central to the Scottish Enlightenment. As all four provide extended descriptive historiographies, there is extensive repetition here, but as the four also offer radically different answers, they (...) are worth reading.In the first essay Paul Wood argues that Dugald Stewart created an imaginary picture of the Scottish Enlightenment that has influenced almost all subsequent interpretations of the movement. These interpretations have promoted the idea that there was a coherent “Scottish school” of philosophy of which David Hume and Francis Hutcheson were the cofounders; that the Scottish school emphasized moral philosophy and social theory; and that it included figures from Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen. Wood claims that Stewart downplayed the relationship between natural knowledge and social theory, except for some minor methodological commonalities, for several reasons. In part, he desperately wanted to maintain the mind‐body dualism that characterized the Scottish school. In addition, his main statement on the Scottish Enlightenment appeared as an essay on the history of the progress of metaphysics and morals that was paired with John Leslie's essay on the progress of the natural sciences in the supplement to the fourth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and he was simply responding to the limits of his assignment. Regardless of his motives, one major consequence of Stewart's approach has been the exclusion of the natural sciences from a central role in most subsequent interpretations of the Scottish Enlightenment not written by historians of science—an exclusion Wood laments.The second essay, by John Robertson, seems, on one level, almost designed to prove Wood's main point, for it explicitly denies natural science a significant role. For Robertson, moral philosophy, history, and, above all, political economy are at the core of Scottish concerns. He departs from Stewart, however, by insisting on a fundamental opposition between Hume and Hutcheson and by arguing that the Scottish Enlightenment would be better understood as part of a broader European Enlightenment, with less patriotic fervor about Scots exceptionalism.Richard Sher's essay on what book history can tell us about science and medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment is remarkably insightful and illuminating; it left me waiting with great anticipation for his book‐length study on the subject. Although Sher rejects Roger Emerson's claims that the natural sciences were the driving force for the Enlightenment in Scotland, he insists that science and medicine were important. He then goes on to suggest a series of fascinating ways in which characteristics of the book trade both shaped and can illuminate the place of science.Among the other essays likely to interest historians of science are those by Anita Guerrini, John Wright, and Fiona MacDonald. These authors explore aspects of medical theory and medical care in very different but very illuminating ways. One other related set of essays consists of pieces by James Moore, Christopher Berry, and Alexander Broadie, all of which focus on aspects of the theorized relationship between science and religion. Here, the major theme is the difference in emphases between those who followed the ancient materialists in seeing fear as the primary motive in the origins of religion and those who emphasized some version of the design argument.This volume provides a good introduction to the current state of interpretations of the Scottish Enlightenment, and its special emphasis on the place of science among eighteenth‐century Scottish intellectuals should make it attractive to many readers of Isis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Social Cartesianism: François Poulain de la Barre and the Origins of the EnlightenmentSiep StuurmanMore than sixty years ago Paul Hazard demonstrated that the major ideas usually associated with the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment were voiced as early as the 1680s. 1 Hazard situated Cartesianism squarely at the origins of his story: Descartes himself may have wanted to remain a moderate in political and religious matters, but his followers behaved (...) like the proverbial apprentis sorciers, stopping at nothing and criticizing everything under the sky. 2 Reviewing Hazard’s argument after half a century, Margaret Jacob warns against an interpretation of Cartesianism that sees it solely as an oppositional movement. In the French situation, Cartesianism also “provided arguments for absolutism as well as for the domination over society by those... groups capable of mastering the new science.” 