George Washington's Romance: Plotting the Federal City, 1791–1800

Prospects ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Sarah Luria
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Modern Nation State

Washington, D.C., was born from the marriage of literary, economic, and political revolutions of the late 18th century, when the expansion of the marketplace, the rise of the novel, and the increased circulation of print spawned a bourgeois public sphere and, with it, the modern nation-state. Washington, D.C., was from the start an imagined city, created through the circulation of booster literature to attract investors and so solidify a rational political order. Washington, D.C., arose precisely from this need to ground the imagined landscapes of the Enlightenment, to turn the visionary into the visible and political theory into fact.

The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wokler ◽  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
Modern Nation State

This chapter's overriding objective is to explain how both the invention of our modern understanding of the social sciences, on the one hand, and the post-Enlightenment establishment of the modern nation-state, on the other, encapsulated doctrines which severed modernity from the Enlightenment philosophy which is presumed to have inspired it. It offers illustrations not so much of the unity of political theory and practice in the modern world as of their disengagement. In providing here some brief remarks on how post-Enlightenment justifications of modernity came to part company from their Enlightenment prefigurations, it hopes to sketch an account of certain links between principles and institutions which bears some relation to both Enlightenment and Hegelian conceptual history.

Religion and Social Change

2021 ◽  
pp. 25-46
Author(s):  
Jon Keune
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Control ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Modern Nation State

This chapter discusses the peculiarly modern way of relying on the idea of social equality to study the past, which has led to a widespread narrative that religious traditions routinely failed to bring about social equality. It focuses on social historians, whose interest in non-elite people grew out of Marxist sensitivities that predisposed them to view religion as a symptom of distress or instrument of social control but not as a force for social change. It traces the emergence of “equality” as an important term in western political and social writing and how modern nation-state rhetoric from the late 18th century onward made it normative. It becomes clear that modern democracies too have often failed to bring about social equality, even when they explicitly promote it. This develops a penetrating view of scholarship about equality in historical religions, thereby framing the historiographical issues that occupy the rest of the book.

The Quest for a Global Age of Reason. Part II: Cultural Appropriation and Racism in the Name of Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-155
Author(s):  
Dag Herbjørnsrud ◽  
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment is more global and complex than the standard Eurocentric Colonial Canon narrative presents. For example, before the advent of unscientific racism and the systematic negligence of the contributions of Others outside of “White Europe,” Raphael centered Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in his Vatican fresco “Causarum Cognitio” (1511); the astronomer Edmund Halley taught himself Arabic to be more enlightened; The Royal Society of London acknowledged the scientific method developed by Ibn Al-Haytham (Alhazen). In addition, if we study the Transatlantic texts of the late 18th century, it is not Kant, but instead enlightened thinkers like Anton Wilhelm Amo (born in present-day’s Ghana), Phillis Wheatley (Senegal region), and Toussaint L’Ouverture (Haiti), who mostly live up to the ideals of reason, humanism, universalism, and human rights. One obstacle to developing a more balanced presentation of the Age of the Enlightenment is the influence of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and methodological nationalism. Consequently, this paper, part II of two, will also deal with the European Enlightenment’s unscientific heritage of scholarly racism from the 1750s. It will be demonstrated how Linnaeus, Hume, Kant, and Hegel were among the Founding Fathers of intellectual white supremacy within the Academy. Hence, the Age of Enlightenment is not what we are taught to believe. This paper will demonstrate how the lights from different “Global Enlightenments” can illuminate paths forward to more dialogue and universalism in the 21st century.

scholarly journals Lyckans administration

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (121) ◽  
pp. 135-152
Author(s):  
Thomas Götselius
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Local Administration ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Theoretical Level ◽  
German State ◽  
State Reform ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ◽  
The Subject

This article engages in the new concept of individual happiness that spread in the 18th Century and in Goethe’s pivotal novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96). In this novel, the process of “Bildung” is designed to lead the protagonist to happiness, but happiness turns out to be possible only if the process can be governed from the outside, by powers alien to the subject. For this reason, the article argues that the notion of happiness orchestrated in the novel is not based on a revolutionary concept of happiness or a victorious Enlightenment critique, but on a concept derived from a more local field of knowledge, namely “Polizeywissenschaft”. Central to German state reform, and the practices of local administration in the late 18th Century, “Polizeywissenschaft” was developed in order to render happiness to both states and individuals, and it did so by means of surveillance and secret intervention in everyday life. On a theoretical level, the breakthrough of ”the police” during the century could be mapped as an outcome of the transition from a sovereign power regime to a biopolitical one, in Michel Foucault’s teminology. In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, as in the biopolitics encoded in the “Polizeywissenschaft,” the experience of happiness is thus coupled with a new way of governing life as such.

