Showing papers on "Enlightenment published in 1975"

The Well-Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Attempt at a Comparative Approach

Abstract: TRADITIONALLY, WESTERN HISTORIOGRAPHY traces the origins of the so-called modern world to the Enlightenment and the revolutionary waves, political and economic, at the end of the eighteenth century. These eighteenthcentury origins are related to the rise of a new social class and its triumph over the ancien regime as a precondition for the unfolding of the two major aspects of modern civilization-capitalism and statism. But is this view not oversimple? We historians know all too well-and recent scholarship repeatedly reminds us of it-that the past is much more tenacious than public opinion imagines it to be. Little of the past is ever fully lost, though its dynamic role may change and its forms be transmuted. With respect to state policy and administration, the question arises whether the new ideas of the Enlightenment and the interests of a rising middle class helped to shape the actions of rulers and governments before the French Revolution. Was not the enlightened despotism (or "absolutism," as I would prefer to call it) such a response to intellectual and social pressures? But the very contradiction inherent in the notion of enlightened absolutism doomed the effort to failure and opened the way to the storm of

The Politics of History: Writing the History of the American Revolution, 1783-1815

Abstract: This is an analysis of the American Revolutionary generation's attempt to create a national history that would justify the Revolution and develop a sense of nationhood. Shaffer pursues a number of themes and establishes a connection between the historians' republican ideology, political concerns and outlook, and the precise ways in which they interpreted American history. He also includes an analysis of their background, education, profession, political persuasion, personal ambitions and circumstances, and attitudes toward the problem of union during the 1780s. The writings here offer unusual insights into the mind of the Revolutionary generation. The histories produced during the early national period represent the beginnings of a genre of writing new to America, one characterized by the subjugation of history to the service of nationalism. It is this element"nationalism"that gave this history its flavor, made possible its achievement, saddled it with difficulties, and, although unintentionally, produced a tone and emphasis different from that of the Enlightenment. The contribution of the Revolutionary generation of historians to the public identity represents an important aspect of the intellectual history of the early national period. With all their frequent vagueness and imprecision of formulation, almost incantatory repetitiousness, and patriotic sentimentality, the works of the first national generation of historians comprise a revealing effort to come to grips with the meaning of the Revolution and nationhood. This striving charted much of the course that American historiography was to travel thereafter.

Femme et Philosophe: Enlightenment Origins of Feminism

Abstract: AT THE END of the eighteenth century a furious debate raged in Europe-its subject was the "woman question." Advocates and adversaries of the female sex argued passionately over the nature of women, the place they should occupy in society, and what political rights, if any, they should enjoy. Feminists, including Olympe de Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Theodore de Hippel, announced in their writings that the sexes were equal, demanding educational opportunities and even the franchise for women.' Opponents, scandalized by such claims, retaliated with traditional arguments chosen to demonstrate the innate inferiority of the female sex, and enlisted in their cause the prominent German philosophers, Johann Fichte and Georg Hegel.2 While the French Revolution was the immediate precipitator of this feminist and antifeminist outburst, the controversy had been building for over a century. From the 1690s on, philosophers had risen to challenge traditional views regarding the inferiority of the female sex along with the laws and social customs which marked that inferiority.3

From Enlightenment to Revolution

Abstract: (1975). From Enlightenment to Revolution. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 3, No. 8, pp. 206-207.

The Victorianism of Victorian Literature

Abstract: T IS A TRIBUTE to criticism published during the last decade that the Victorians are in danger of losing their identity and becoming "mid-nineteenth century" or "premodern." In reaction perhaps to the stigma that the term carried, literary historians and critics have attempted to demonstrate the "un-Victorian" characteristics of the age and to indicate what they consider to be its true nature. Three influential studies reveal their approach by the subtitles: "The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition"; "Essays on the Continuity of Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Literature"; and "Five Nineteenth-Century Writers." No longer, it seems are such titles as The Victorian Frame of Mind or The Victorian Temper or even Victorian England: Portrait of an Age suitable.1 Perhaps the most influential studies in this tradition have been Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience and The Modern Spirit, both of which focus on the similarities rather than the differences of Romantic, Victorian, and modern. In the former, Langbaum stresses particularly the way that the writers of all three periods were influenced by the Enlightenment: "Whatever the differences between the literary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries," he writes, "they are connected by their view of the world as meaningless, by the response to the same wilderness." In The Modern Spirit his approach is best indicated by the subtitle.2 One other example will help define this tradition. In his perceptive analysis of the reactions of De Quincey, Browning, Bronti, Arnold, and Hopkins to the "disappearance" of God, J. Hillis Miller places all five in the tradition of Romanticism. After citing other possible reactions to the withdrawal of God-that is, humanism,

