scholarly journals Patriotism and Bellicism in German and Dutch Epics of the Enlightenment

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Cornelis van der Haven

AbstractThe German and Dutch historiography of eighteenth-century patriotism defines two different forms of patriotism. It is either presented as an enlightened and virtuous-eudemonic form of ʻlove for the fatherlandʼ based on reason, or as an ideology that foreshadows nineteenth-century emphatic forms of aggressive nationalism. A critical reading of the mid-eighteenth-century epics Cyrus by Christoph Martin Wieland and De Gevallen van Friso by Willem van Haren shows that the discourses are strongly intertwined. Heroism in these epics is based on a personal experience of war acts and no longer on distanced and ʻtheatricalʼ experiences of the military spectacle. It confronts us with aggressive war fantasies related to early bellicism, as well as with pacifist statements. In Cyrus, for instance, the sentimental warrior inspires his fellow-soldiers to offer their blood in the struggle against the enemy, but he has doubts about the war and shows compassion with the enemy. Explorations of the effects of individual emotions on the battlefield, prepared both further idealisations of patriotic war acts and a more critical literary approach to war and fatherland.

Author(s):  
Alice Soares Guimarães

This chapter examines transformations of state–society relations in eighteenth-century Portugal in relation to Enlightened political debates of the time. It also explores how these transformations shaped the relations between Portugal and Brazil in the nineteenth century, the debate about the political form of independent Brazil, and the intra-Brazilian struggles over this form before and after independence. More importantly, it challenges the notion that the Enlightenment was absent from the Portuguese Empire as a result of the rejection of modern ideas by conservative world views and projects. It argues that there was a Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment that was plural and eclectic, supporting both critiques and defences of the absolute power of the king, endorsing simultaneously a secularisation process, the promotion of reason and Roman Catholicism, and fostering not only revolutionary projects but also conservative state reforms.


Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa

This book is a sequel to A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in an Age of Reason, where I analyzed new intellectual approaches to religion in early modernity, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.1 In the present work, I study some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion during the long nineteenth century. More precisely, I seek here to understand the implications, in a secular age, which was also the formative period of the new discipline, of a major paradigm shift. The nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of the taxonomy of religions. According to the traditional model, in place since late antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were cognate religions, all stemming from the biblical patriarch Abraham’s discovery of monotheism. This model was largely discarded during the Enlightenment, and would be later replaced by a new one, according to which Christianity, the religion of Europe, essentially belonged to a postulated family of the Aryan, or Indo-European religions, while Judaism and Islam were identified as Semitic religions....


Author(s):  
Александр Каменский

The history of suicide in Russia, especially prior to the nineteenth century, remains understudied. While in most European countries the process of decriminalization and secularization of suicide was underway, in Russia, with the introduction of the Military Article of 1715, it was formally criminalized. On the basis of the study of more than 350 newly examined archival cases, this article examines how the transfer of suicide investigations to secular authorities also entailed secularization, while the peculiarities of the Russian judicial and investigative system, as well as lacunae in the legislation, actually led to the gradual decriminalization of suicide. At the same time, although among Russians, as well as among other peoples, a number of superstitions were associated with suicide, there is no evidence in the archival documents studied in this article of a particularly emotional perception of suicide. The phenomenon of suicide in eighteenth-century Russia, when compared to early modern Europe, did not have any significant, fundamental differences. However, the features of the Russian judicial-investigative system made this phenomenon less public, less visible and less significant for public consciousness.  


Author(s):  
Klaus Ries

This chapter challenges the widespread assumption that terrorist ideology was invented in the mid-nineteenth century by such figures as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. Instead, the chapter argues, the foundations of terrorism were laid at the end of the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his disciples, who in turn exerted a strong influence on later radical thinkers. In showing how the intellectual reverberations of the French Revolution gave rise to anarchist ideology as well as acts of terrorism in Germany, the chapter traces a link between the state terror of the French Revolution and the emergence of insurgent terrorism.


Ensemblance ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 112-139
Author(s):  
Luis de Miranda

After 1800, esprit de corps was often nationally manufactured, and Napoleon was its first engineer. French society became a reflection of the military. This chapter shows how the Bonapartists succeeded in building a national system of rewards and interdependent privileged corps in which ‘esprit de corps’ was encouraged according to a military model of general agonism. The transformation of the organisation of labour, of the army, and of education after the French Revolution is narrated. This chapter is essential to understand not only today’s France, but also most nation-states, functioning more or less under a similar model. The author also analyses the decline of labour communities and their form of belonging since the eighteenth century. The Revolutiondiscredited the esprit de corporation, and capitalist merchants were often thankful for the republican defence of more competitive and less-regulated entrepreneurship.


