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Enlightenment

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


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01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: The idea of an electrical utopia, as we attempted to show in the first part of this article, took root in Europe with the Enlightenment and the onset of industrialism, and it became a literary convention adopted as a cultural strategy: an attempt to explore the meaning of industrialization and the promise of technology for what Raymond Williams has come to call "The Long Revolution".
Abstract: idea of an electrical utopia, as we attempted to show in the first part of this article, took root in Europe with the Enlightenment and the onset of industrialism. It began as a literary convention adopted as a cultural strategy: an attempt to explore the meaning of industrialization and the promise of technology for what Raymond Williams has come to call "The Long Revolution." Transferred to this continent, the idea of an electrical Utopia emerges as a literal expectation as well as literature. European ideas had made us particularly susceptible to the notion that the creation of America signaled a new departure in social history. America's redemption from the past was to come from "Nature" and a "Virgin Land," a new scene of human society filled with unique possibilities. Developed into a political and social theory under labels such as "the theory of propitious circumstances," the rhetoric of the technological sublime forecast that mechanization and industrialization would not produce the untoward consequences apparent in the European version of the Industrial Revolution. Instead America was to realize, through a marriage of nature and mechanics, an unprecedented solution to the problem of industrialization, a solution that would rejuvenate all immigrants who ventured into the new world and allow us to transcend the typical evils of industrial society. In the last third of the nineteenth century, it became steadily

31 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A comprehensive overview of the Enlightenment origins and meanings of the term civilisation(s) is given in this article, where a central concern is the oft-neglected normative component of the ideal of civilisation and the implications it carries.
Abstract: There has been a revival in the use of the terms ‘civilisation’ and ‘civilisations’ to describe and explain events in the social sciences and humanities, nowhere more so than in politics and international affairs. This revival has seen the terms interpreted and applied in a variety of manners and different contexts. In too many cases this endeavour has been less than effective because of an oversimplification of what the terms mean and what they have historically represented. In part in response to this revival but also in part as an explanatory tool itself, this article gives a comprehensive overview of the Enlightenment origins and meanings of the term civilisation(s). A central concern is the oft‐neglected normative component of the ideal of civilisation and the implications it carries.

31 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Historical Novel as discussed by the authors is a seminal work on the development of the historical novel and the history of the French Revolution, as well as its influence on the early United States political culture.
Abstract: In his 1937 magnum opus, The Historical Novel, Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukacs suggested that new ideas about history - and implicitly, about time itself- laid the foundation for the development of the historical novel. According to Lukacs, "the quick succession of . . . upheavals" associated with "the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon . . . for the first time made history a mass experience.'''' Whereas individuals during the Enlightenment viewed "Progress ... as an essentially unhistorical struggle between humanist reason and feudal-absolutist unreason," the succeeding generations came to think of time in terms of "the inner conflict of social forces," so that "history itself is the bearer and realizer of progress." Lukacs wrote from a Marxist perspective and was therefore deeply concerned with showing the diverse ways in which writers in the post-Napoleonic era addressed the question of "how modern bourgeois society arose out of the class struggles between nobility and bourgeoisie." No matter how one views Lukacs's politics, it is hard to deny the potential explanatory power of his insight that "the huge, rapidly successive changes" of the French Revolution and Napoleonic rule pushed humans "to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned."1That insight was fully explored only as a generation of revisionist scholars began challenging the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution. More specifically, historians like Mona Ozouf, Lynn Hunt, and Jeremy Popkin revitalized scholarship on the French Revolution by paying close attention to previously understudied elements like festivals and the press. The collective emphasis on textual analysis and cultural symbols brought into relief French revolutionaries' dynamic understanding of temporality. New ideas about time and history, it seems, were intimately related to far-reaching transformations in political culture, and any attempt to explain either of the two phenomena must necessarily consider the other.2Taken together, the prescient analysis of Lukacs and the wave of innovative work on the French Revolution invite new ways of evaluating various aspects of the early United States. In particular, they draw attention to the way in which the advent of the radicalized French Revolution - the series of international events taking place between the imprisonment of King Louis XVI (August 10, 1792) and the onslaught of the Terror (September 5, 1793) - prompted American newspaper writers and readers to address concepts of contemporaneity in a more rigorous fashion than ever before. This sustained engagement with notions of time did not materialize without problems, and partisan discussions of the proper mode of interpreting recent events and newspapers ensued. The resulting cacophony, which revolved around Federalist challenges to Democratic-Republicans' belief that revolutionary time moved more quickly than regular time, destabilized traditional efforts to pinpoint the present moment on a preordained timeline. French Revolutionary intelligence thus assumed prominence as both cause and reflection of initial American encounters with a concept of political time divorced from inherited notions of Protestant providence, Whig cyclical history, and Scottish enlightenment progress. In a halting, unintended manner, American newspaper writers and readers broached the subject of contingency.3A study of newspapers in 1792-1793 also reveals, more broadly, how profoundly the radicalized French Revolution molded American political culture. Historians have known for years that the French Revolution influenced the United States, but too often they have been content to assert the existence of that influence without probing its nature in full. That is unfortunate because certain parallels between Gallic and American political development are sufficiently striking that they provide a case study of transnational history, of the way in which various forces cross over political boundaries and spur the same type of change in multiple national entities. …

