Revitalizing the Intellectual History of the French Revolution

1989 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 652 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack R. Censer ◽  
Daniel Arasse ◽  
Keith Michael Baker ◽  
Carol Blum ◽  
Robert Darnton ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

scholarly journals The Contemporaneity of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. From the French Revolution to German Post-War Sociology

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 940-970
Author(s):  
Sonja Asal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
German Sociology ◽  
The French Revolution

While resistance to Enlightenment thought occurring in the eighteenth century is often framed by the concept of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, the term itself was not introduced before the twentieth century. The article first reconstructs the anti-Enlightenment polemic before and after the French Revolution to highlight that while the notion of Counter- Enlightenment is appropriate for the identification of hitherto unexplored strands of thought, in view of a broader and more differentiated approach to the intellectual history of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it does not allow for a substantial definition. Subsequently, the article examines the history of the concept in French, English and German linguistic contexts, the German sociology of the interwar period and discussions about the legacy of the Enlightenment after World War II, to retrace how the different iterations have to be understood as a key for the self-reflection of modern societies throughout the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Never the Same Again: On Some Recent Interpretations of the French Revolution

2016 ◽  
Vol 71 (02) ◽  
pp. 189-216
Author(s):  
Francesco Benigno
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Anthropological Perspective ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
History Of ◽  
Revolution Francaise ◽  
Anthropologie Politique ◽  
The French Revolution

This essay is a discussion of three recent and important books on the French Revolution: Timothy Tackett's The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution, Jonathan Israel's Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from the Rights of Man to Robespierre, and Haim Burstin's Révolutionnaires. Pour une anthropologie politique de la Révolution française. All three volumes are characterized by a welcome return to general interpretations based on new theoretical approaches and consider the revolutionary process from multiple points of view: the first uses the historiographical current known as the “new history of emotions” to explain the contemporary obsession with conspiracies and thence the Terror; the second proposes a new approach based on the traditional history of ideas, considered capable of explaining the so-called “hard facts”; the third envisages the revolutionary experience from an anthropological perspective, constructing a typology in order to characterize it. Nevertheless, all three are united by a reluctance to analyze the political structure itself; in other words, to investigate the concrete workings of political institutions during the Revolution.

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