Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Examining the social and political upheavals that characterized the collapse of public judgment in early modern Europe, this book offers a unique account of the achievement of liberal democracy and self-government. The book argues that the work of John Locke instills a civic judgment that avoids the excesses of corrosive skepticism and dogmatic fanaticism, which lead to either political acquiescence or irresolvable conflict. Locke changes the way political power is assessed by replacing deteriorating vocabularies of legitimacy with a new language of justification informed by a conception of probability. For Locke, the coherence and viability of liberal self-government rests not on unassailable principles or institutions, but on the capacity of citizens to embrace probable judgment. The book explores the breakdown of the medieval understanding of knowledge and opinion, and considers how Montaigne's skepticism and Descartes' rationalism—interconnected responses to the crisis—involved a pragmatic submission to absolute rule. Locke endorses this response early on, but moves away from it when he encounters a notion of reasonableness based on probable judgment. In his mature writings, Locke instructs his readers to govern their faculties and intellectual yearnings in accordance with this new standard as well as a vocabulary of justification that might cultivate a self-government of free and equal individuals. The success of Locke's arguments depends upon citizens' willingness to take up the labor of judgment in situations where absolute certainty cannot be achieved.

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Unsettling the Modern Knowledge Settlement

Beyond Reason ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197500583.003.0002 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 21-51

Author(s):

Sanjay Seth

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Early Modern ◽

Social History ◽

Science Studies ◽

Cultural Anthropology ◽

Early Modern Europe ◽

The Core ◽

The Social ◽

Modern Knowledge ◽

Modern Europe

This chapter outlines the core presuppositions that underlie and define the social sciences: that knowledge is a relation between a subject who represents and explains an object or process; that nature and the social/cultural are two different domains, authorizing the distinction between the natural and the social sciences; and that knowledge is necessarily secular. These presuppositions, novel when first advanced in early modern Europe, later hardened into unquestioned axioms and came to be seen not as the presuppositions of a particular conception and practice of knowledge, but as the premises of knowledge tout court. This chapter proceeds to show that these presumptions have been challenged and are coming undone, and does so by focusing on recent disciplinary debates in science studies, social history, and social and cultural anthropology. It concludes that taken together, these challenges indicate that modern Western knowledge, the superiority and universality of which was once taken for granted, now has to be defended.

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Clothing and social inequality in early modern Europe: introductory remarks

Continuity and Change ◽

10.1017/s0268416051003674 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 15 (3) ◽

pp. 359-365 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

CARLO MARCO BELFANTI ◽

FABIO GIUSBERTI

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Social Rank ◽

Early Modern Europe ◽

Social Hierarchies ◽

Social Scale ◽

The Social ◽

Status Signals ◽

Modern Europe ◽

The One

In the European society of the Ancien Régime lifestyle was an effective pointer to the social class to which a family and its members belonged. Social hierarchies were reflected in patterns of consumption: the upper classes had a definite need for ostentation, since lavish spending made their position at the top of the social scale manifest. Clothing had a decisive function in this connection: clothes were undoubtedly the most visible marks of high living, embodying a whole series of status signals – the quality of the cloth, the richness of the accessories, the colours – clearly identifying the social rank of the wearer. Yet a number of recent studies on pre-industrial consumerism have shown that in England – chiefly, but not alone among European societies – a taste and feeling for consumer goods caught on among other social classes besides the upper. It follows that the correspondence between clothing – or more broadly, a consumer pattern – on the one hand, and rank, on the other, is not something one can apply mechanically. The web of connections between dress and social hierarchy in early modern Europe was highly complex and varied, as the ensuing remarks briefly suggest.

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