‘The Age of Louis XIV’: Frederick the Great and French Ways of War*

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-46
Author(s):  
Adam L Storring
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
French Military ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Military

Abstract This article demonstrates that the military ideas of King Frederick the Great of Prussia up to the Seven Years War (1756–1763) were primarily inspired by France, and particularly by the towering figure of King Louis XIV. It examines the intellectual inspirations for Frederick’s military ideas, showing that French military influence reflected the strength of French cultural influence in the long eighteenth century and the importance of Louis XIV as a model for monarchical self-representation. Frederick’s famous personal command of his armies reflected the Enlightenment concept of the ‘great man’ (grand homme), but Frederick thereby sought primarily to outdo the Sun King, whom Voltaire had criticized for merely accompanying his armies while his generals won battles for him. The example of Frederick thus demonstrates that not only rulers but also enlightened philosophers often looked backwards toward older monarchical examples. Frederick sought to create his own ‘Age of Louis XIV’ in the military sphere by imitating the great French generals of the Sun King. Frederick’s famous outflanking manoeuvres followed the example of famous French generals, reflecting the practice of the more mobile armies of the mid-seventeenth century. Frederick used French practice to justify his attacks with the bayonet, and his ‘short and lively’ wars reflected French strategic traditions. The evidence of French influence on Frederick seriously challenges concepts of a ‘German Way of War’, and indeed of supposed national ‘ways of war’ in general, emphasizing the need for a transnational approach to the history of military thought.

Knowledge From Underground: Leibniz Mines the Enlightenment

1997 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Hamm
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Administrative Work ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of Geology ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Mining Machinery ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Fantastic

The history of geology has focused largely on the foundations of geology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Considerable attention has also been given to grand theories of the earth, or cosmogonies, of the seventeenth century. This approach has left out most of eighteenth-century mineralogy; it has also left out mining. The argument here is that Leibniz's Protogaea is best understood in the context of the Harz mines, where Leibniz spent considerable energy doing administrative work and inventing new mining machinery. By looking to the mines we not only make sense of Protogaea, but of most of German mineralogy in the eighteenth century. J. G. Lehmann, J. F. W. Charpentier, C. G. Delius and many other practitioners working in and around mines were deeply concerned with mapping the subterranean structure of the earth's crust and they contrasted their work with the "fantastic" world of theorists. The Freiberg Mining Academy, other institutions, and the way vocabularies of mining changed will also be considered. Finally there are some concluding thoughts on why mining has almost disappeared from the history of geology.

HOW THE STOICS BECAME ATHEISTS

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 387-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER BROOKE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Critical History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ralph Cudworth ◽  
The Way

In the middle of the seventeenth century, scholarship on ancient Stoicism generally understood it to be a form of theism. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Stoicism was widely (though not universally) reckoned a variety of atheism, both by its critics and by those more favourably disposed to its claims. This article describes this transition, the catalyst for which was the controversy surrounding Spinoza's philosophy, and which was shaped above all by contemporary transformations in the historiography of philosophy. Particular attention is paid to the roles in this story played by Thomas Gataker, Ralph Cudworth, J. F. Buddeus, Jean Barbeyrac, and J. L. Mosheim, whose contributions collectively helped to shape the way in which Stoicism was presented in two of the leading reference works of the Enlightenment, J. J. Brucker's Critical History of Philosophy and the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert.

The Enlightenment

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-206
Author(s):  
Tomás McAuley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Musical Harmony ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mechanical Approach ◽  
Modes Of Interaction

This chapter traces the history of music and philosophy in the Enlightenment, with a particular focus on English thinkers in the years 1660–1750. It identifies three modes of interaction between musical and philosophical ideas: music as object of philosophy, music as inspiration for philosophy, and music as corroboration for philosophy. The chapter hones in particularly on the significance of the new, “mechanical” approach to philosophy that emerged in the later seventeenth century and on changing explanations of music’s fabled ability to cure the bite of the tarantula. Through all of this, it uncovers how ideas about musical harmony and music’s affective power were intertwined in this period. It also includes two eighteenth-century case studies showing how these ideas played themselves out in the French “high” Enlightenment and in German Idealist philosophy at the close of the Enlightenment. The chapter closes with an examination of the relative merits, in this context, of the terms “Baroque,” “scientific revolution,” and “Enlightenment.”

scholarly journals Subjective practices of war: The Prussian army and the Zorndorf campaign, 1758

2020 ◽  
pp. 007327532095895
Author(s):  
Adam L. Storring
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Chance Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Subjective Element ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Military ◽  
Military Theory

This article integrates the history of military theory – and the practical history of military campaigns and battles – within the broader history of knowledge. Challenging ideas that the new natural philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called Scientific Revolution) fostered attempts to make warfare mathematically calculated, it builds on work showing that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy was itself much more subjective than previously thought. It uses the figure of King Frederick II of Prussia (reigned 1740–1786) to link theoretical with practical military knowledge, placing the military treatises read and written by the king alongside the practical example of the Prussian army’s campaign against the Russians in summer 1758 at the height of the Seven Years War (1756–1763), which culminated in the battle of Zorndorf. This article shows that both the theory and practice of war – like other branches of knowledge in the long eighteenth century – were fundamentally shaped by the contemporary search for intellectual order. The inability to achieve this in practice led to a reliance on subjective judgment and individual, local knowledge. Whereas historians have noted attempts in the eighteenth century to calculate probabilities mathematically, this article shows that war continued to be conceived as the domain of fortune, subject to incalculable chance. Answering Steven Shapin’s call to define concretely “the subjective element in knowledge-making,” the examples of Frederick and his subordinate, Lieutenant General Count Christoph zu Dohna, reveal sharply different contemporary ideas about how to respond to uncertainty in war. Whereas Dohna sought to be ready for chance events and react to them, Frederick actively embraced uncertainty and risk-taking, making chance both a rhetorical argument and a positive choice guiding strategy and tactics.

