Hoe verlicht waren de genootschappen? - De achttiende-eeuwse sociabiliteit in recent historisch onderzoek

2014 ◽  
Vol 127 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-209
Author(s):  
Jordy Geerlings
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Important Object ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Many ◽  
Traditional Understanding

The many forms of sociability that flourished during the eighteenth century have long been viewed as vehicles of the Enlightenment. Not only were societies, clubs, and lodges permeated by a spirit of egalitarianism, secularism, and religious tolerance, they were also essential factors in the dissemination of knowledge and new ideas. Additionally, sociability has been associated with the rise of the public sphere and civil society, as various societies provided important platforms for the new bourgeois public to discuss and address the issues of the day. However, recent research has challenged these views. Historians are increasingly finding that many societies were permeable to a variety of worldviews and practices, not all of which can be meaningfully associated with the Enlightenment. New insights also suggest the importance of local restrictions and social conventions influencing many societies, further complicating the traditional understanding of the progressive, enlightened nature of sociability during this period. At the same time, sociability remains an important object of research in its own right, as well as an indispensible window onto an ever increasing variety of historical phenomena. This article explores the ways in which recent research has transformed our understanding of sociability and its place in the Enlightenment.

“A Swarm of Laughter!” On Kierkegaard’s Conception of Enthusiasm and Its Comedic Remedy, an Enlightenment Inheritance

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carson Seabourn Webb
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Many

AbstractToday the term “enthusiasm” signifies little more than innocuous excitement. During the Enlightenment, however, the term was abuzz with pejorative innuendos of sub-humanity, the many nuances of which were debated in the public sphere. Its significance was more sting than substance, however, and by the middle of the nineteenth century Kierkegaard could complain that the category of enthusiasm had become hopelessly unclear. Despite this, based on The Book on Adler and on three texts in which Kierkegaard uses Socrates as a prototype of enthusiasm, I argue that Kierkegaard’s concept of enthusiasm places him in the lineage of earlier Enlightenment writers, such as Lessing, Shaftesbury, and Kant, whose conceptions and critiques of enthusiasm Kierkegaard was familiar with. By putting Kierkegaard’s use of the comic in The Book on Adler into conversation with Shaftesbury’s and Kant’s comedic remedies for enthusiasm, the extent to which Kierkegaard is an inheritor of and detractor from this tradition becomes evident

Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel on the Status of Women in the State

2021 ◽  
pp. 157-176
Author(s):  
Charlotte Sabourin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Categorical Imperative ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Status ◽  
Civil Status ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Status Of Women

Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, mayor of Königsberg, was a friend and former student of Immanuel Kant. This chapter investigates Hippel’s plea for the improvement of the civil status of women in eighteenth-century Germany. Hippel argues that men and women are equal and that this equality should lead to similar civil status. On these grounds, he shows that the Enlightenment is bound to be self-defeating if women are excluded from the public sphere. In doing so, he proposes a feminist appropriation of some of Kant’s ideas—in particular by revisiting the categorical imperative. Hippel’s proposals thus provide support to the idea that the legal subordination of women is a problem for the enactment of the Enlightenment broadly construed, and even more so in a Kantian perspective.

Sex in the City that Peter Built: The Demimonde and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth Century St. Petersburg

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-930
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The City

This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provides a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I's era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”

Deconstructing female conventions

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 11-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria E. Rodríguez-Gil
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
At Home

Summary This paper examines Ann Fisher’s (1719–1778) most important and influential work, A New Grammar (1745?). In this grammar, the author did not follow the trend of making English grammar fit the Latin pattern, a common practice still in the eighteenth century. Instead, she wrote an English grammar based on the nature and observation of her mother tongue. Besides, she scattered throughout her grammar a wide set of teaching devices, the ‘examples of bad English’ being her most important contribution. Her innovations and her new approach to the description of English grammar were indeed welcomed by contemporary readers, since her grammar saw almost forty editions and reprints, it influenced other grammarians, for instance Thomas Spence (1750–1814), and it reached other markets, such as London. In order to understand more clearly the value of this grammar and of its author, this grammar has to be seen in the context of her life. For this reason, we will also discuss some details of her unconventional lifestyle: unconventional in the sense that she led her life in the public sphere, not happy with the prevailing idea that women should be educated for a life at home.

(Un)Liberated and Contested Narratives

2019 ◽  
pp. 334-347
Author(s):  
Bongani C Ndhlovu
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Many ◽  
Contested Narratives

This chapter analyses the influence of the state in shaping museum narratives, especially in a liberated society such as South Africa. It argues that while the notion of social cohesion and nation building is an ideal that many South African museums should strive for, the technocratisation of museum processes has to a degree led to a disregard of the public sphere as a space of open engagement. Secondly, the chapter also looks at the net-effect of museums professionals and boards in the development of their narrative. It argues that due to the nature of their expertise and interests, and the focus on their areas of specialisation, museums may hardly claim to be representative of the many voices they ought to represent. As such, the chapter explores contestations in museum spaces. It partly does so by exploring the notion “free-spokenness” and its limits in museum spaces. To amplify its argument, the chapter uses some exhibitions that generated critical engagements from Iziko Museums of South Africa.

Battles of Ideas Between the Legal and the Legitimate

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-161
Author(s):  
Paula Castro ◽  
Sonia Brondi ◽  
Alberta Contarello
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Many

This chapter discusses how social psychology can offer theoretical contributions for a better understanding of the relations between the institutional and public spheres and how this may impact change in ecological matters. First, it introduces the difference between natural and agreed—or chosen—limits to human action and draws on Sophocles’s Antigone to illustrate this and discuss how legitimacy has roots in the many heterogeneous values of the public sphere/consensual universe, while legality arises from the institutional/reified sphere. Recalling some empirical research in the area of social studies of sustainability, it then shows how a social representations perspective can help us understand the dynamic and interdependent relations between the institutional or reified sphere and the consensual or common sense universe—and their implications for social change and continuity.

In Search of “Fellow Pilgrims”: Radical Protestants and Transconfessional Exchanges in Europe and the British Atlantic, c. 1670–1730

2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 590-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bouldin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
British Isles ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
The Public ◽  
Geographic Boundaries ◽  
The Public Sphere

The mobility and literacy of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dissenters allowed for the circulation of people and ideas throughout Europe, the British Isles, and colonial North America. This article focuses on the interactions of dissenting groups who flourished in the half century between the Restoration and the Great Awakening, such as English Philadelphians, French Prophets, radical German Pietists, Quakers, Bourignonians, and Labadists. It considers how a push for further reforms, particularly those arising from the context of late seventeenth-century millenarianism, served as a catalyst for radical Protestants to seek out other dissenters with the goal of uniting communities of reformers across linguistic, confessional, and geographic boundaries. Dissenters facilitated their endeavors through the development of new sites of sociability, a reliance on implicit codes of expected behavior, and the circulation of manuscript and printed texts. By relying on mechanisms of the public sphere, they carried out esoteric conversations and critical debates about radical Protestantism.

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