Enlightenment

About: Enlightenment is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 6845 publications have been published within this topic receiving 116832 citations.

The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother

Abstract: "Everyone has had one's own Orient, pertaining to space and time, most often of both" (Todorova 1997:12). Orientalism Revisited "Orientalism" as a critical category was instituted by Edward Said in 1978. For him orientalism is, first of all, a set of discursive practices through which the West structured the imagined East politically, socially, military, ideologically, scientifically and artistically. Orientalism is also "a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and...'the Occident'" (Said 1978: 2) The Orient as such exists and real people live in the region concerned, but the European representation of these people is a typical cultural creation that enables those powerful to legitimize their domination over those subjugated and conquered. The oriental Other constitutes the alter ego of the West and a perpetuation of this dichotomy proves that a powerful cultural hegemony is still at work. Discursive hardening permits politically stronger groups to define weaker groups. Orientalism has been received both approvingly and critically. The most important critiques refer to the fact that "Said's work frequently relapses into the essentializing modes it attacks and is ambivalently enmeshed in the totalizing habits of western humanism" (Clifford 1988:271). Critique notwithstanding, the book inspired a sequel of works, some of them directly addressing Eastern Europe (Wolff 1994) and the Balkans (Todorova 1997; Bakii-Hayden 1995; Bakic-Hayden and Hayden 1992; Hayden 2000). Wolff wrote about the invention of Eastern Europe in the period of Enlightenment by Western intellectuals, travelers and writers in a style similar to Said's. Todorova is more specific. She focuses on the Balkans and asserts that in Western eyes this region appears, so to speak, as "neither fish, nor fowl," semi-oriental, not fully European, semi-developed, and semi-civilized. "Unlike orientalism, which is a discourse about imputed opposition, balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity" (Todorova 1997: 17). An ambiguity that raises anxiety. The Balkans emerge as the product of attempted Europeanization (westernization, democratization), a region that permanently has to shed "the last residue of imperial [i.e. Ottoman] legacy" (p. 13) by implementing rationalism, secularism, commercial activities and industry. The work in imagology, the term she borrows from Milan Kundera, despite being narrowed and redefined, also focuses on the way the West has created its "quasi-colony" which has to be dominated and subordinated both politically and intellectually. While discussing orientalism, Said, Wolff and Todorova touch upon several issues vital for today's anthropology that I will partly, although at times only indirectly, address later. All of these revolve around the issue of alterity and the epistemological validity of the concept of the Other. Thus, one can recognize that they are concerned with (1) the modes by which the Other is created. In anthropology, as well as in the works cited, the Other often assumes the status of (2) a universal cognitive category in the factory of social and individual identity that divides the universe into "us" and "them." However, it also figures as (3) an analytical concept that enables authors to construct narration and at the same time, somehow paradoxically, and in the most subtle approaches, to (4) deconstruct the category itself. In social life, the process of making the Other assumes various forms. Shifts in collective identities and the meaning of "the Other" have become a part of the transformations in Europe after 1989. There are several factors influencing these alterations, but one among them seems especially salient: a restructuring of the perception of social inequalities by the hegemonic liberal ideology. The degree to which various countries, authorities, social groups and individuals have embraced the free market and democracy-always evaluated by those powerful who set rules of the game-has become a yardstick for classifying different regions, countries and groups as fining more or less into the category of "us," i. …

Perpetual peace, and other essays : on politics, history, and morals

Abstract: TABLE OF CONTENTS: Introduction. Bibliography. A Note on the Text. 1. Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent (1784) 2. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784) 3. Speculative Beginning of Human History (1786) 4. On the Proverb: That May Be True in Theory, but Is of No Practical Use (1793) 5. The End of All Things (1794) 6. To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) Glossary of Some German-English Translations. Index.

The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000

Abstract: The Death of Christian Britain examines how the nation's core religious culture has been destroyed. It challenges the generally held view that secularisation has been a long and gradual process beginning with the industrial revolution, and instead proposes that it has been a catastrophic and abrupt cultural revolution starting in the 1960s. This book explores what it has meant to be 'religious' and 'irreligious' during the last 200 years. The concept of secularisation was created by Enlightenment rationality and scientific method, and led to the Victorian obsession with counting churchgoers and non-churchgoers which endures in today's focus on the 'church in crisis'. Brown challenges this approach by shifting attention from statistics to the media, demonstrating that from 1800 to 1960 people drew on novels, magazines, obituaries and tracts for the Christian language, morality and narrative structures with which to tell their own life stories in autobiography and oral history. But this personal Christian identity broke down suddenly in the 'swinging sixties' when new media, new gender roles and the moral revolution dramatically ended people's conception that they lived Christian lives. The Death of Christian Britain uses the latest techniques to offer new formulations of religion and secularisation. By listening to people's voices rather than purely counting heads, it offers a fresh history of de-christianisation, and predicts that the British experience since the 1960s is emblematic of the destiny of the whole of western Christianity.

The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers

Abstract: Here a distinguished American historian challenges the belief that the eighteenth century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval world, and that these philosophers "demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials." In a new foreword, Johnson Kent Wright looks at the book's continuing relevance within the context of current discussion about the Enlightenment. "Will remain a classic-a beautifully finished literary product."-Charles A. Beard, American Historical Review "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers remains one of the most distinctive American contributions to the historical literature on the Enlightenment. . . . [It] is likely to beguile and provoke readers for a long time to come."-Johnson Kent Wright, from the foreword

The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate

Abstract: Introduction by Richard Wolin. Translatora s Preface. 1. Neoconservatism. 2. The New Obscurity:. The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies. 3. Heinrich Heine and the Role of the Intellectual in Germany. 4. The Idea of the University:. Learning Processes. 5. The Horrors of Autonomy:. Carl Schmitt in English. 6. Work and Weltanschauung:. The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective. 7. Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present:. On Foucaulta s Lecture on Kanta s What is Enlightenment?. 8. Culture and Politics. 9. A Kind of Settling of Damages. 10. Historical Consciousness and Post--Traditional Identity:. The Federal Republica s Orientation to the West.