Sympathy for a Devil’s Chaplain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Boddice
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Evolutionary Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
Evolutionary Science ◽  
Greater Good ◽  
Moral Feeling

Chapter 2 explains why the luminaries of Darwinian science were thought to have cast such a pall over civilised morality and moral feeling. It provides the intellectual history of Darwinian sympathy, beginning with the inheritance of a set of ideas from Adam Smith, as well as a study on how the life of an evolutionist was influenced through living the theory. An analysis of the evolutionary science of emotions argues that evolutionists tended to see themselves at the vanguard of evolutionary development, better able than ‘ordinary’ men, or women, or ‘lower’ races, to feel out the greater good and act accordingly.

War, Peace, and Progress: Militarism and Pacifism in Evolutionary Thought, 1898-1920

1970 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Massie
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
International System ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Evolutionary Thought ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Evolutionary Science ◽  
Evolutionary Narratives ◽  
First World

Much of the academic literature written about the First World War has tended to revolve around questions of diplomacy, foreign policy, and the International System as it existed in Europe in the decades before the war began. To balance this, I analyze the intellectual history of evolutionary thought as it applied to the question of war, peace, and the alleged “pugnacity” of man before and during the war years. Many people viewed the world of international conflict through the lens of socio-biological progress and a “struggle for existence” among humans, nations, and races. By identifying three broad intellectual trends, I argue that these evolutionary narratives of the war question were diverse. Some used the language of human evolution to arguethat war was an inevitable engine of progress whereas others stressed different concepts in evolutionary science, such as cooperation, to make pacifist arguments. A third school of thought, the pessimists, argued that man was inherently warlike but that this instinct could be tamed. As the centennial anniversary of the July Crisis and the beginning of the First World War approaches, it is worth investigating the ideational “mood” of the era and the intellectual climate which allowed for such a devastating war to take place.

Lineages of Empire

2009 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
History Of ◽  
Popular Interest

Recently there has been an explosion of academic and popular interest in the history of how Britons have thought about their Empire. This book focuses on the ways in which the intellectual history and political thought of modern Britain have been saturated with imperial concerns. The chapters address thematic questions about size and scale, race, colonial emigration, and the ideological uses of the classical tradition, questions that are crucial for understanding the historical roots of British imperial thought. There are also studies of figures central to understanding the character of intellectual debates about the British Empire from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries: Edmund Burke, James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Harold Laski. The book also shows how an awareness of these histories of the imperial past can provide numerous lessons for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of much contemporary political thinking about empire and imperialism.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Thought

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....

Essays on Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Berry
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Subsequent Work ◽  
Retrospective Assessment ◽  
The 1960S

A collection of essays by a leading scholar. The work selected spans several decades, which together with three new unpublished pieces, cumulatively constitute a distinct interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole while incorporating detailed examination of the work of David Hume and Adam Smith. There is, in addition, a substantial introduction which, alongside Berry’s personal intellectual history, provides a commentary on the development of the study of the Scottish Enlightenment from the 1960s. Each of the previously published chapters includes a postscript where Berry comments on subsequent work and his own retrospective assessment. The recurrent themes are the ideas of sociability and socialisation, the Humean science of man and Smith’s analysis of the relation between commerce and morality.

Indian Sex Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Global History ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
History Of

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

Idleness and Freedom in Michel de Montaigne’s “Essays”

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

The article advances a hypothesis about the composition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Specialists in the intellectual history of the Renaissance have long considered the relationship among Montaigne’s thematically heterogeneous thoughts, which unfold unpredictably and often seen to contradict each other. The waywardness of those reflections over the years was a way for Montaigne to construct a self-portrait. Spontaneity of thought is the essence of the person depicted and an experimental literary technique that was unprecedented in its time and has still not been surpassed. Montaigne often writes about freedom of reflection and regards it as an extremely important topic. There have been many attempts to interpret the haphazardness of the Essays as the guiding principle in their composition. According to one such interpretation, the spontaneous digressions and readiness to take up very different philosophical notions is a form of of varietas and distinguo, which Montaigne understood in the context of Renaissance philosophy. Another interpretation argues that the Essays employ the rhetorical techniques of Renaissance legal commentary. A third opinion regards the Essays as an example of sprezzatura, a calculated negligence that calls attention to the aesthetic character of Montaigne’s writing. The author of the article argues for a different interpretation that is based on the concept of idleness to which Montaigne assigned great significance. He had a keen appreciation of the role of otium in the culture of ancient Rome and regarded leisure as an inner spiritual quest for self-knowledge. According to Montaigne, idleness permits self-directedness, and it is an ideal form in which to practice the freedom of thought that brings about consistency in writing, living and reality, in all of which Montaigne finds one general property - complete inconstancy. Socratic self-knowledge, a skepticism derived from Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, and a rejection of the conventions of traditional rhetoric that was similar to Seneca’s critique of it were all brought to bear on the concept of idleness and made Montaigne’s intellectual and literary experimentation in the Essays possible.

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