Enlightenment

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

Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy

Abstract: Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy John E. Buschman. Westport, Connecticut: Libraries Unlimited, 2003. 219pp. $45.00.It can be difficult to accurately "see" one's own time and place in history. It is less difficult to see, study, and understand the past. It is challenging to question the inherited social and economic environment of the decades of one's youth, adolescence, and adulthood because the lens of objectivity is tainted by the very grains that have formed the looking glass, and cloud the means of examining one's own inherited environment, one's lived experience. This text challenges librarians to examine their present, their past, and the role of libraries in a democratic society.John Buschman's valuable perspective and carefully supported argument challenges librarians and the profession to see that the social philosophy has been transformed in recent decades by a "postmodern accommodation to the antidemocratic cultural and economic biases of networked resources and information capitalism" (170). This is what Buschman terms the "new public philosophy" of the postmodern era. He argues that our society, in recent decades, has increasingly moved away from a well formed democratic philosophy of the common good. The foundation of this argument derives from the philosophical ideas of Jurgen Habermas concerning the "public sphere." Buschman's supporting argument built upon this foundation is an in-depth reading of the professional literature of the library profession and related academic material.The Habermasian concept of the "public sphere" is surveyed but a more thorough philosophical and historical explanation would have strengthened the foundation of his argument. The concept of the public sphere is concerned with society maintaining a delicate balance between the individual's needs/goals and the emerging maturity of citizens' vision of the public realm in the wake of the Enlightenment. This was an emerging social enlightenment that began to focus on the larger good of the communal public interest and less on the private interests inherent in a classconscious feudalistic society. It was an outgrowth of the emerging bourgeois class and their ideals of a common collective of individuals who would challenge the established powers of feudalism.It is clear throughout Buschman's work that the "dismantling of the public sphere" in the present time is undermining the enlightened progress of the past and threatens the stability of democracy itself. Increasingly, in recent decades, political ideals in the United States (and the West) are focused on an economic understanding of the role of government, education, and democratic institutions. This undermines the core values that have been the guiding principles of libraries and the ideals of librarianship. Public institutions are increasingly in the position of needing to justify their public funding, prove their worth and the necessity of their programs, or defend their very existence. The dismantling of the "public sphere" is the deconstruction of an understanding of the communal assets/institutions of democracy as foundational to the common good. The preservation of the common good and social potential is, Bushman argues, being replaced by a market/economic understanding of what the role of a library is. …

The political theory of the Scottish Enlightenment

Abstract: Scotland's singular voice within the polyphony of the European Enlightenment has attracted a great deal of debate. As historians attempt to weigh local varieties of Enlightenment, informed by disparate religious, political and cultural settings, against the transnational concerns and cosmopolitan aspirations of 'the' Enlightenment, Scotland posits a remarkable case in point. Scotland's European contexts have often been overlooked; by the same token, its distinct features can only be mapped against the contours of the European Enlightenment. David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, John Millar and Adam Ferguson were subtle disciples of European intellectual traditions, and conversant with a range of Enlightenment cultures. At the same time, their writings convey a powerful sense of Scotland's incomparable position as a kingdom within the British union, set apart by its church and jurisprudence, and by its singular decision to trade sovereignty for empire. Nowhere is this apparent tension more pronounced than in the field of political theory. POLITICS AND THE SCOTS Taken as a field of enquiry, politics is a conjuncture of mind-sets responding to contemporary political issues, critical perusals of intellectual traditions and cross-fermentation with other sciences. The balance between these elements may differ according to era and culture; but eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers were able to draw vigorously on all three sources of inspiration. Their political thought was accordingly shaped by three sets of problems: Scotland’s voluntary loss of sovereignty in an age when statehood and statecraft steadily gained importance; the need for a viable modern theory of politics amid clashing idioms of the good life and the good polity; and the tall order set by the natural sciences for standards of certainty, regularity and predictability in the study of human affairs.

The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon

Abstract: In the years immediately following Napoleon's defeat, French thinkers in all fields set their minds to the problem of how to recover from the long upheavals that had been set into motion by the French Revolution. Many challenged the Enlightenment's emphasis on mechanics and questioned the rising power of machines, seeking a return to the organic unity of an earlier age and triggering the artistic and philosophical movement of romanticism. Previous scholars have viewed romanticism and industrialization in opposition, but in this groundbreaking volume John Tresch reveals how thoroughly entwined science and the arts were in early nineteenth-century France and how they worked together to unite a fractured society. Focusing on a set of celebrated technologies, including steam engines, electromagnetic and geophysical instruments, early photography, and mass-scale printing, Tresch looks at how new conceptions of energy, instrumentality, and association fueled such diverse developments as fantastic literature, popular astronomy, grand opera, positivism, utopian socialism, and the Revolution of 1848. He shows that those who attempted to fuse organicism and mechanism in various ways, including Alexander von Humboldt and Auguste Comte, charted a road not taken that resonates today. Essential reading for historians of science, intellectual and cultural historians of Europe, and literary and art historians, "The Romantic Machine" is poised to profoundly alter our understanding of the scientific and cultural landscape of the early nineteenth century.