3 Cartesianism thus appears as a Janus-faced phenomenon that contained the germs of both an emergent “rational absolutism” and an iconoclastic critique of established authority.The chief interest of the first generation of Cartesian philosophers who published their work in the 1660s and 1670s was with natural science, and when drawn into the ideological minefield of theology, they usually bent over backwards to deny any and all materialist implications of their philosophy. Generally, they were inclined to keep aloof from social and political matters. There were, however, exceptions. The most conspicuous of these was François Poulain de la Barre who is hardly ever mentioned today outside the historiography [End Page 617] of early-modern feminism. 4 In the 1670s Poulain published three egalitarian-feminist treatises which must be considered the first examples of a self-conscious Cartesian social philosophy. The three books went to the press in an impressive staccato 5 : De l’Egalité des deux Sexes. Discours Physique et Moral, où l’on voit l’importance de se défaire des Préjugez (Paris, 1673); De l’Education des Dames pour la Conduite de l’Esprit dans les Sciences et dans les Moeurs. Entretiens (Paris, 1674); and De l’Excellence des Hommes contre l’Egalité des Sexes (Paris, 1675). 6In these texts, produced in a few years of frenzied intellectual activity, Poulain presents the case for the equality of the sexes in all fields of social life, from intellectual pursuits to military skills. Of the three the first is a systematic treatise, the second a dialogue, and the third a polemical tract in which Poulain first attempts to show that the Christian tradition is on his side, then “refutes” himself, and finally demolishes his own refutation, thus returning to his original argument. These writings are organized around his feminist program, but even a cursory reading of his books makes clear that his philosophical ambitions went beyond the issue of gender as such. Poulain himself states that he is going to attack male supremacy because it is the most deeply ingrained prejudice of all: if that can be subverted, all other prejudices will in due course follow suit. 7Poulain’s egalitarian philosophy was actually the first sustained attempt to apply Cartesian reasoning to the analysis of society, authority, and power. Previous treatments of Poulain’s thought have chiefly centered on his feminism, but the other aspects of his philosophy have received far less attention. Furthermore, Poulain has generally been portrayed as a lone radical, and the intellectual origins of his thought have so far escaped systematic investigation. 8 [End Page 618]Poulain’s writings are best seen as an attempt to construct an overall egalitarian view of society, which I shall call social Cartesianism. His critique of masculine rule widens out into an attack on unjustified power in other domains, such as race and rank. Poulain mounts an epistemological attack on traditional authority in all fields of human activity and even formulates a first, tentative conception of social change, taking issue with the alleged fixity of the concept of “nature” in the theory of modern natural law. Moreover, his thought almost literally prefigures themes and theses habitually associated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In the historiography of Cartesianism and the early Enlightenment, however, we find him scarcely mentioned, still less given serious attention. 9In the historiography of... (shrink)

In the traditional historiography of the Enlightenment in which historians regard it as a rather narrow, exclusively intellectual movement, the voice of women is almost, if not entirely, non-existent. However, a more inclusive interpretation of the Enlightenment, which adds cultural and social dimensions to it, allows for a place for her-story. In this essay, various roles that women played during the era of the Enlightenment are explored.

"Ludvig Holberg was the foremost representative of the Danish-Norwegian Enlightenment and also a European figure of note. He was an Enlightenment thinker in the conventional sense, with significant works in natural law and history, but also a very important body of moral essays and epistles. He authored several engaging autobiographies and European travelogues; and - not least - a major utopian novel that was a European bestseller, a couple of interesting satires, and a large number of plays, mainly (...) comedies. These comedies have secured Holberg's status as the most significant playwright in Scandinavia before Ibsen and Strindberg; his plays remain hugely popular and have hardly been off the stage since he died. Through his extensive oeuvre, but especially through his plays, Holberg had a decisive influence on the formation of modern Danish as a literary language, something that was a self-conscious effort on the part of a man who saw himself as an educator of the public. Despite all these accomplishments Holberg is most often remembered outside of the Nordic countries for Edvard Grieg's Holberg Suite and in the title of one of the most prestigious prizes in the humanities. It is the aim of the contributors to this volume to revive Holberg as a very major figure from a very minor corner of the Enlightenment world, presenting the latest scholarship from Scandinavia on the main areas of Holberg's work with serious emphasis on the wider European Enlightenment context and perspectives. It will appeal to all those researching intellectual history, history of philosophy, literary history/studies, theatre studies, church historiography, Scandinavian studies and Enlightenment Europe."--. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 473-492 [Access article in PDF] Sainte-Beuve between Renaissance and Enlightenment Paul Nelles For a period of eight years in the 1840s Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve held a post of conservateur at the Bibliothèque Mazarine. 1 Each day he traversed the gallery of hommes illustres which decorated the reading room. This held busts of major figures from history and literature. In one (...) of his portraits littéraires from these years Sainte-Beuve pretended to derive inspiration from this legion of intellectual heroes. Among the busts stood one of Gabriel Naudé, Mazarin's first librarian in the 1640s. Sainte-Beuve dreamt, he wrote at the time, of placing Naudé's bust beside that of Charron, or even better, between those of Montaigne and Bayle. Through Naudé, Sainte-Beuve avowed to discover the genius loci of the Bibliothèque Mazarine. Yet whatever local reasons there were for the presence of Naudé's bust at the Mazarine, Sainte-Beuve set out in this essay to find a place for Naudé among the pantheon of French thinkers on his own merits. Such playfulness with a biographical conceit of both the literary and visual arts belied serious purpose. If it fuelled Sainte-Beuve's claim to have found in the seventeenth-century thinker "un sceptique moraliste sous masque d'érudit," 2 it was also expressive of a critical campaign devoted to the revision of a received tradition of French thought and learning. Sainte-Beuve [End Page 473] juxtaposed a seventeenth-century tradition of "literary" skepticism independent of formal philosophy with an Enlightenment inheritance he was eager to disown. Central to this task was a disciplinary turn away from philosophical inquiry and the history of philosophy to literary history. This in turn entailed a full embrace of the shadowy inhabitants of the margins of pre-Enlightenment thought from the late Renaissance to Bayle.Sainte-Beuve's discovery of seventeenth-century precursors, as he clearly regarded them, was first sketched in a series of articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes in the 1830s and 1840s. Naudé was thus somewhat more than a random sighting in Sainte-Beuve's critical galaxy. Together with Bayle and a handful of other figures Naudé occupied a key position within the constellation of thinkers Sainte-Beuve charted in plotting a course for the practice of literary history and criticism in the middle years of the nineteenth century. The context of the development of Sainte-Beuve's enterprise illuminates an intriguing aspect of the historiography of skepticism in modern intellectual history. While functioning in part to legitimize literary history as a discipline, the circumstances of Sainte-Beuve's undertaking are rooted in wider contemporary currents of historiography and the philosophy of history. There is, then, a crucial disjuncture between the tradition Sainte-Beuve set out to describe and that established in the twentieth century under the rubric of libertinage. Sainte-Beuve did not seek to establish seventeenth-century origins for Enlightenment free thought. Rather, he turned to the seventeenth century in an effort to exhume a tradition of criticism and literary skepticism with which, on his account, the Enlightenment had openly broken. 3Sainte-Beuve's interest in Naudé, Bayle, and other figures derived from a need to differentiate the orientation and method of literary history from contemporary mechanisms for assessing the significance of France's intellectual and cultural heritage. For all concerned this was a heritage unquestioningly viewed through the prism of the political events of 1789 and their aftermath. According to Sainte-Beuve, la critique emerged in the seventeenth century with thinkers such as Charron, Naudé, and Bayle. From his standpoint, the significance of such figures inhered entirely in their pre-Enlightenment status. They vividly illustrate how the Enlightenment had deviated from a well-established tradition of la critique. The degree to which they served as a foil to the Enlightenment becomes evident when contrasted with Sainte-Beuve's characterization of mainstream Enlightenment figures. [End Page 474]For Sainte-Beuve and his contemporaries literature was not yet restricted to a narrow canon... (shrink)

