scholarly journals In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas

1971 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Darnton
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

scholarly journals Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment; Essays in Honor of Robert Darnton. Ed. Charles Walton. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. xvii, 244p. ISBN 978-0-271-05012-6. $49.95

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-207
Author(s):  
Greg Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
State University ◽  
Pennsylvania State University ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Penn State ◽  
History Of

Appearing as a title in the Penn State Series in the History of the Book, Into Print is a collection of twelve essays demonstrating a debt to Robert Darnton’s ground-breaking scholarship on the social history of ideas (Walton, vii; Pasta, 82). Divided into five thematic parts (“Making News,” “Print, Paper, Markets, and States,” “Police and Opinion,” “Enlightenment in Revolution,” and “Enlightenment Universalism and Cultural Difference”), it includes contributions from scholars, primarily historians, who studied under Darnton. Editor Charles Walton points out in his superb preface that, while topics covered are diverse, each essay exhibits Darnton’s influence by “analyzing the dynamic . . .

Making Natural History: Doing the Enlightenment

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Dietz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Active Mass ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mass Participation ◽  
Initial Focus

The image of the Enlightenment as an era has proved to be remarkably constant, repeatedly resisting protracted and subtle attempts to de-ideologize, pluralize, and reperiodize it. Historians have turned away from a pure history of ideas in favor of a cultural history of publishing and reading, a social history of intellectual sociability, and the situating of ideas within historical-political constellations. The concept of a homogeneous, quasi-monolithic Enlightenment has been pluralized and parceled into a large number of geographically and thematically distinct Enlightenments. At the same time, the chronological scope of research interests has been extended and refined. Whereas the decades of the high Enlightenment in Britain and France were the initial focus of interest, the phase of the radical early Enlightenment has since achieved a firm place in a total panorama that also takes account of chronologically different developments in various national contexts. Nonetheless it is true, although necessarily a generalization, to say that the interpretation of the Enlightenment as a whole concentrates on an “Enlightenment thinking” characterized as rational, critical of dogma, and systematic, and whose main emphases are seen as political ideas, philosophy, criticism of superstition, and the experimental sciences. The intention here is to focus on the aspect of active mass participation in the intellectual project of the Enlightenment and to supplement the image of an intellectual history centered on the triad of ideas, authors, and texts (more rarely books) with a perspective that focuses on learned practice.

Reclaiming Theology for the Enlightenment: The Case of Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten (1706–1757)

2003 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sorkin
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
New Information ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jonathan Israel ◽  
New View ◽  
Ideas And Institutions

The new millennium appears to be ushering in a new view of the Enlightenment. The synthesis of the 1930s to the 1970s had posited a unitary Enlightenment that was the matrix of a modern secular or secularizing culture. The authority of reason and science either fully displaced, or fundamentally challenged and thus forced the reconstruction of, the claims of belief and tradition. From the 1970s a social history of ideas and institutions explored the Enlightenment's seemingly infinite regional and national variations, subverting the unitary notion and yielding a mass of new information. The works of J.G.A. Pocock and Jonathan Israel, James E. Bradley and Dale K. Van Kley, have begun to build on this accumulated scholarship, offering a new synthesis that rests on two related notions.

GEOGRAPHY, ENLIGHTENMENT, AND IMPROVEMENT Geography and Enlightenment. Edited by David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. viii+455. ISBN 0-226-48720-2 (hb). $52·00. 0-226-48721-0 (pb). $25·00. Nature's government: science, imperial Britain, and the ‘improvement’ of the world. By Richard Drayton. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xxi+346. ISBN 0-300-05976-0. £25·00. Enlightenment geography: the political languages of British geography, 1650–1850. By Robert J. Mayhew. London: Macmillan, 2000. Pp. viii+324. ISBN 0-333-79186-X. £45·00.

