Skin colour

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mechthild Fend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Medical Problem ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Microscopic Structure ◽  
Body Colour ◽  
Medical Illustration ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Medical Theory ◽  
A New Technique

This chapter shows that the notion of skin colour emerged only gradually since the sixteenth century and became a prominent marker of race in conjunction with the development of racial anthropology during the Enlightenment. The colour of a person used to be perceived as body colour and often referred to as complexion, a term linked to the ancient medical theory of the four humours and temperaments. The artistic making and mixing of flesh tones was closely linked to humoral theory. By the eighteenth century most anatomist interested in the microscopic structure of skin agreed that the body's colouring matter – later called pigment – resides in an outer layer of the skin. This was demonstrated in an early medical illustration by Jan Admiral made for a Bernard Albinus‘ anatomical treatise on the colour of the skin. Interestingly, the print also uses a new technique of colour printing, and the argument is that skin colour is simultaneously an artistic, technical and medical problem in this colour mezzotint. Finally, an analysis of Girodet's Portrait of Belley and Benoist's Portrait d'une negresse suggests that skin colour is both a political and representational problem in these portraits painted shortly after the French Revolution.

Making Terrorism Thinkable: The Philosophy of the Act and Its European Reception

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Ries
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
The State ◽  
Johann Gottlieb Fichte ◽  
State Terror ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Mikhail Bakunin ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter challenges the widespread assumption that terrorist ideology was invented in the mid-nineteenth century by such figures as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. Instead, the chapter argues, the foundations of terrorism were laid at the end of the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his disciples, who in turn exerted a strong influence on later radical thinkers. In showing how the intellectual reverberations of the French Revolution gave rise to anarchist ideology as well as acts of terrorism in Germany, the chapter traces a link between the state terror of the French Revolution and the emergence of insurgent terrorism.

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.

A Contested Inheritance: The Family and the Law from the Enlightenment to the French Revolution

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-87
Author(s):  
Hannah Callaway
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Family Law ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Family ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines a particularly interesting inheritance case from late-eighteenth-century France to study the intersection of legal practices and Enlightenment ideas at the end of the Old Regime. The case, involving dispute around the estate of a deceased tax farmer, addresses family relations broadly within the specific context of inheritance and spousal assets. The five briefs produced on appeal to the Parlement of Paris show particular engagement with Enlightenment themes of reason, nature, and sentiment. The family was a locus of particular interest in eighteenth-century France because of its implications for social relations and its connection, through inheritance, to royal sovereignty. However, family law has been primarily studied from the perspective of practices, whereas the present article focuses on ideals. The article argues that the courtroom was an important site where the diverse implications of Enlightenment thought on family law were worked out. The argument that family law was a site for integrating ideals into practices has implications for how we think about the relationship between law and social change, as well as, in particular, the relationship between Enlightenment and Revolution.

Utilitarianism and Reform: Social Theory and Social Change, 1750–1800

Utilitas ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Burns
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Systematic Development ◽  
Long Life

The object of this article is to examine, with the work of Jeremy Bentham as the principal example, one strand in the complex pattern of European social theory during the second half of the eighteenth century. This was of course the period not only of the American and French revolutions, but of the culmination of the movements of thought constituting what we know as the Enlightenment. Like all great historical episodes, the Enlightenment was both the fulfilment of long-established processes and the inauguration of new processes of which the fulfilment lay in the future. Thus the seminal ideas of seventeenth-century rationalism (in moral and social theory the idea, above all, of natural law) realized and perhaps exhausted their potentialities in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The ideas with which this article is concerned, however—conveniently grouped and labelled as the ideas of utilitarianism—only began to achieve systematic development in these later decades of the eighteenth century. Within that period—during the first half and more of Bentham's long life—attempts to apply those ideas to the solution of social problems met largely with failure and frustration. Yet unrealized potentialities remained, the realization of which was reserved for a time when the world of the philosophes no longer existed. The movements for social and political reform which have played so large a part in modern history since the French Revolution may be judged in widely differing ways; but whatever the verdict, these movements surely cannot be understood without due consideration of that part of their origins which lies in eighteenth-century utilitarianism.

Hellenism in the Enlightenment

2009 ◽  
pp. 165-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Cartledge
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
European History ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

This article moves past the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and, in particular, to the French Revolution, which crystallized an important, if not fully understood, moment in the history of Hellenism. It shows how the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the inspiration for so many of the French revolutionaries, were simultaneously proto-democratic and pro-Spartan. In this respect, Rousseau marks a complex breakthrough in the political traditions of Hellenism, which were, for much of European history until the eighteenth century, anti-democratic and pro-Spartan.

FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE TERROR: NEW GENEALOGIES

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-162
Author(s):  
ANNELIEN DE DIJN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Prolific Author ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

Dan Edelstein is a prolific author. In less than two years he has produced not one but two books. His first, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution, was published by The University of Chicago Press in October 2009. Its Irish twin, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy, appeared with the same press in the fall of 2010. Each of these books deals with a much-studied subject—respectively the Terror and the Enlightenment—the kind of subject, in other words, about which even the most recent literature alone can fill entire libraries. Yet in both cases, Edelstein manages to make a contribution of startling originality and importance. It is clear that this literary scholar—Edelstein is a professor of French and Italian at Stanford University—is one of the most important new voices in the field of eighteenth-century French intellectual history. In this review, I will start by discussing both of his books separately. I will then conclude with some reflections on what Edelstein's work contributes to our understanding of eighteenth-century intellectual history when read as a whole.

Sans-Culottes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sonenscher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Urban Violence ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
Revolutionary Period ◽  
The French Revolution

This is a bold new history of the sans-culottes and the part they played in the French Revolution. It tells for the first time the real story of the name now usually associated with urban violence and popular politics during the revolutionary period. By doing so, it also shows how the politics and economics of the revolution can be combined to form a genuinely historical narrative of its content and course. To explain how an early eighteenth-century salon society joke about breeches and urbanity was transformed into a republican emblem, this book examines contemporary debates about Ciceronian, Cynic, and Cartesian moral philosophy, as well as subjects ranging from music and the origins of government to property and the nature of the human soul. By piecing together this now forgotten story, the book opens up new perspectives on the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy, the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the political history of the French Revolution itself.

LIVING THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: JAMES WATT, MATTHEW BOULTON, AND THEIR SONS

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER M. JONES
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Steam Engine ◽  
The West ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
West Midlands ◽  
History Of ◽  
James Watt ◽  
Discrete Family

This article is a contribution to the cultural history of English Enlightenment. It examines the formation of a discrete ‘family’ of philosophes in the West Midlands who maintained close links with their counterparts on the continent. Birmingham's role as a magnet for ‘industrial tourists’ in the second half of the eighteenth century helped to propagate the influence of this local intelligentsia who were mostly members of the Lunar Society. None the less, it is argued that the activities of the Society correspond more closely to an Enlightenment than to a proto-industrial pattern of inquiry. The events of 1789 in France disrupted this philosophic ‘family’. Their impact is explored through the medium of a real family; that of James Watt, the engineer, who came to Birmingham to manufacture the steam engine in partnership with Matthew Boulton. The vicissitudes of the Watt family, and of other prominent members of the Lunar Society, are unravelled to illustrate the dilemmas faced by men raised in the values of the Enlightenment when confronted with the reality – and the proximity – of a far-reaching political revolution.

In Pursuit of Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Participatory Politics ◽  
Private Citizens ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Public Instruction ◽  
The French Revolution

In pursuit of politics offers a new interpretation of debates over education and politics in the early years of the French Revolution. Following these debates from the 1760s to the early years of the Republic (1792-94), and putting well-known works in dialogue with previously-neglected sources, it situates education at the center of revolutionary contests over citizenship, participatory politics, and representative government.Education was central to how people thought about what was possible, desirable, and achievable in eighteenth-century France. With that in mind, In pursuit of politics uses the debates over education as a window onto one of history’s most dramatic periods of political uncertainty and upheaval, anxiety and ambition. It weaves together debates taking place among Enlightenment writers, philosophes, royal and institutional administrators and, later, among revolutionary legislators, private citizens, political clubs, and provincial schoolmasters. This book explores the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, highlights the emergence of “public instruction” as a revolutionary pedagogy, and allows us to think in new ways about how the citizens and statesmen of eighteenth-century France tried to navigate modern politics at their tumultuous start.

Early Modern Socinianism and Unitarianism

2014 ◽  
pp. 360-372
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
The Trinity

This essay describes the version of Christianity set out by Faustus Socinus, including his critique of the Trinity and the atonement, and his understanding of Christian ethics. It shows how his theology was taken up and developed by later Socinians, and describes how the role of reason in Socinian theology changed. The challenges which Socinianism posed to mainstream theology, especially in a period when new philosophies were being explored, are outlined. From the middle of the seventeenth century, Arian and then Unitarian ideas were heard, but these then receded into the background in the eighteenth century. It is suggested that the anti-Trinitarians benefited from changing attitudes toward philosophy and human nature during the Enlightenment, but that the French Revolution ushered in a new era of conservatism and hostility toward Socinianism and Unitarianism, at least in Europe.

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