Germany’s political and cultural past from ancient times through World War II has dimmed the legacy of its Enlightenment, which these days is far outshone by those of France and Scotland. In this book, Jim Reed clears the dust away from eighteenth-century Germany, bringing the likes of Kant, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Gotthold Lessing into a coherent and focused beam that shines within European intellectual history and reasserts the important role of Germany’s Enlightenment. Reed looks closely at the (...) arguments, achievements, conflicts, and controversies of these major thinkers and how their development of a lucid and active liberal thinking matured in the late eighteenth century into an imaginative branching that ran through philosophy, theology, literature, historiography, science, and politics. He traces the various pathways of their thought and how one engendered another, from the principle of thinking for oneself to the development of a critical epistemology; from literature’s assessment of the past to the formulation of a poetic ideal of human development. Ultimately, Reed shows how the ideas of the German Enlightenment have proven their value in modern secular democracies and are still of great relevance—despite their frequent dismissal—to us in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The perception of intellectual life in Greek antiquity by the representatives of the European Enlightenment of the 18th century favoured the establishment of the cult of reason. Myth as a potential source of knowledge was disregarded: instead, the monopoly of truth-finding through pure rationalisation was asserted. This tendency, positing, as it did, reason in opposition to myth, did a signal disservice to the realities of intellectual life among the ancient Greeks. Nevertheless, these distortions of the Enlightenment have conditioned (...) our approach to education and have led to our privileging of reason as a mode of enquiry right up to the present day. The ancient Greek intellectuals (i.e. the pre-Socratic philosophers, the early historiographers, philosophers of the classical age) did not set myth (mythos) and reason (logos) in opposition to each other. In fact, they benefited from both as differing modes of enquiry, each in its own right and possessing its own value. Plato, in his reasoning, was much concerned with the proper use of mythical narrative. In one of his dialogues, he even coined a new term for explaining how mythical topics and motifs should be exploited as a source of knowledge. This term is mythologia, and it first occurs in Plato's Republic (394b). The present study aims to offer a corrective to traditional cliches and received wisdom about intellectual life in ancient Greece. The work proposes, and aims to reconstruct, a mental landscape in which myth and reason connect and vividly interact, and in which the concepts of mythos and logos are intertwined in the terminological network of the ancient Greek language. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 126-127 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment T. J. Hochstrasser. Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 246. Cloth, $54.95. In a worthy addition to Cambridge's Ideas in Context series, T. J. Hochstrasser undertakes an excavation. His aim is to provide a description, (...) and to demonstrate the importance within the German Frühaufklärung, of a largely forgotten philosophical approach: eclecticism. Hochstrasser argues that the triumph of Wolffian rationalism in the Protestant universities in the middle of the eighteenth century occluded the importance of eclecticism for Kant, who in turn occluded it for everyone afterward. But the price of forgetting eclecticism is high. Not only are we left with no account--or a skewed account--of the development of German thought from the first stirrings of the Enlightenment to the emergence of the Critical philosophy, but our understanding of the development of the historiography of philosophy is badly compromised. For among their many accomplishments--in natural jurisprudence, in university reform--the eclectics were the first critical historians of philosophy, their distinctive genres being historically aware treatises on natural law and Whig histories of natural jurisprudence. Hochstrasser's study traces the development of eclecticism, from the work of its founders, Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius, through a devolution in the hands of Thomasius's later disciples, to the eventual oblivion in the middle of the eighteenth century. This review will focus on the beginning of this narrative, as Pufendorf is the leading figure in the book.Eclecticism began with Pufendorf's attempt, in his mature work on natural law, to reconcile his conflicting inheritances from Grotius and Hobbes without simply endorsing the work of either. He was impressed both by Grotius's explanation of the law of nations in terms of human sociability--but also by Hobbes's criticisms of Grotius, rooted in the latter's analysis of the state of nature. At the same time, he wished to reject Grotius's method of induction from sociological observation and Hobbes's minimally constrained voluntarism. Contributing further to his perplexity was his increasing disaffection from the geometric approach he had adopted in his Elementa Jurisprudentiae Universalis.The way out of this impasse, Hochstrasser contends, was revealed to Pufendorf in correspondence with Hermann Conring, the leading constitutional lawyer