The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment

1991 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorraine Daston
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Brick And Mortar ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Urban Versus ◽  
The Ideal

The ArgumentThe Republic of Letters of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries teaches us two lessons about style in science. First, the bearer of style—individual, nation, institution, religious group, region, class—depends crucially on historical context. When the organization and values of intellectual life are self-consciously cosmopolitan, and when allegiances to other entities (e.g., Protestant versus Catholic, or urban versus rural) are culturally more compelling than those to the nation-state, distinctivelynationalstyles are far to seek. This was largely the case for the Republic of Letters, that immaterial (it lacked location, formal administration, and brick and mortar) but nonetheless real (it exercised dominion over thoughts and deeds) realm among the sovereign states of the Enlightenment. Second, that form of objectivity which made science seem so curiously detached from scientists, and therefore so apparently unmarked by style at any level, also has a history. The unremitting emphasis on impartial criticism and evaluation within the Republic of Letters encouraged its citizens to distance themselves first from friends and family, then from compatriots and contemporaries, and finally, in the early nineteenth century, from themselves as well. Although this psychological process of estrangement and ultimately of self-estrangement may seldom have been completely realized, the striving was genuine and constitutes part of the moral history of objectivity.

Court, Salon and Republic of Letters

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
The Republic ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Ideal

The humanist educational project to educate the elite of Western Europe produced as one of its dizzy successes the application of conversation to the speech and behavior of nobleman at court. This, the development of the ideal of the courtier, took conversation from the leisurely retreat from the ancient political world to the courtly heart of the Renaissance political world. The salons of seventeenth-century France further transformed the conversational tradition of the court: in principle, the conversation of the salons began quietly to set itself to rival the world of oratory, to address itself to the same worldly subject matter. The Republic of Letters provided an alternate social matrix for sermo, scholarly rather than courtly—and one which migrated away from its Ciceronian roots towards the mode of Baylean critique. Where the courtly and scholarly traditions of sermo acted as complementary modes during the Renaissance, the increasing scope of salonnier conversation and the increasing abandonment of sermo by the Republic of Letters set them at odds with one another in the opening of the Enlightenment. Both now harbored universalizing ambitions, which would set these sibling modes to fierce conflict.

The Organization of Knowledge from Ramus to Diderot

2019 ◽  
pp. 427-448
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Bury
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Critical Reasoning ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
European Dimension ◽  
Central Notion ◽  
Institutional Organization ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic

The organization of knowledge in early modernity concerns both the institutional organization of types of learning and the study of persons engaged with such learning (traditionally “men of letters”) with regard to their professions and to their forms of exchange and sociability. It also deals with the intellectual organization that articulates and structures hierarchically the different fields of knowledge during a crucial period of their mutation (humanism, scientific revolution, the Enlightenment). The central notion that orients this ensemble is the “Republic of Letters,” which conveys the European dimension of the space of learning and conditions the practices of communication (correspondence, periodicals, circulation of manuscripts and printed works). From the age of philology (ars critica) to that of the Encyclopédie, the world of learning reacted in its own way to the political and religious history of an epoch in turmoil in order to maintain the standards of critical reasoning and to permit the emergence of new forms of knowledge.

Philosophic Pride

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Marcus Aurelius ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.

scholarly journals Batalia „szklanej rury”. Współzawodnictwo „starego” i „nowego” w debacie wokół doświadczeń z próżnią z 1647 roku

1970 ◽  
pp. 167-190
Author(s):  
Anna Kołos
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Blaise Pascal ◽  
Normal Science ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Knowledge Formation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic

The article addresses the issue of one of the more intense and captivating European scientific disputes, likewise common to Poland, in the era of the seventeenth-century transformation of knowledge formation, which centered around the possibility of the existence of vacuum, and which culminated in 1647. The fundamental aim of the article comes down to an attempt to determine a position in the scientific-cognitive debate, from which the pro and anti-Polish and European representatives of The Republic of Letters (Respublica literaria)  could voice their opinions. In the course of the analysis of the mid-seventeenth century scientific discourse, the reflections of Valeriano Magni, Torricelli, Jan Brożek, Wojciech Wijuk Kojałowicz, Blaise Pascal, Giovanni Elefantuzzi, Jacob Pierius, and Pierre Guiffart are subjected to close scrutiny. From the perspective of contextualism in the history of science, experiments demonstrating the existence of vacuum are perceived as anomalies that fall into the crisis of normal science, largely based on Aristotle’s physics. The conflict between the old and the new is not, however, presented as a battle of progression with epigonism, but merely as a contest between opposing individual views and the concept of science, which before the formation of the new paradigm was accompanied by ambiguous verification criteria.

scholarly journals The Rise of the Academies: Continuity or Change?

