Plant Societies and Enlightened Vegetality

2019 ◽  
pp. 56-85
Author(s):  
Natania Meeker ◽  
Antónia Szabari
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Plant Life ◽  
Alternate Conception ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
Botanical Classification

This chapter investigates the emergence, in the form of an enlightened plant, of utopian theories of vegetal sociability in the eighteenth century, at a time that witnesses the proliferation of schemes for botanical classification and physiological inquiries into plant life. These theories both herald and resist the development of classificatory systems and a biopolitics modeled on vegetal life. Authors Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) and Tiphaigne de la Roche (1722–1774) create new narratives of liberal and rationally-governed societies by peopling them with plants. Yet these utopian visions are not only hopeful, they also bring into view a plant that troubles the very concept of society by existing in a state of utter indifference to need and human desire. Thus these works also make visible the possibility of an alternate conception of modernity in which the plant delivers a powerful critique of enlightenment itself.

Commercial Society and Christian Virtue: The Mandeville-Law Dispute

1989 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Nieli
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
The Common ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
Bernard Mandeville ◽  
Material Progress

From earliest apostolic and patristic times, Christian writers have generally been suspicious of the common human desire to improve one's economic status. In Britain, however, by the end of the seventeenth century, this suspicion had all but vanished as most Christians began to accommodate themselves to the exigencies of an increasingly dynamic commercial society. This article takes up the early eighteenth-century controversy over the compatibility of traditional Christian moral virtues with the demands of economic and material progress as reflected in the writings of the two most important antagonists in the controversy, Bernard Mandeville and William Law. Although both Mandeville and Law spoke the language of Christian rigorism and perfectionism, and proclaimed attachment to the full austerity of the Christian Gospels, Mandeville, it is explained, was really a hedonist in disguise who feigned attachment to traditional Christian and Stoic ascetic principles merely to be able to discredit those principles. Law, it is explained, was a man of uncommon piety and devoutness who was shocked by the increasing secularism and materialism of his age, and who sought to recall his contemporaries to a life of true Christian holiness. The article concludes with an evaluation of the relative merits of the positions of each of the two thinkers.

scholarly journals Interchangeable Bodies: International Marriage and Migration in the Eighteenth-Century Moravian Church

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 348-366
Author(s):  
Kelly Douma-Kaelin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
International Partnerships ◽  
Moravian Church ◽  
The Social ◽  
Family Based ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Global Church ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
The Church

This article investigates the extent to which the theology and structure of marriage within the German Moravian Church functioned to connect and grow the Church as an international network across the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. Specifically, it argues that Moravian conceptions of marriage facilitated intentional international partnerships that led to the relocation and migration of many European women as Moravian missionaries throughout the eighteenth century. In some instances, early Moravians lived in sex-segregated communal housing and viewed sexual intercourse as a sacred unification with Christ, free of human desire. Part of the Moravian impetus to be “everywhere at home” required preventing individual congregational differences in order to create a larger international community. If the Church aimed to view all brothers and sisters as productive bodies to serve the growth of the community, then these bodies needed to be interchangeable and unrooted to a specific space. The premeditated practice of intermarriage between congregations meant that there were not individual groups that practiced the Moravian faith, but rather a singular global church family. Based on an analysis of Moravian missionary women's memoirs, this article begins to delve into the social and geographic mobility available to these eighteenth-century women through a nonnormative marital structure.

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