Disaggregating ‘the Enlightenment’: an international intellectual history of the English Enlightenment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliette Gout
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Thought

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....

Projecting the Enlightenment

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wokler ◽  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
History Of

This chapter retraces Alasdair MacIntyre's own construal of the Enlightenment Project's trajectory in order to show how his interpretation of an intellectual tradition depends above all on his assessment of its impact. It argues that MacIntyre's Enlightenment Project is largely unreconstructed, unredeemed, and undiminished in its failure, even after substantial embellishment. His three principal works comprise an extraordinary indictment of the theoretical and practical legacy of eighteenth-century philosophy. His account projects the Enlightenment's implications and influence as they stem from its aims. He holds it to blame for some of the most sinister aspects of a morally vacuous civilization, cursed by the malediction of unlicenced Reason. His intellectual history of the period forms one of the mainsprings of his own philosophy.

The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment

1991 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Goldie
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
Royal Road ◽  
History Of

In the eighteenth century, most Scottish Protestants took it for granted that Roman Catholicism was antithetical to the spirit of “this enlightened age.” Amid the several polarities that framed their social theory—barbarism and politeness, superstition and rational enquiry, feudal and commercial, Highland and Lowland—popery in every case stood with the first term and Protestantism with the second. Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet, set in the 1760s, is redolent of these contrarieties. He draws a stark contrast between the world of Darsie Latimer, the cosmopolitan, bourgeois, and Presbyterian world of an Edinburgh attorney, and the world of Hugh Redgauntlet, rugged and rude, clannish and popish. When the Stuart Pretender appears on the scene he is disguised as a prelate, his odor more of sinister hegemony than of pious sanctimony. Scott's tableau captured the Enlightenment commonplace that the purblind faith of popery was a spiritual halter by which the credulous were led into political despotism. Catholicism, by its treasonable Jacobitism and its mendacious superstition, seemed self-exiled from the royal road of Scottish civil and intellectual improvement.It is not too harsh to suggest that modern scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has implicitly endorsed this view, for next to nothing has been written about the intellectual history of Scottish Catholicism, let alone anything comparable with the two full-scale studies now available on the English Catholic Enlightenment. One historian has suggested an alternative view, by suggesting that, in the emergence of the Scottish Enlightenment, it was Catholics and Episcopalians who, as alienated outsiders, helped loosen the straitjacket of Calvinist orthodoxy.

scholarly journals The Great Battle of the Books between the Cultural Evolutionists and the Cultural Relativists: From the Beginning of Infinity to the End of History

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 6-30
Author(s):  
Kevin Fernlund ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Human History ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
End Of History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Francis Fukuyama ◽  
History Of ◽  
The End Of History

The idea that societies or cultures can evolve and, therefore, can be compared and graded has been central to modern history, in general, and to big history, in particular, which seeks to unite natural and human history; biology and culture. However, while extremely useful, this notion is not without significant moral and ethical challenges, which has been noted by scholars. This article is a short intellectual history of the idea of cultural evolution and its critics, the cultural relativists, from the Age of the Enlightenment, what David Deutsch called the “beginning of infinity,” to the neo-Hegelianism of Francis Fukuyama. The emphasis here is on Europe and the Americas and the argument is that the universal evolutionism of the Enlightenment ultimately prevailed over historical partic-ularism, as global disparities in social development, which were once profound, narrowed or even disappeared altogether.

scholarly journals O legislador entre “felicidade pública” e “máxima felicidade”: contribuição à história da filosofia jurídica às vésperas da era dos direitos

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (41) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Rodrigues de Castro
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Public Happiness ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Law ◽  
Cesare Beccaria