4. Modern reading

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-74
Author(s):  
Belinda Jack
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
Paper Making ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Printing Processes ◽  
Rotary Press

The Industrial Revolution from the late 18th century on brought changes to reading. Printing processes developed further, in particular typesetting. The development of the steam-powered press, the rotary press, and cheaper paper-making accounted for the birth and rapid rise of the daily newspaper. ‘Modern reading’ also explains how the Industrial Revolution resulted in the expansion of towns and cities, which then became the privileged places for reading. The ever-growing audience of readers were reading newspapers and journals, sermons and manuals, but above all novels. The history of the novel is considered along with how reading affected people’s ideas, in terms of how they then wanted to live.

scholarly journals DEATH IN THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF J. DERRIDA: TERRORISM, SECRECY, DEATH PENALTY AND THE CRISIS OF THE MODERN NATIONAL STATE

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-197
Author(s):  
George Bakhtin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Integral Feature ◽  
Modern Nation State

The article outlines the main crisis points and trends in the development of the modern nation-state. Special attention is paid to the consideration of the phenomenon of terrorism as an inevitable product of the Enlightenment project. The coronavirus pandemic has made the problem points more relevant, calling into question not only the essence of democracies, but also the irreversibility of the processes of globalization. The author suggests following the logic of the argumentation of the French philosopher J. Derrida, who preferred to deconstruct the power discourse in order to find an answer to the question: how and to what extent is it possible to combat violence and terror, the products of modern Western civilization. The article consistently examines the prerequisites for understanding death not only as a secret rooted in antiquity and associated with the classical paradigm of philosophizing, phenomenology, Heideggerianism and existentialism, but also as an economy of mourning for the dead, which is close to psychologism and Freudianism. The focus is concentrated on the study of the mechanisms of the sovereign state that help it to claim comprehensive possession of the moment of death for a person sentenced to death. Capital punishment - an instrument of control on the part of sovereignty - is interpreted as the core of the theological and political tradition that determines the orthogenesis of any nation-state. Finally, the author considers the concept of the “heart of the other” as a starting point for the fight against abuse and for debunking phantasms and illusions that are an integral feature of the modern political organism. It is the deconstruction of the death penalty that is the key subject touched upon by the author of the article.

scholarly journals L’échec du mentorat dans Les malheurs de l’amour (1747) de Madame de Tencin et dans Les Lettres du marquis de Roselle (1764) de Madame Élie de Beaumont

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Sante Arcangelo Viselli
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Madame De Lafayette

The novel of the Enlightenment is rich in topoi evoking mentors: Madame de Tencin, in Les Malheurs de l’amour (1747) and Madame Élie de Beaumont in Lettres du marquis de Roselle (1764) are particularly keen to stage this character who has been evolving since Fenelon in quite a dramatic manner: in the texts studied, the mentor, a wise advisor, often a woman, alludes to a message that goes well beyond its ancient symbolism. However, this intellectual guide becomes the disillusioned spokesperson and, at the same time, the victim of the Enlightenment. S/he guides the mentee through the dark forest of deceptive passions, such as the obvious example of love, but also those passions born, above all, of the contradictory game of interests between social classes, the behaviour of a bourgeoisie desperate to be recognized, and the impoverished, decadent and libertine aristocracy. The 18th Century witnesses a transformation of the mentor as s/he was classically portrayed. The latter keeps on fulfilling his/her original role as an advisor, but also becomes a narratological model – particularly in Madame de Tencin’s fictions, for whom Madame de Lafayette, for example, remains the intellectual model to imitate. Moreover, the mentor becomes, during the Enlightenment, a being in the flesh, sensual, passionate, whose ethic is merely anthropological, who surveys and examines the laws through reason. The Age of the “libertine” is also the era of a reconsidered mentorship: a calculating character, the libertine-mentor is often tinged with existential evil, a resurgence of a double-edged “ego” which characterizes human beings, a philosophy inaugurated by Montaigne and echoed by Descartes and Pascal, among others. Evil lingers during the entire Enlightenment despite the optimism conveyed by reason. Although this analysis will focus on the two aforementioned novels, it would also be stimulating to further the study of this topos, by including several other novels which would expand and enrich the SATOR database.