of his time, and Johann Böcler, Grotius's most erudite commentator. Böcler chastised Pufendorf for his neglect of history, and both of Pufendorf's correspondents pointed out his need for some non-Hobbesian criterion by which he could validate his first principles, whatever they turned out to be. Stung particularly by Böcler's remarks, Pufendorf returned to the Stoics and there discovered a via media between Hobbes's pessimism and Grotius's optimism: a synthesis anticipating Kant's doctrine of "unsocial sociability." For the purposes of Hochstrasser's study, the key aspects of Pufendorf's solution are these: first, it avoids mere voluntarism; second, it does this by means of a moral epistemology that sharply distinguishes natural law [End Page 126] from moral theology; finally, the validating criterion for Pufendorf's first principles is located in critical appropriation of the history of moral philosophy. These were to be hallmarks of Pufendorf's school.On the first and second points, Hochstrasser seems to me substantively correct, though I think he misunderstands the nature of Pufendorf's escape from mere voluntarism and thereby underplays the religious dimensions of Pufendorf's theory. Among recent Anglo-American commentators on Pufendorf, only Robert Adams has in my view properly construed Pufendorf's thought: that it involves a command theory of obligation proper, but posits the natural advantageousness of some hierarchies as a buttress against mere voluntarism. Hochstrasser is thus right to insist, against Leibniz, that Pufendorf's account of obligation is coherent. But he is wrong to suggest that "there was nothing in Pufendorf's theory... to oblige him to introduce fear of punishment by a superior... " (105). He is... (shrink)

In this impressive first book, Clark explores the extraordinary history of the Destruction of Troy by Dares the Phrygian. Dares's account of the fall of Troy is a short, Latin prose narrative that claims to be an eyewitness account of the Trojan War, translated from the Phrygian by Cornelius Nepos, the Roman historian, and sent to Sallust, another, even more famous Roman historian. Dares's text came to light as late antiquity turned into the medieval era, and Dares was promptly hailed (...) as “the first pagan historian”—a predecessor of Homer—by Isidore of Seville. Throughout the medieval period, a series of scholars were transfixed by Dares. His text was taken as the earliest and thus most reliable source for the world-changing event of the Trojan War—which led to the foundation of Rome and the shape of the West. It was exciting not just for its antiquity but also for its polemical revision of the standard received story. Not only did its prefatory letter claim—with a nicely rationalizing rhetoric—that even the Athenians declared Homer was “insane” for imagining that gods and humans might meet on the battlefield, but also, even more alluringly, Dares stated that Aeneas, the pious hero of Virgil's Aeneid, was a traitor who had sold out Troy to the Greeks: he escaped the sack to found Rome because he had opened the doors of the city to its enemies. The pious Aeneas, exemplary hero, committed the deeply impious act of treachery to his own fatherland. Dares provided a moral rejoinder to later Roman political propaganda and provoked a set of intense debates about the past, its value, and its truth.Early modern humanists were more suspicious. The great scholars Scaliger and Vossius in particular turned their philological fervor against what they saw as an obvious forgery—but even then, not everyone was persuaded. The celebrated Bodin, most surprisingly, still thought Dares represented historical truth. Clark carefully shows how oversimplified the common story of the triumph of humanist learning is. It took a lot of work and much forgetting as well as persuasion for Dares to lose his position. It was indeed only in the Enlightenment that Dares finally passed into the half-light of insignificance reserved for forgeries. One strength of Clark's book is his insistence on trying to discover with generosity and understanding how apparently baffling opinions could be held and argued for—how, that is, the past is a foreign country even and especially where such apparently basic ideas as historical truth are at stake (a topic not without relevance in modern politics).Clark examines in considerable detail across several centuries how Dares was read and mobilized. It is especially satisfying to have a work of reception history that stretches across the modern historiographical divides (of the late antique, medieval, early modern, and Enlightenment periods) and sees how complex the lines of continuity and change are. The naive prose of Dares, in Clark's sophisticated analysis, raises profound questions of what antiquity is and why it matters; how authenticity and authorship are constructed differently across this time period; what the relations are between fiction, truth, and exemplarity (both in theory and in practice); and how texts shift in status and