RESUMOO presente trabalho é um estudo de história intelectual do direito e tem como objetivo descrever a evolução de alguns tópicos do pensamento jurídico-político setecentista. Na teoria política pró-absolutista do século XVIII, um dos tópicos mais importantes foi a figura do legislador, que aparece já no começo do século no âmbito do discurso da felicidade pública. Posteriormente, o tema volta a ser elaborado pela incipiente filosofia utilitarista que se desenvolvia ainda dentro do iluminismo com Claude-Adrien Helvétius e Cesare Beccaria. De tal forma, o tema do legislador contribuiu de forma decisiva para a transição à segunda modernidade no âmbito do pensamento jurídico, fundamentando a hegemonia da lei sobre as outras fontes de direito e facilitando a emergência dos direitos – direitos humanos, direitos fundamentais, direitos da personalidade – como centro da ordem jurídica. Procuramos seguir este itinerário, demonstrando como a questão do legislador e os temas a ele conectados vão sendo reelaborados ao longo do desenvolvimento do pensamento político setecentista. Demonstramos, assim, que no âmbito de uma fundamentação teórica do absolutismo monárquico, que se inicia com a metamorfose na compreensão do papel da coroa com relação à sociedade, o tema do legislador converte-se em pedra angular de algumas importantes tendências do pensamento jurídico moderno. Utilizamos os métodos propostos pela história conceitual.PALAVRAS-CHAVEHistória do pensamento jurídico. Legislador. Utilitarismo. Máxima felicidade. ABSTRACTThe present work is a study on the intellectual history of law and aims to describe the evolution of some topics of eighteenth-century legal-political thinking. In the eighteenth-century pro-absolutist political theory, one of the most important subjects of debate was the legislator, which appears already at the beginning of the century in the “public happiness” discourse. Subsequently, it continued to be discussed by the incipient utilitarian philosophy that started being developed within the Enlightenment with Claude-Adrien Helvétius and Cesare Beccaria. The debate on the legislator contributed decisively to the transition to the second modernity in the field of legal thought, laying the foundations for the hegemony of statutory law over other sources of law and facilitating the emergence of rights – human rights, fundamental rights, personality rights – as the center of the legal order. We seek to follow this itinerary, demonstrating how the legislator question evolved throughout the eighteenth-century political thought. We thus intend to demonstrate that within the framework of a theoretical justification for monarchical absolutism, the legislator subject became the cornerstone of some important trends in modern legal thought. We use the methods proposed by conceptual history.KEYWORDSHistory of legal thought. Legislator. Utilitarianism. Greatest happiness.

Intellectual Change before the Enlightenment: Scotland, the Netherlands and the Reception of Cartesian Thought, 1650–1700

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Raffe
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
United Provinces

This article argues that intellectual historians' fascination with a narrative of the emerging Scottish enlightenment has led to a neglect of ideas that did not shape enlightenment culture. As a contribution to a less teleological intellectual history of Scotland, the article examines the reception of the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). Cartesian thought enjoyed a brief period of popularity from the 1670s to the 1690s but appeared outdated by the mid-eighteenth century. Debates about Cartesianism illustrate the ways in which late seventeenth-century Scottish intellectual life was conditioned by the rivalry between presbyterians and episcopalians, and by fears that new philosophy would undermine christianity. Moreover, the reception of Cartesian thought exemplifies intellectual connections between Scotland and the Netherlands. Not only did Descartes' philosophy win its first supporters in the United Provinces, but the Dutch Republic also provided the arguments employed by the main Scottish critics of Cartesianism. In this period the Netherlands was both a source of philosophical innovation and of conservative reaction to intellectual change.

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ENLIGHTENMENT: A VIEW OF THEIR HISTORY

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. A. POCOCK
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Single Root ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Single Process ◽  
History Of

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.

The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Revisionist History through the Lens of Jewish-Christian Relations

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-86
Author(s):  
Anthony Le Donne
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Revisionist History ◽  
Common Thread ◽  
History Of

This essay challenges the standard paradigm for the intellectual history of ‘Jesus Quests’ popularized by Albert Schweitzer and mimicked by almost every survey since. I argue that historical reconstruction begins at least with Augustine (perhaps sooner) and with an eye to Jewish-Christian relations. By analyzing key moments in the intellectual history of Jesus studies, I argue that a common thread has been Jewish-Christian relations. This thread suggests that an important (perhaps seminal) impetus for study of the historical Jesus before the Enlightenment and through to the modern period has been largely neglected by the standard ‘Jesus Quests’ paradigm.

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.

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