Karen O'Brien

Bio: Karen O'Brien is an academic researcher from University of Wales. The author has contributed to research in topics: Enlightenment & Roman Empire. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 8 publications receiving 229 citations.

Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon

Abstract: Acknowledgements and author's note 1 Introduction: cosmopolitanism, narrative, history 2 Voltaire's neoclassical poetics of history 3 European contexts in Hume's History of England 4 William Robertson to the rescue of Scottish history 5 Robertson on the triumph of Europe and its empires 6 Emulation and revival: Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 7 David Ramsay's sceptical history of the American Revolution Afterword Bibliography Index

Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract: Introduction: the progress of society 1. Anglican Whig feminism in England, 1690-1760: self-love, reason and social benevolence 2. From savage to Scotswoman: the history of femininity 3. Roman, Gothic and medieval women: the historicisation of womanhood, 1750-c.1804 4. Catharine Macaulay's Histories of England: liberty, civilisation and the female historian 5. Good manners and partial civilisation in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft 6. The history women and the population men, 1760-1830 Bibliography.

The Return of the Enlightenment

Abstract: THE SECOND DECADE of the twenty-first century finds the Enlightenment in robust health As a designation of period, as an intellectual clustering, as a method of experimental inquiry, and as an ideal, even, of rationality and toleration to be pitted against the world's zones of intolerance, it is back in circulation and generating new historical work

The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory

Abstract: Gerard Delanty provides a comprehensive assessment of the idea of cosmopolitanism in social and political thought which links cosmopolitan theory with critical social theory. He argues that cosmopolitanism has a critical dimension which offers a solution to one of the weaknesses in the critical theory tradition: failure to respond to the challenges of globalization and intercultural communication. Critical cosmopolitanism, he proposes, is an approach that is not only relevant to social scientific analysis but also normatively grounded in a critical attitude. Delanty's argument for a critical, sociologically oriented cosmopolitanism aims to avoid, on the one hand, purely normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism and, on the other, approaches that reduce cosmopolitanism to the empirical expression of diversity. He attempts to take cosmopolitan theory beyond the largely Western context with which it has generally been associated, claiming that cosmopolitan analysis must now take into account non-Western expressions of cosmopolitanism.

Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany

Abstract: Observant un retour a la problematique du cosmopolitisme pour faire face a la resurgence actuelle des sentiments nationalistes dans le monde, l'A etablit une typologie des differentes formes de cosmopolitisme moral, federaliste-international, juridique, culturel (G Forster), economique (D H Hegewisch), et romantique (Schlegel, Novalis), qui se sont developpees en Allemagne a la fin du XVII e siecle Examinant la notion de citoyennete morale a l'origine du cosmopolitisme moral de C M Wieland et de la theorie morale, politique et juridique de Kant, l'A montre que le cosmopolitisme romantique, a l'exception de celui de F Schlegel, s'oppose aux cinq autres versions en tant qu'il marque la fin des Lumieres et adopte le courant reactionnaire et nationnaliste qui caracterisera le romantisme allemand

The Enlightenment's Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society

Abstract: Acknowledgements A note on the text Introduction and agenda 1. The foundations of a project 2. Self-love and the civilizing process 3. Performance principles of the public sphere 4. A world of goods 5. Imposing closure - Adam Smith's problem Epilogue: The Fable's modern fate Bibliography Index.

List of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland published in 2009

Abstract: (The place of publication is London and the date 2009 unless otherwise stated.)