scholarly journals Lhitage des Lumies: The Enlightenment as an unfinished and morally demanding project

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-30
Author(s):  
Charlotta Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment ◽  
Anglo American

The French Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1789 have commonly been seen as forerunners of modern Western European democracies and democratic values such as inalienable human rights, freedom from oppression, equality, religious tolerance, social security and happiness, inherited partly from the Anglo-American revolutions and partly from the radical French philosophes of the last third of the eighteenth century. Historians interested in the culture of the age of Enlightenment have long been looking for the movement in itself, studying the forms of participation and the places where Enlightenment ideals, described and impersonated by men like Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot, were propagated. As much as ‘the Enlightenment’ itself is not a homogeneous philosophical trend, recent historical research has shown that the social and cultural practices of eighteenth-century philosophic-al circles were far from corresponding to the ideals of equality and liberty commonly associated with the Enlightenment. A second bias in our interpretations of the Enlightenment is the central place given to values commonly associated with it in the legitimisation of modern democracies, while in the meantime, other phenomena of the age of Enlightenment, such as cosmopolitanism, are misunderstood or rejected because of, for example, the idea of national primacy. This article is concerned with how the strengthening of the focus in cultural history on social practices has changed our picture of the Enlightenment as a movement, but also with the difficulties experienced by historians who are intellectually and morally indebted to the Enlightenment in constructing a credible picture of this movement in a time when its legacy is subject to political debate.

scholarly journals Introduction: The Culture of Jesuit Erudition in an Age of Enlightenment

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-415
Author(s):  
Jeffrey D. Burson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

Although works on religious, specifically Catholic, and more specifically Jansenist, contributions to the Enlightenment abound, the contributions of the Jesuits to the Enlightenment have remained relatively unexplored since Robert R. Palmer initially identified affinities between Jesuit thought and the emergence of the French Enlightenment as long ago as 1939. Accordingly, this introduction and the essays contained within the pages of this special issue revisit and further explore ways in which the individual Jesuits contributed to broader patterns of European intellectual and cultural history during the age of Enlightenment. Taken together, the contributions to this special issue investigate different aspects of an important question: to what extent were some Jesuits (at time, despite themselves, and at times, even against the grain of the order’s official positions) unlikely contributors to the Enlightenment? This question of whether one might speak of a specifically Jesuit Enlightenment is complicated by the still unsatisfactory scholarly consensus regarding the definition of the Enlightenment. But, growing scholarly attention to the nature of Catholic Enlightenment, and to the continuities linking eighteenth-century preoccupations to the controversies of the seventeenth century have further underscored the need for greater attention to Jesuit contributions to the Enlightenment itself. In this introduction, rather than considering the Enlightenment as a series of transformative and largely eighteenth-century debates rooted in the middle or late seventeenth century, I suggest that Jesuit engagement with the Enlightenment is best understood if the Enlightenment is more firmly anchored somewhat earlier in the culture of late Humanism—a culture that was first weaponized then chastened within the crucible of the European Reformations.

The Twentieth Century and the Enlightenment as Historical Problem

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
European Society ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the historical problem of how to gain an understanding of the fundamental traits that were original to the Enlightenment. More specifically, it considers how the Enlightenment arose over the intellectual, political, and social life of eighteenth-century élites, so as to produce a cultural revolution that transformed European society. Franco Venturi interpreted the Enlightenment as the “history of a movement,” a movement of a political nature that was created by self-conscious intellectual minorities. The chapter considers Venturi's proposal to go back to a view of the Enlightenment as a movement and as a fundamental chapter in the new history of intellectuals. In particular, it discusses Venturi's project for a political history of the Enlightenment, his denunciation of scholars engaged in the social history of the Enlightenment, and the emergence of a new cultural history in the 1980s.

Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment

2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
North East ◽  
The Social ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
Scottish History

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.

Haydn's Creation and Enlightenment Theology

2008 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 25-44
Author(s):  
Mark Berry
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
High Culture ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Austrian Tradition

Haydn's two great oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons (Die Schöpfung and Die Jahreszeiten) stand as monuments—on either side of the year 1800—to the Enlightenment and to the Austrian Enlightenment in particular. This is not to claim that they have no connection with what would often be considered more “progressive”—broadly speaking, romantic—tendencies. However, like Haydn himself, they are works that, if a choice must be made, one would place firmly in the eighteenth century, “long” or otherwise. The age of musical classicism was far from dead by 1800, likewise the “Age of Enlightenment.” It is quite true that one witnesses in both the emergence of distinct national, even “nationalist,” tendencies. Yet these intimately connected “ages” remain essentially cosmopolitan, especially in the sphere of intellectual history and “high” culture. Haydn's oratorios not only draw on Austrian tradition; equally important, they are also shaped by broader influence, especially the earlier English Enlightenment, in which the texts of both works have their origins. The following essay considers the theology of The Creation with reference to this background and, to a certain extent, also attempts the reverse, namely, to consider the Austrian Enlightenment in the light of a work more central to its concerns than might have been expected.