The Formal Nature of Victorian Thinking

Abstract: JOHN STUART MILL'S celebrated essays on Bentham and Coleridge turn for the most part upon the profound theoretical and ideological differences that separate the two men; but at the outset of the essay on Coleridge, Mill suggests that before anything else the two are opposed by virtue of a fundamental difference in the formal character of their thinking. "By Bentham, beyond all others," Mill says, "men have been led to ask themselves, in regard to any ancient or received opinion, Is it true? and by Coleridge, What is the meaning of it?"1 The difference between these two questions, Mill goes on to make clear, resolves itself into a distinction between two habits of mind, or between two forms of rational inquiry: the one is critical and evaluative and operates according to the model of scientific method; the other is historical and interpretive and requires what Mill, in the essay on Bentham, calls "the power by which one human being enters into the mind and circumstances of another" (p. 92). Thus Bentham "took his stand outside the received opinion, and surveyed it as an entire stranger to it." He "judged a proposition true or false as it accorded or not with the results of his own inquiries; and did not search very curiously into what might be meant by the proposition, when it obviously did not mean what he thought true." Coleridge, by contrast, "looked at it from within, and endeavoured to see it with the eyes of a believer in it; to discover by what apparent facts it has ever since been rendered continually crediblehas seemed, to a succession of persons, to be a faithful interpretation of their experience" (pp. 119-20). Bentham stood, so to speak, athwart intellectual history and worked to demystify it, whereas Coleridge entered into it to discover its inner form and to comprehend the laws of its development. The opposition between Bentham and Coleridge, as Mill defines it, testifies most obviously to the great Victorian theme of historical relativism. The historical thinker knows that truth is almost always perspectival, that it is distributed along a diachronic axis formed by manifold and often conflicting points of view; whereas, for the logical mind, truth is always finally beyond history: it is transcendent and univocal, purified of earthly circumstance in the manner of a scientific or mathematical concept. The distinction that Mill draws between logical and historical habits of mind raises, however, a more interesting and finally more important issue: namely, the morphology of thinking itself. In this paper I would like to explore some of the ways in which Mill's distinction bears upon the morphology of Victorian thinking, by which I mean particularly the formal activities of mind that seem to characterize a number of Victorian writers of discursive prose. In a general s nse, we already know (from the work of Walter Houghton, Jerome Buckley, Basil Willey, Raymond Williams, David DeLaura, and others) what the Victorians thought. What we need to know now, however, is whether there exist among the major Victorian writers, not shared ideas, but shared ways of conceiving them. We need to examine the Victorian mind, not for its products or contents or the disjecta membra for which it is usually remembered, but in order to recover as adequately as possible "the dramatic action of its thinking." This useful phrase belongs to Ernst Cassirer, who formulated it as a way of proposing that the "true nature of Enlightenment thinking cannot be seen in its purest and clearest form where it is formulated into particular doctrines, axioms, and theorems; but rather where it is in process, where it is doubting and seeking, tearing down and building up." The "philosophy of the Enlightenment" is not a structure that can be reduced to "the sum total of what its leading thinkers . . . thought and taught. It cannot be presented in a summation of the views of these men, nor in the temporal sequence of their views; for it consists less in certain individual doctrines than in the form and manner of intellectual activity in general."2

Newton and the American political tradition

Abstract: Students of intellectual history establish a clear line of connection from Newton and Locke through the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the evolution of deism to the American political tradition reflected in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. This paper briefly traces the historical sequence and indicates readily available sources (mostly in paperback) in which students and lecturers can find deeper background and additional detail.

Suzuki, Hartshorne, and Becoming-Now

Abstract: The aim in this paper is to discuss the philosophic views of Suzuki Daisetz and Charles Hartshorne with respect to the conception of process. The thesis is that Hartshorne's whiteheadian philosophy of process and Suzuki's interpretation of Zen Buddhism contain a common vision of what is concrete in human experience and, for that matter, in experience generally. Explicit focus is on what can appear as a crucial difference between the two philosophers concerning the issue of "a present now." One concerned with philosophic and religious studies, and standing in some sense within the American tradition of so-called "process philosophy," finds an interest in Suzuki and the Zen experience of zazen aroused for two basic reasons. First, if a "philosophy of process" is to be true to human experience, it ought to be verifiable by every experience whatsoever, but falsifiable by none. Since Hartshorne in fact holds this principle of method worthy enough to be practiced, his metaphysics, if true to life, must be verified by zazen. But within the general history of ideas, the experience of "enlightenment," "the peace that passes all understanding," has been reported by persons of varying religious and philosophic persuasions, and articulated in a diversity of ways. So secondly, the interest herein specifically concerns Suzuki's interpretation of Zen because it seems quite in agreement with some, if not all, aspects of Hartshorne's metaphysic and logic. Note, for example, the following claims of Suzuki that we have correlated (in parentheses) with certain principles Hartshorne defends. First, being is activity itself (process); secondly, the world of prajna or nonduality is always new, fresh, and dynamic, never a repetition-for unity is multiplicity (creative synthesis). Third,

The Clerical Confrontation with the Enlightenment in Spain

Abstract: To the intellectually aware but orthodox Catholic in Spain, as elsewhere, the Enlightenment presented a painful dilemma. Of no group was this truer than of intelligent and conscientious clerics. Their social, intellectual and spiritual position gave them extensive power to interpret for others and defend or condemn enlightened ideas and practices. Clerics were the focus of much attention from enlightened modernizers who saw in them either helpful allies or dangerous opponents, and they produced thousands of sermons, pastoral letters, tracts and books both supporting and rejecting enlightened proposals. The crucial importance of their role in delimiting the Spanish reaction to the Enlightenment and the great abundance of works from their own pens have not yet elicited the special attentions which historians owe