Moses Mendelssohn

1984 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Altmann
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
General Reader ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Moses Mendelssohn ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
New Phase

This acclaimed, wide-ranging biography of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–96) was first published in 1973, but its stature as the definitive biography remains unquestioned. Moses Mendelssohn came to be recognized as the inaugurator of a new phase in Jewish history. His life was a kaleidoscope of the European intellectual scene, Jewish and non-Jewish. As both a prominent philosopher and a believing Jew, Mendelssohn became a spokesman for the Jews and Judaism. What was Mendelssohn's Judaism like? To what extent did the disparate worlds of Judaism and modern Enlightenment jostle each other in his mind and to what degree could he harmonize them? These questions are not easily answered, and it is only in the aggregate of a multitude of accounts of experiences, reaction, and statements on his part that the answer is to be found. The book will be of interest not only to those who are concerned with Jewish intellectual history but also to those interested in eighteenth-century cultural and social history, philosophy and theology, literary criticism, aesthetics, and the other areas of intellectual activity in ferment at that time. The general reader will also find much of contemporary relevance in Mendelssohn's life, not only because of his exemplary devotion to reason and tolerance, but also because of his lifelong struggle with the basic dilemma of the Jew in the modern world: the attraction of assimilation versus the singularity of Jewish life, and the preservation of Jewish identity versus integration in the wider society.

African Intellectual History and Historiography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathon L. Earle
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Public Libraries ◽  
Modern World ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The 1960S

Intellectual historians of Africa are principally concerned with how Africans have understood and contested the contexts that they inhabited in the past, and how ideas and vernacular discourses change over time. As a particular approach in historical methodology it is closely associated with cultural history, and its evolution followed the emergence of political history writing during the 1960s and social history during the 1980s. The first innovative works in African intellectual history were concerned with pan-Africanism and Négritude. These studies were followed by histories of religious ideas and social dissent. Historians have since offered varying descriptions of Africa’s “intellectuals.” For some, Africa’s colonial intellectuals were mostly missionary-educated literati, while others emphasize Africa’s rural intellectual histories and the importance of studying “homespun,” or vernacular historiographies. African epistemologies and knowledge production have also remained a central concern in the study of African intellectual history. To illuminate Africa’s intellectual registers, historians interrogate different topics, regions, and temporalities. Historians of precolonial Africa use historical linguistics to understand the intersection of ideas about public healing and social organization. Scholars of the colonial period challenge many of the earlier assumptions held by colonial researchers and policy makers, who had cast African communities as primordial, conquered peoples. Intellectual historians, by contrast, explore the constantly changing arenas of ideational disputation and political contestation within African societies. Intellectual historians of gender have shown how ideas about production, masculinity, and femininity have informed competing nodes of authority. By the early 21st century, global intellectual historians began demonstrating how Africans reworked European political ideas into local vernacular debates about the past, and how Africans have shaped the making of the modern world. To write Africa’s intellectuals histories, scholars draw from a range of sources, which are often maintained in institutional archives, public libraries, and private homes. These sources—textual, oral, and material—include letters, diaries, annotated libraries, vernacular newspapers, grammars, novels, oral histories, linguistic etymologies, sculptures, clothing, paintings, photography, film, and music.

Niccolo Machiavelli

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Niccolo Machiavelli ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Western World ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Niccolò Machiavelli ◽  
History Of ◽  
Republican Government ◽  
The Stability

As he suggests in a justly famous letter written to a friend in 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli (b. 1469–d. 1527) lived most fully when he communed in thought with the great ancient writers on the greatest deeds of Antiquity—and in succeeding centuries he continued to live on in the thoughts and through the writings of such great thinkers as Spinoza and Tocqueville; Marlowe and Shakespeare, Fichte and Nietzsche, not to mention indirectly in the deeds of Cromwell, Robespierre, Mazzini, and Lenin. Machiavelli comes to us wrapped in this diverse and contested tradition but also and more immediately in the garb of contemporary scholarship, where diversity and contestation abound, as well. One thing all scholarly parties can agree on is that the Florentine was vastly important—be it as a preeminent expression of the cyclonic intellectual activity of a time we now call the Renaissance, as the restorer of classical republican ideals, the founder of the modern world, the apostle of power politics, or the father of modern revolutionary thought. Born at a time of relative stability for Italy due in no small part to the successful machinations of Florence’s Medici rulers, Machiavelli’s young adulthood saw the stability vanish with the invasion of Italy by the French and the expulsion from Florence of the Medici. By 1498 he found himself serving the republican government of Florence that, in 1512, was itself brought down, leading to Machiavelli’s political banishment and to the writing of the works that would cause him to be counted among the greatest figures of the Renaissance and of the intellectual history of the Western world.