attribution. Dares indeed, as Clark puts it well, “test[s] the meaning and boundaries of antiquity itself.” The range of material is stunning: not only in terms of who read and used Dares but also in terms of the other texts that were read and transformed alongside his. It is remarkable, for example, to see how Joseph of Exeter's medieval hexameters were attributed to Dares (and then reattributed), or how Dares became silently incorporated into a work of Jerome. Despite this richness, I would have liked to see more pages on the relation between pagan and Christian historiography. How does Dares's believed (but false) claim to be an eyewitness relate to Christian claims to witness events (martyr means [eye-]witness)? Philology and its attack on authenticity were key to the battles of the Reformation. Clark could also have spent more time exploring what difference the rediscovery of the Greek text of Homer made to the story of Dares's reception. Homer's rise in the West is part of Dares's fall. In its detail, however, and its range of questions and scope of material, The First Pagan Historian is an exemplary work of reception history. (shrink)

Eric Hobsbawm is a man of the Enlightenment: does he not define socialism as the last and most extreme heir of the eighteenth century's rationalism? So it is not surprising that the distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ has an important place in his work. However, examining some of his writings, and in particular the three books from the period 1959-69 devoted to so-called archaic forms of revolt, it is evident that his approach differs markedly from the ‘progressive’ (...) orthodoxy in its interest, sympathy, even fascination - these are his own words - for ‘primitive’ movements of peasant antimodern (anti-capitalist) resistance and protest. I refer to Primitive Rebels (1959), Bandits (1969) and Captain Swing (1969). (shrink)

That science is fundamentally universal has been proclaimed innumerable times. But the precise geographical meaning of this universality has changed historically. This article examines conceptions of scientific internationalism from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, and their varying relations to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, socialism, and ‘the West’. These views are confronted with recent tendencies to cast science as a uniquely European product.

This article questions the status of Vattel's Law of Nations as an exemplary illustration of eighteenth-century developments in the history of international law. Recent discussions of the relation between eighteenth-century thinking about the law of nations and the French Revolution have revived Carl Schmitt's contention about the nexus between just war theory and the emergence of total war. This evaluative framework has been used to identify Vattel as a moral critic of absolutism who helped undermine the barriers against total war, (...) as well as an architect and defender of those very barriers. Neither of these opposing readings is corroborated by late-eighteenth-century commentators on Vattel's treatise. To its late-eighteenth-century critics and defenders alike, Vattel's Law of Nations was distinguished by the weakness of its derivation of the law of nations from principles of natural law. Insofar as these readers did link Vattel to justifications of relatively unrestrained forms of warfare, they did so in connection with the perceived weakness of Vattel's moral position rather than with its strength. This late-eighteenth-century consensus on the defining features of Vattel's approach to the law of nations sits uncomfortably with Schmitt's evaluative framework, and indeed with other assessments of Vattel that limit themselves to orienting his treatise along fault lines in the historiography of international law. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century German Statistik was an empirical and descriptive discipline of "the land and the people." As the study of material conditions it provided governments with information to assess the strength of their own state in comparison with others. Its adherents' claim that Statistik was a useful science, however, was severely tempered by their empirical method and holistic view of society. As a "science of the present" it was seriously challenged by the recognition of the essential historicity of its subject matter. (...) Both circumstances explain the decline of Statistik from which mathematical statistics, political economy, and political historiography profited. (shrink)

O artigo explora duas polêmicas eruditas que contribuíram para fixação do cânon historiográfico brasílico setecentista. Aparentemente arcaizantes, os temas do Dilúvio Universal e o debate em torno da passagem do Apóstolo São Tomé pela América portuguesa constituíram importantes referências na construção da memória histórica brasílica. As elites letradas luso-americanas procuraram construir uma interpretação alternativa frente às teorias de inferiorização da América e dos Americanos.