The Enlightenment's Animals

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Wolloch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Economic Resources ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
European Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

In The Enlightenment’s Animals Nathaniel Wolloch takes a broad view of changing conceptions of animals in European culture during the long eighteenth century. Combining discussions of intellectual history, the history of science, the history of historiography, the history of economic thought, and, not least, art history, this book describes how animals were discussed and conceived in different intellectual and artistic contexts underwent a dramatic shift during this period. While in the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century the main focus was on the sensory and cognitive characteristics of animals, during the late Enlightenment a new outlook emerged, emphasizing their conception as economic resources. Focusing particularly on seventeenth-century Dutch culture, and on the Scottish Enlightenment, Wolloch discusses developments in other countries as well, presenting a new look at a topic of increasing importance in modern scholarship.

‘A colony so fertile’

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Hingley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Public Buildings ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Published Evidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Military

In A Specimen of a History of Oxfordshire, the Reverend Thomas Warton reflected on the significance of the Roman pavement at Stonesfield (Oxfordshire) and explored the two main themes which structure chapters three and four: he writes of Roman settlers who migrated with their families to Britain but suggests that wealthy and well-connected Britons might have built villas like the example uncovered at Stonesfield. From the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, the debate about the nature of society in Roman Britain drew upon these contrasting images to explain the character of the Roman occupation of southern Britain. Certain writings of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had developed the idea of the passing on of civility from the Romans to the British, which could be used as a source of patriotic reflection. There was less confidence in this idea during the eighteenth century, when influential works on the Walls and the northern stations promoted a primarily military interpretation of Roman sites in the south. In the introduction to his volume of 1793, Roy presented a thoughtful assessment of contemporary understanding of Roman Britain and emphasized its military nature. Following earlier examples, he divided the monuments of the Roman empire into two types: the public buildings—the temples, amphitheatres, and baths well known to British gentlemen from their visits to Italy—and the military sites. Roy emphasized that, with regard to military remains of Britain ‘perhaps no quarter of their vast empire, not even Italy itself, furnishes so great a variety; and many of them exceedingly perfect’. By contrast, in reflecting on public buildings, he states that ‘Britain affords very few vestiges of any consequence’. Indeed, it is true that, by the late eighteenth century, there was very little published evidence for public buildings to compare with the extensive evidence for the military sites of southern Scotland and northern England. Roy argued, ‘neither is it probable that the Romans ever executed many of those costly edifices in this island’. At the time Roy was writing (c.1773), little excavated evidence had been found for public buildings or ornate architecture anywhere in Britain.

Intellectual Change before the Enlightenment: Scotland, the Netherlands and the Reception of Cartesian Thought, 1650–1700

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Raffe
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
United Provinces

This article argues that intellectual historians' fascination with a narrative of the emerging Scottish enlightenment has led to a neglect of ideas that did not shape enlightenment culture. As a contribution to a less teleological intellectual history of Scotland, the article examines the reception of the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). Cartesian thought enjoyed a brief period of popularity from the 1670s to the 1690s but appeared outdated by the mid-eighteenth century. Debates about Cartesianism illustrate the ways in which late seventeenth-century Scottish intellectual life was conditioned by the rivalry between presbyterians and episcopalians, and by fears that new philosophy would undermine christianity. Moreover, the reception of Cartesian thought exemplifies intellectual connections between Scotland and the Netherlands. Not only did Descartes' philosophy win its first supporters in the United Provinces, but the Dutch Republic also provided the arguments employed by the main Scottish critics of Cartesianism. In this period the Netherlands was both a source of philosophical innovation and of conservative reaction to intellectual change.

Passes and Protection in the Making of a British Mediterranean

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 602-631 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tristan Stein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Regulatory Regime ◽  
North African ◽  
Pass System ◽  
Naval Power ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractBetween the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the security of British navigation in and around the corsair-infested waters of the Mediterranean depended on indented parchment passports—Mediterranean passes. This article recovers the history of the Mediterranean pass and traces the development of the Mediterranean pass system from its origins in England's mid-seventeenth-century treaties with the North African regencies to its role in the emergence of Britain's Mediterranean empire over the course of the long eighteenth century. At its inception, the Mediterranean pass system formed an interstate regulatory regime that mediated between North African and British naval power by providing a means to identify British vessels at sea and to limit the protection of Britain's treaties to them. During the eighteenth century, however, foreign merchants and shipowners, especially from Genoa, sought out the security of British passes by moving to Britain's colonies at Gibraltar and Minorca. The resulting incorporation of foreigners into the British pass system fundamentally altered the nature and significance of the pass and contributed to the development of Britain's imperial presence in the Mediterranean. This article reveals how the growth of British power and the interactions of British consuls and imperial officials with mariners and merchants from around the Mediterranean transformed the pass from a document of identification into an instrument of imperial protection that helped sustain Britain's Mediterranean outposts in the eighteenth century and make possible the dramatic expansion of the British Empire further into that sea at the start of the nineteenth.

Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Half

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

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