Author(s):  
Christy Pichichero

The introduction presents the book’ argument: from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth century, the seemingly antipodal phenomena of war and enlightenment were inextricably connected in a metadiscourse that constituted one of the greatest challenges, debates, and fights for progress of the century. This metadiscourse was born of “the Enlightenment” as a discursive context and a contemporary acceptance of war as an inevitable part of human society and as necessary for sovereign states both in terms of reputation and success in a colonial, mercantilist age. Facing the exorbitant costs of global warfare and growing moral criticism, agents of the Military Enlightenment sought to make “good war” in two ways. First, to wage war when necessary and to do so effectively and efficiently while sparing costs and precious resources of the fiscal-military state, especially manpower. Second, to wage war humanely to reflect the compassion, rationality, and dignity of the human race.


Author(s):  
Thomas Marschler

In the second half of the eighteenth century, under the influence of the Enlightenment, Catholic theology had increasingly turned away from its scholastic tradition. A renewal of Thomist thought started in the first decades of the nineteenth century, especially from Italy. Its original concern was to overcome the modern philosophies that were perceived as endangering faith. From the middle of the century, the movement spread to other parts of Europe, gaining support of the Church’s magisterium under Pope Pius IX. In the wake of the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) written by his successor Leo XIII, neo-scholasticism made its final breakthrough in Catholic academic life. Subsequently, numerous Thomist-oriented textbooks were published and Thomist academies were founded throughout Europe. The critical edition of the works of Aquinas (Editio Leonia) marked the beginning of a period of intense historical research on medieval theology and philosophy.


2009 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Sippel

AbstractFrench Socialists currently appear less and less convinced of the relevance of rejecting today's consumption-oriented society and turn increasingly to more center-left models in order to refound their party. (Refoundation is one of the most frequently used terms within the party.) Therefore, it is instructive to go back to the eighteenth-century roots of socialism and note the way many of its founding theorists promoted the establishment of truly social communities set in a perfectly harmonious relationship to the natural environment.As the intellectual debate was not confined within French borders at the time of the Enlightenment, this study will create a dialogue between those who argued that luxury was absolutely essential in a modern society (Mandeville, and later Malthus, whose views are echoed in the voices of contemporary right-wing politicians) and those who, on the contrary, advocated a return to a voluntary state of nature, which implied the rejection of material accumulation and social inequality (such as Rousseau and later William Godwin, whose concerns are nowadays echoed by the defenders of décroissance). This article also explores the most utopian propositions coming from objecteurs de croissance, individuals who side with the far left while adding their concern for the environment and emphasis on humane values.


1990 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 137-146
Author(s):  
Mieczysław Brzozowski

Jan Paweł Woronicz—Polish archbishop, preacher, and poet, who lived in the second half of the eighteenth century and in the first third of the nineteenth century—presented in his writings a very characteristic and conceptually uniform vision of the nation. Generally speaking, one can say that this vision was based on the principles of divine finality and providence. It perceived individual nations as realities planned and created by God, aimed at precisely determined goals and provided with continual divine providence. These views are not the fruits of the Enlightenment, but can be traced back to biblical sources and to the writings of St Augustine and Jacques Bénigne Bosuet (1627–1704). However, in Poland these ideas are deeply rooted in the concepts already expressed by Jan Długosz (1415–80), Stanisław Orzechowski (1513–66), Stanisław Sarnicki (1532–97), Piotr Skarga (1536–1612), Wespazjan Kochowski (1633–1700), and Szymon Starowolski (1588–1656).


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Fernanda Ribeiro Rocha Fagundes

Neste artigo pretende-se evidenciar a produção de saberes em língua portuguesa, elaborados pelo físico-mor José Pinto de Azeredo, ao final do século XVIII e princípios do XIX, sob a ótica da História das Ciências Global e Transcontinental. Destaca-se na análise as ideias reelaboradas e circulantes desse ator histórico em regiões como a América portuguesa, Europa e África. Tal circulação se dava em uma conjuntura ilustrada, em que se admitia uma espécie de ciência pragmática. Nesse contexto, o Império Ultramarino mantinha uma rede de conhecimentos úteis, que era constantemente alimentada por várias instituições portuguesas e diversos personagens históricos a ela conectados, que agiam nas mais variadas possessões do além-mar português. As informações circulantes envolviam diversos setores, incluindo os saberes médicos.*In this essay, we want to show the Portuguese knowledge made by the physician José Pinto de Azeredo in the end of eighteenth century and first part of nineteenth century. We are using the New Global and Transcontinental History of science theory. This paper has underlined José Pinto de Azeredo’s ideas, which had been recreated and traveled around Portuguese America, Europe and Africa. This process of ideas circulation happened in a historic moment of the Enlightenment, when a pragmatic science was possible. In that moment, the Portuguese overseas empire kept a useful knowledge network, which was fed by several Portuguese institutions and a lot of history characters who belong to Portugal. These characters could be overseas employees, travelers, physicians, traders who sent a lot of information about several subject including cure’s knowledge to Portugal’s network.


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