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
FELIX DRIVER
Keyword(s):  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Botanic Garden ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Lecture Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

What is Enlightenment? Few questions in the history of ideas can have given rise to more controversy, sustained over more than two centuries and extending into the furthest reaches of contemporary thought. In comparison, the ‘where’ of Enlightenment – the sites from which philosophes garnered their evidence, the settings in which their ideas took shape, the networks through which they were disseminated, the contexts in which they were interpreted – has received much less attention. It is not that these geographies have been altogether neglected. Distinctions between different ‘national’ Enlightenments (French, Scottish, English, and so on) are familiar, perhaps all too familiar, to historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At a smaller scale, it is difficult to imagine historical accounts of the Enlightenment world without some sort of tour of those paradigmatic sites – the coffee house, the botanic garden, the lecture theatre. There is a geography here, of sorts: but in truth it is often simply a stage for action, a passive background (sometimes ‘national’, sometimes ‘local’) to the real business of social and intellectual change. In recent years, however, intellectual historians in general, and historians of science in particular, have begun to pay more attention to these and many other sites, not simply as inert contexts but as vital components of the making and communication of new knowledge. Thus is a genuine geography of knowledge in the making.

scholarly journals pre-eighteenth-century traditions of revivalism: damascus in the thirteenth century

2005 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
konrad hirschler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Large Sections

this article examines whether it is possible to trace eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalist thought to earlier ‘medieval’ examples. the discussion is centred on the issue of ijtiha¯d/taqli¯d, which featured prominently in revivalist thought. taking the example of scholars in thirteenth-century damascus, it firstly compares the respective readings of ijtiha¯d/taqli¯d, by focusing on one individual, abu¯ sha¯ma (d. 1267). it secondly asks whether a scholar like abu¯ sha¯ma, who had adopted a reading similar to later revivalists, also took a critical and oppositional stand against large sections of his contemporary society, i.e. a revivalist posture. it is this article's main contention that the example of abu¯ sha¯ma shows the need to study in more detail possible revivalist traditions prior to the ‘grand’ movements. the combination of the history of ideas and social history might allow a deeper understanding of how and in what contexts calls for reform and opposition to the current state of affairs were expressed.

Philosophie als Konfliktgeschehen

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-136
Author(s):  
Ludwig Stockinger
Keyword(s):  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interpretation Of Literature

Abstract The reception of Panagiotis Kondylis’ depiction of the Enlightenment published in 1981 was determined by its reduction to the thesis of the ›rehabilitation of sensuality‹ (Sinnlichkeit). In addition, the objection raised by critics against ›decisionism‹ impaired an adequate reception of Kondylis’ work. This article attempts to reconstruct Kondylis’ argument and clarify its social-anthropological presuppositions, by interpreting the history of ideas as a history of the struggle for power between philosophy and theology. Employed as an agent in this struggle, the ›rehabilitation of sensuality‹ generates a second problem: the danger of relativizing all values as in nihilism. This article identifies work on this problem, which remains ultimately unresolved, as the central goal of the Enlightenment movement. Understood in this light, Kondylis’ these can be contextualized in the social-historical interpretation of literature and culture grounded in theories of secularization and history of problems in the modern period.

PREFACE

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHRUTI KAPILA
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
South Asian ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Major Site ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time

In a recent appraisal of the nature of the enterprise of intellectual history, it was remarked, not for the first time, that the “the only history of ideas to be written are histories of their uses in argument”. Though perhaps not in such a self-conscious manner, the essays in this issue consider the transformative capacity of ideas. Modern intellectual history in the European and American context grew out of a critique of the dominance of social history; by contrast, it has received little or no attention in the field of colonial and modern South Asia. Despite the vibrancy of the field in general, the two major works in Indian intellectual history were written almost half a century ago. Eric Stokes's English Utilitarians and India and Ranajit Guha's A Rule of Property for Bengal were both concerned with the making of the regime of colonial political economy. These two important books took the major site of the generation of ideas to be the colonial state and the major actors to be its official intellectuals. Interestingly, both these historians later moved away from intellectual history to social history and the experience of the peasantry. It is an ironic tribute to their books that the subsequent focus of much South Asian historical scholarship has been on the nature of the colonial state and its relation to politics, economy and society. However, the emphasis on the power and the work of ideas, in Stokes's and Guha's initial formulations, slowly but surely gave way to “ethnographies of the state”. A related historiographical move emphasized the politics and culture of resistance, as indeed did Stokes and Guha in their later work.

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