31 citations

Book
01 Jan 2004
TL;DR: The BULGARIAN REVIVAL EPILOGUE as mentioned in this paper explores the history of the BulgARIAN revolution and its evolution from a dictatorship to a modern economy and society.
Abstract: PREFACE INTRODUCTION: FROM METAPHOR TOWARD HISTORICAL EPOCH CHAPTER ONE: MEANINGS OF THE REVIVAL (I) NATIONAL AND CULTURAL * THE NATIONAL INTERPRETATION * CONCEPTS OF THE (BULGARIAN) NATION * NATIONALISM AND ROMANTICISM * THE NATIONAL AND THE SPIRITUAL (CULTURAL) MEANINGS * THE ANALOGY WITH THE RENAISSANCE * THE BULGARIAN REVIVAL AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT * ANALOGIES WITH THE REFORMATION * THE BULGARIAN REVIVAL AND EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT * MODERNITY AND MODERNIZATION CHAPTER TWO: MEANINGS OF THE REVIVAL (II) ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL * THE TRANSITION FROM FEUDALISM TO CAPITALISM * CAPITALISM DURING THE REVIVAL * OTTOMAN FEUDALISM * THE SOCIAL (BOURGEOIS) REVOLUTION AND THE AGRARIAN THESIS * THE ECONOMIC AND THE NATIONAL-SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION EXCURSUS ON PERIODIZATION CHAPTER THREE: CLASSES AND CLASS STRUGGLES * THE URBAN "ESTATE" AND SOCIAL STRUGGLES IN OLDER HISTORIOGRAPHY * BOURGEOISIE AND NOTABLES IN EARLIER MARXIST CONTROVERSIES * TOWARD REHABILITATION * THE PEASANTS * THE INTELLIGENTSIA * THE CLASS STRUGGLES BETWEEN THE SOCIAL AND NATIONAL * VULGAR MARXIST SOCIOLOGISM AND ITS ABANDONING CHAPTER FOUR: PATHS OF THE REVIVAL AND NATIONAL HEROES * PAISII AS A PROBLEM * EVOLUTIONISTS AND REVOLUTIONARIES * THE HIERARCHY OF NATIONAL HEROES: RAKOVSKI, KARAVELOV, LEVSKI, BOTEV REAPPRAISALS AND RESHUFFLING CHAPTER FIVE: THE APRIL UPRISING, THE RUSSO-TURKISH LIBERATION WAR, AND THE REVOLUTION * THE APRIL UPRISING AND THE RUSSO-TURKISH WAR * THE REVOLUTION * REVISIONS AND REAPPRAISAL CHAPTER SIX: THE CONTINUING REVIVAL: SYMBOLIC STRUGGLES AND IMAGES * RIGHTIST VISIONS OF THE BULGARIAN REVIVAL * THE DEMOCRATIC IMAGE * THE BATTLE OF THE COMMUNISTS FOR THE LEGACY OF THE REVIVAL EPILOGUE: THE BULGARIAN REVIVAL AS A NATIONAL MYTH

31 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20241
2023965
20222,158
202181
2020179
2019214