JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER AND ENLIGHTENMENT POLITICAL THOUGHT: FROM THE REFORM OF RUSSIA TO THE ANTHROPOLOGY OFBILDUNG

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
RETO SPECK
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
The Political ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This essay revises customary interpretations of Johann Gottfried Herder that stress the non-political or anarchical nature of his philosophy and his opposition to Enlightenment thought. Approaching his politics through the idea ofBildung, it argues that Herder first elaborated on this seminal concept in a series of early texts concerned with the reform of Russia. It analyses Herder's writings on Russia in the context of wider Enlightenment debates about the reform of the empire, and shows thatBildungwas employed as a means to mediate between contrasting models of political action put forward by contemporaries such as Voltaire and Denis Diderot. An outline of the subsequent development ofBildungin his anthropological works reinforces the political intention behind the concept, and situates Herder's political thought firmly within late eighteenth-century controversies.

Refutation and Desire: European Perceptions of Shamanism in the Late Eighteenth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-121
Author(s):  
Kocku von Stuckrad
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
European Project ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The article discusses learned debates that evolved at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe about the interpretation of shamanism. Intellectuals, philosophers, and enlightened monarchs engaged in controversies about shamanism that were clearly linked to Enlightenment ideals of rationality and religious critique. The article addresses the ambivalence of ‘refutation and desire’ in French, German, and Russian responses to shamanism, with special attention to the French Encyclopedists, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Catherine the Great. The controversies reveal the intrinsic tension of the European project of ‘modernity’: what was discussed as ‘shamanism,’ ultimately turned out to be the result of European self-reflection.

JEAN-LOUIS DELOLME AND THE POLITICAL SCIENCE OF THE ENGLISH EMPIRE

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
IAIN McDANIEL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Stability ◽  
British State ◽  
Constitutional Republic

ABSTRACTThis article aims to extend our understanding of eighteenth-century political science through a re-examination of the writings of Jean-Louis Delolme (1741–1806). Beginning with an account of Delolme's conception of a modern ‘science of politics’, the article demonstrates that Delolme's ambition to rest the study of politics on scientific foundations developed in the context of an evolving concern with the stability and durability of the English ‘empire’. Underlining Delolme's critique of traditional republican political science as well as the comparative science of politics set out in Montesquieu's The spirit of the laws, the article thus sheds light on the connection between eighteenth-century conceptions of political science and eighteenth-century analyses of the English constitution and the British state. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the resonance of Delolme's central ideas in late eighteenth-century debates, in Britain, America, and France, about the character and properties of the modern constitutional republic.

Learning Conservatism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Jones
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
English Literature ◽  
General Level ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
New Students

The construction of Burke as the ‘founder of conservatism’ was also a product of developments in education. The increasing study of Burke arose out of several converging movements: in publishing and technology; in philosophical thought; in the increasing disposable income and leisure time of greater portions of the population; and in education movements for men and women at all levels. The popularity of topics such as the French Revolution, Romanticism, and late eighteenth-century history meant that Burke became a feature of lectures and examinations. At university, Burke was of particular interest to philosophical Idealists, English literature professors and students, and a generation of historians who taught increasingly modern courses. By analysing how Burke was studied at this much more popular, general level it is possible to pinpoint how Burke’s ‘conservative’ political thought was taught to swathes of new students—it took more than gentlemanly erudition to establish a scholarly orthodoxy.

Calabria 1783

2018 ◽  
pp. 176-187
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Caridi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Technical Knowledge ◽  
Working Hypothesis ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Orthogonal Grid ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Dual Domain

This chapter considers the reconstruction operations that were carried out in Calabria following the earthquake of the late-eighteenth century. The author connects the physical and ideological role played by the orthogonal grid within the scope of this urban process to Foucault's concept of the device. Such a working hypothesis makes it possible to highlight the dual-domain in which lies political power, on one hand, and technical knowledge, on the other. This is a duplicity that is not resolved in the supremacy of either one domain or the other but, rather, in their huddle in a dialectical node: the political power that avails itself of the technical knowledge to reinforce itself and the technical knowledge that takes advantage of the political power to legitimise itself.

‘Opinion in Eighteenth-Century Thought: What did the Concept Purport to Explain?’

Utilitas ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-33
Author(s):  
J. A. W. Gunn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Political Vocabulary ◽  
Century Thought

We all ‘know’ that public opinion came to prominence in the political vocabulary of the late eighteenth century. It may be that this dates its rise a bit late, but it is not relevant to argue the matter here. My concern is rather that we be equally aware of the purposes for which people made use of the concept. Here I wish to consider various possible contexts for speaking or writing of public opinion, or ‘opinion’, as it was usually called prior to the mid-eighteenth century. It may be possible to define, more fully than heretofore, the work that the expression did in eighteenth-century thought. As contemporary students of public opinion have been learning, an answer to this question may not even be wholly irrelevant to the task of specifying the nature of public opinion in our own time.

Labor, Leisure, and the Yeoman in Coleridge's and Wordsworth's 1790s Writings

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Malachuk
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civic Virtue ◽  
The Political ◽  
Free Press ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Republican Theory

Abstract In the republican tradition, from Aristotle through James Harrington, leisure was essential to the cultivation of civic virtue; labor—associated with the oikos rather than the polis—was not. In the late eighteenth-century, however, some democratic republicans celebrated the yeoman, who cultivated civic virtue through both his leisure and his labor. As a union of ancient opposites, the yeoman was a compelling but politically unstable character in republican theory, as suggested in the work of Jefferson and Rousseau. The same is true of the yeoman in Coleridge's and Wordsworth's early writings. Both writers began the 1790s convinced that in the yeoman one found the political realization of both labor and leisure. By mid-decade, Wordsworth no longer believed this, emphasizing instead the moral—rather than civic—value of landed property (the site of labor and leisure). Coleridge, too, came to question the significance of landed property, but not the significance of civic virtue; instead, he investigated new means to realizing that political condition, including a free press and a clerisy.

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