William James and the Modernist Esthetics of Religion

2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 154-162
Author(s):  
Amanda Porterfield
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
William James ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Intellectual Biography ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Annie Dillard ◽  
The Universe ◽  
As If

In his intellectual biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Robert Richardson never defines modernism, and never addresses the reasons for its turbulence in America. But he does present the maelstrom through his subject, showing how James helped drive the modernist sensibility he inhabited—a whirlwind of creativity and intellectual passion “whose leading ideas,” to quote Richardson, “are still so fresh and challenging that they are not yet fully assimilated by the modern world they helped to bring about.” Presenting James as an intellectual activity, Richardson focuses on bringing the emotional background of that activity into view, chronicling James's intellectual history as splashes from a turbulent stream of consciousness. The book's dedication to Annie Dillard next to the book's epigraph from James reveals Richardson's respect for the volatility both writers represented. The dedication is: “For Annie, who wrote, ‘we have less time than we knew and that time buoyant, and cloven, lucent, missile, and wild,’” followed by the epigraph from James testifying that, “[life] feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.”

War in Social Thought

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Joas ◽  
Wolfgang Knöbl
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Original Argument

This book provides a sweeping critical history of social theories about war and peace from Thomas Hobbes to the present. It presents both a broad intellectual history and an original argument as it traces the development of thinking about war over more than 350 years—from the premodern era to the period of German idealism and the Scottish and French enlightenments, and then from the birth of sociology in the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. While focusing on social thought, the book draws on many disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, and political science. It demonstrate the profound difficulties most social thinkers—including liberals, socialists, and those intellectuals who could be regarded as the first sociologists—had in coming to terms with the phenomenon of war, the most obvious form of large-scale social violence. With only a few exceptions, these thinkers, who believed deeply in social progress, were unable to account for war because they regarded it as marginal or archaic, and on the verge of disappearing. This overly optimistic picture of the modern world persisted in social theory even in the twentieth century, as most sociologists and social theorists either ignored war and violence in their theoretical work or tried to explain it away. The failure of the social sciences and especially sociology to understand war, the book argues, must be seen as one of the greatest weaknesses of disciplines that claim to give a convincing diagnosis of our times.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

scholarly journals The Annihilation of Space: A Bad (Historical) Concept

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Alexis D. Litvine
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Cultural Mediation ◽  
Counter Example ◽  
Dead End ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Representations Of Space

Abstract This article is a reminder that the concept of ‘annihilation of space’ or ‘spatial compression’, often used as a shorthand for referring to the cultural or economic consequences of industrial mobility, has a long intellectual history. The concept thus comes loaded with a specific outlook on the experience of modernity, which is – I argue – unsuitable for any cultural or social history of space. This article outlines the etymology of the concept and shows: first, that the historical phenomena it pretends to describe are too complex for such a simplistic signpost; and, second, that the term is never a neutral descriptor but always an engagement with a form of historical and cultural mediation on the nature of modernity in relation to space. In both cases this term obfuscates more than it reveals. As a counter-example, I look at the effect of the railways on popular representations of space and conclude that postmodern geography is a relative dead end for historians interested in the social and cultural history of space.

Zionism’s Redemptions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arieh Saposnik
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political History ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
New Framework

In this volume, Arieh Saposnik examines the complicated relations between nationalism and religious (and non-religious) redemptive traditions through the case study of Zionism. He provides a new framework for understanding the central ideas of this movement and its relationship to traditional Jewish ideas, Christian thought, and modern secular messianisms. Providing a longue-durée and broad view of the central themes and motivations in the making of Zionism, Saposnik connects its intellectual history with the concrete development of the Zionist project in Israel in its cultural, social, and political history. Saposnik demonstrates how Zionism offers lessons for a politics in which human perfectibility continues to serve as a guiding light and as a counter-narrative to the contemporary politics of self-interest, self-promotion and 'post-truth.' This is a study that bears implications for our understanding of modernity, of space and place, history and historical trajectories, and the place of Jews and Judaism in the modern world.

Collected Essays

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haym Soloveitchik
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Methodological Study ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
Hasidei Ashkenaz

Continuing the contribution to medieval Jewish intellectual history, this book's author focuses here on the radical pietist movement of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz and its main literary work, Sefer Ḥasidim, and on the writings and personality of the Provençal commentator Ravad of Posquières. In both areas the author challenges mainstream views to provide a new understanding of medieval Jewish thought. Some of the essays are revised and updated versions of work previously published, and some are entirely new, but in all of them the author challenges reigning views to provide a new understanding of medieval Jewish thought. The section on Sefer Ḥasidim brings together over half a century of the author's writings on German Pietism, many of which originally appeared in obscure publications, and adds two new essays. The first of these is a methodological study of how to read this challenging work and an exposition of what constitutes a valid historical inference, while the second reviews the validity of the sociological and anthropological inferences presented in contemporary historiography. In discussing Ravad's oeuvre, the author questions the widespread notion that Ravad's chief accomplishment was his commentary on Maimonides' Mishneh Torah; his Talmud commentary, he claims, was of far greater importance and was his true masterpiece. He also adds a new study that focuses on the acrimony between Ravad, as the low-born genius of Posquières, and R. Zeraḥyah ha-Levi of Lunel, who belonged to the Jewish aristocracy of Languedoc, and considers the implications of that relationship.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document