The Encyclopedist and the Peruvian Princess: The Poetics of Illegibility in French Enlightenment Book Culture

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-123
Author(s):  
Lorraine Piroux
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Book Culture

This study focuses on the French Enlightenment's fascination with the materiality of non-Western and nonalphabetic scripts in the broader context of the history of the book. By examining definitions of writing in the Encyclopédie as well as Françoise de Graffigny's novelistic appropriation of the Inca quipu script in Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1747), I argue that there emerges from these texts a conception of the literary sign capable of challenging the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment printed book: dematerialized textuality and absolute legibility. Shaped by the scriptural imagination of eighteenth-century book culture, literature was able to acquire full aesthetic legitimacy only insofar as it was defined as the other of the purely semantic text. (LP)

scholarly journals The Lower Clergy and Popular Culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dániel Bárth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Written Form

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of the Christian lower priesthood in local communities in eighteenth–twentieth century Hungary and Transylvania in cultural transmission. The author intends to map out the complex and changing conditions of the social function, everyday life, and mentality of the priests on the bottom rung of the clerical hierarchy. Particular emphasis is placed on the activity of priests active at the focus points of interaction between elite and popular culture who, starting from the second half of the eighteenth century, often reflected both directly and in a written form on the cultural practices of the population of villages and market towns. The theoretical questions and possible approaches are centered around the complex relations of the priest and the community, their harmonious or conflict-ridden co-existence, questions of sacral economy, stereotypes of the “good priest” and the “bad priest” as shaped from above and from below, the subtleties of “priest-keeping”, the intentions related to preserving traditions and creating new customs, and the different temperaments of priests in relation to these issues.

What Reason Wrought

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-156
Author(s):  
Kathleen Wellman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Divine Punishment ◽  
New Nation

This chapter recognizes scholarly debates about the Enlightenment; some indict the movement for failing to live up to its ideals. Nonetheless, the Founding Fathers were traditionally understood to have been shaped by Enlightenment values. These curricula reject that understanding. They repudiate Enlightenment values, including secularism, tolerance, the social sciences, social reform, internationalism, and those values’ possible influence on the new nation. The curricula instead indict the Enlightenment as godless and reject its appreciation of reason and science as threats to the authority of the Bible. The genuine eighteenth-century Enlightenment is, for these curricula, the religious revival known as the Great Awakening. These textbooks also assert that France’s commitment to humanism warranted divine punishment in the French Revolution, and that its reprehensible politics differentiate it from American virtues. This chapter concludes with some implications of what rejecting the Enlightenment entails for modern America culture.

Comment

1999 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 229-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intellectual Challenge

The Articles By David Sorkin and Edmund Kern have a common starting point. Both address aspects of the reform movement that unfolded in the Habsburg lands under Maria Theresa. They underline an argument made by much recent work on the subject that the movement in question, though committed to substantial changes in the social and cultural fabric, was fundamentally Catholic in its inspiration and only loosely and partially aligned with either the great intellectual challenge of the Enlightenment or the fuller and later program of reconstruction that has come to be known in the Austrian context as Josephinism. Both writers acknowledge the powerful contributory stimulus from abroad to the new climate of ideas generated in the monarchy by the travails of the mid-eighteenth century, but submit that those ideas besically arose out of a domestic evolution, especially within ecclesiastical circles.

Samuel Clain and the Rumanian Enlightenment in Transylvania

Slavic Review ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 660-675 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Hitchins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The West ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

In the second half of the eighteenth century the leavening effects of the Enlightenment began to be felt among the Rumanians of Transylvania. The Enlightenment in Transylvania—and in Eastern Europe generally —was a curious blend of natural law, rationalism, and optimism, drawn from the West, and nationalism, a response to local conditions. It is no coincidence that the first tangible signs of national awakening among the Rumanians manifested themselves at this time. In the thought of the Enlightenment they discovered new justification for their claims to equality with their Magyar, Saxon, and Szekler neighbors. For example, they applied the notion of “natural” civil equality between individuals to the relationship between whole peoples, and they accepted wholeheartedly the myth of the social contract as the foundation of society and as the guarantee of the rights of all those who composed it.

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