2001 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Tolley
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Curricular Reform ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Benjamin Rush

In his book, The Age of the Academies, Theodore R. Sizer argued that academies represented a significant break from the relatively narrow schooling that had been previously available to students in the early Latin grammar schools. In his view, the proliferation of academies heralded a new age in education, one more reflective of the Enlightenment values promoted by such Republican leaders as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or Benjamin Rush. After thirty-five years of additional scholarship on academies, does Sizer's thesis still stand? This essay investigates the range of educational institutions that provided some form of advanced schooling to Americans just preceding and concurrent with the founding of the earliest academies. It examines the differences and similarities among a number of northern and southern early nineteenth-century schools in order to address the following question: to what extent did schools calling themselves academies represent a distinctly new turn in the history of American education? By clarifying the relations between the various types of institutions during the post-colonial period, I conclude that the historical significance of the early academy movement is broader than the intellectual or curricular reform discussed by Sizer.

scholarly journals Afterlives of the Republic of Letters: Learned Journals and Scholarly Community in the Early Nineteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-116
Author(s):  
Floris Solleveld
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Scholarly Community ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Changing Role

Abstract What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, in the nineteenth century, there still existed a community gathered in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not go entirely out of use. This article traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it investigates texts that attempt to (re)define the Republic of Letters or a cognate, the wider diffusion of the term, and the changing role of learned journals in that period. While most attempts to reinvent the Republic of Letters failed miserably, they indicate a diagnosis of the state of learning and the position of scholars in a period of transition, and in doing so they contradict an ‘unpolitical’ conception of the Republic of Letters.

Patristic Scholarship and Religious Contention, 1678–1716

2016 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-303
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Specific Interests ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Collective Enterprise

Lactantius’s treatise De mortibus persecutorum, which celebrates the end of the persecutions of Christians in the Roman empire, was lost for six centuries. Its discovery in 1678 was a European event which set the sophisticated machinery of information exchange in the republic of letters in motion. Scholars joined forces in expounding the historical significance of the patristic text. However, this collective enterprise was also bound up with theological-political interests. Editors and commentators were all affected by affairs of state and ecclesiastical policy, which conditioned their engagement with the treatise. This article reviews the editorial history of De mortibus persecutorum, during the three decades in which it attracted scholarly attention, and it highlights the specific interests of the scholars involved. The focus will be on Gijsbert Cuper (1644–1716), often depicted as an exemplary member of the republic of letters. His paper legacy allows us to recover the theological-political concerns which informed his investigations.

Art and Science: or Bach as an Expositor of the Bible

1992 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 343-353
Author(s):  
W. R. Ward
Keyword(s):  
East Germany ◽  
The State ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
National Tradition ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Moment

For a long time before dramatic recent events it has been clear that the German Democratic Republic has been in die position, embarrassing to a Marxist system, of having nothing generally marketable left except (to use the jargon) ‘superstructure’. The Luther celebrations conveniendy bolstered the implicit claim of the GDR to embody Saxony’s long-delayed revenge upon Prussia; still more conveniendy, they paid handsomely. Even the Francke celebrations probably paid their way, ruinous though his Orphan House has been allowed to become. When I was in Halle, a hard-pressed government had removed the statue of Handel (originally paid for in part by English subscriptions) for head-to-foot embellishment in gold leaf, and a Handel Festival office in the town was manned throughout the year. Bach is still more crucial, both to the republic’s need to pay its way and to the competition with the Federal Republic for the possession of the national tradition. There is no counterpart in Britain to the strength of the Passion-music tradition in East Germany. The celebrations which reach their peak in Easter Week at St Thomas’s, Leipzig, are like a cross between Wembley and Wimbledon here, the difference being that the black market in tickets is organized by the State for its own benefit. If Bach research in East Germany, based either on musicology or the Church, has remained an industry of overwhelming amplitude and technical complexity, the State has had its own Bach-research collective located in Leipzig, dedicated among other things to establishing the relation between Bach and the Enlightenment, that first chapter in the Marxist history of human liberation. Now that a good proportion of the population of the GDR seems bent on liberation by leaving the republic or sinking it, the moment seems ripe to take note for non-specialist readers of some of what has been achieved there in recent years.

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