Jan van Eyck

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Acres
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Early Model ◽  
Manuscript Illumination ◽  
The Novel ◽  
20Th Century Literature ◽  
Oil Painting ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
20Th Century Art

Jan van Eyck (b. c. 1390–d. 1441), whose fame was international during his own lifetime and has never faded in the centuries since, was one of the most inventive and influential painters of all time. Born probably in the 1390s in or near Maaseik, his early years and training remain obscure. His career first comes into partial focus in the early 1420s, when he is recorded working in The Hague for John of Bavaria, Count of Holland. In 1425 he was employed by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (r. 1419–1467), one of the most powerful princes in Europe. Based mainly in Bruges, he served Philip and other prestigious patrons for rest of his life. The great esteem in which he was held by the duke and others, along with Jan’s unprecedented assertion of himself among inscriptions and images, made him an early model of the prized court artist, a role that would soon become more familiar in the Renaissance and after. Of the approximately two dozen paintings most confidently attributed to him, the earliest dated work is also the largest and most complex: the Ghent Altarpiece, completed 1432. Its inscription indicates that the project was begun by his brother Hubert (d. 1426), from whom no other surviving works have been confidently identified. The remaining paintings attributed to Jan van Eyck are altarpieces, smaller devotional pieces, and portraits. Lost works mentioned in early sources or echoed in variant paintings and drawings included more of the same, along with at least one genre-like image, of a woman at her bath. It has long been speculated that Jan’s early work may have included manuscript illumination, with the paintings of the Turin-Milan Hours at the center of this scholarship. In his 1550 Lives of the Artists, Vasari credited Jan van Eyck with the invention of oil painting, a claim widely repeated until it was disproven in the late 18th century. But fascination with the brilliant effects of van Eyck’s technique—and especially the novel depths of his realism—has never waned. Much of the 20th-century literature has probed symbolic and related dimensions of meaning in his realism. This interpretive scholarship on van Eyck and his Flemish contemporaries (chiefly Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden), associated especially with Panofsky’s conceptions of iconography, iconology, and “disguised symbolism,” became widely influential in 20th-century art history.

Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deidre Shauna Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social System ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Conflicting Goals

This essay on the novel of ideas in the 1790s investigates the sometimes conflicting goals pursue by the ‘Jacobin’ novelists—figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Hays—and also charts their characteristic preoccupations with the proper relations between reason and passion and mind and body. Revamping the Enlightenment tradition of the conte philosophique, these supporters of the Revolution in France and political reform in Britain advocated a newly ambitious species of novel capable of building bridges between the discursive domains of fiction and political theory. These novelists also set out to claim the power over readers’ emotions they found in sentimental fiction’s stories of suffering individuals. At the same time, contrariwise, they aimed to assemble comprehensive accounts of the social system—of ‘things as they are’, in Godwin’s phrase—and touted their commitment to the promulgation of universal, impersonal truth.

scholarly journals The Hamlet Project in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (30) ◽  
pp. 147-159
Author(s):  
Thomas Kullmann
Keyword(s):  
Personal Development ◽  
Role Model ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Theatrical Space ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Theatrical Practice ◽  
The Hamlet

Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, published in 1795, provides a fictional account of a theatrical production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Its initiator is young Wilhelm, whose experiences with this project, in the context of the novel, mark a decisive stage in his education and personal development; as well as, on another level, in the formation of a German national theatre, the mapping out of a theatrical space peculiar to the German national character. To realize his project Wilhelm has to negotiate with his manager and his fellow-actors; these negotiations can be considered reflections of the cultural aspirations and constraints prevalent late 18th-century Germany: – The project itself, as represented by Wilhelm, appears to be informed by a cultural movement towards emancipation from French culture: The character of Hamlet was interpreted as representing a role model for young Germans. – Informed by a theatrical practice based on French conventions, the manager objects to the lack of dramaturgical coherence of the Shakespeare play. As a compromise, Wilhelm composes an adapted version in which references to Wittenberg, Poland, France and England as well as several minor characters are cut, but the Hamlet scenes and speeches are retained. – Wilhelm and his friends also take account of German audiences’ preferences and capacities.The Hamlet project in Wilhelm Meister can be considered a case study of cultural appropriation. Shakespeare becomes a cultural import, used to define and map a cultural space for the German middle class, which in the nineteenth century set store by the quality of its educational make-up.

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