scholarly journals The Enlightenment in Practice: Swedish Travellers and Knowledge about the Metal Trades

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Göran Rydén
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Tree Of Knowledge ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Mechanical Arts

Ever since the publication of the Encyclop&eacute;die, in the decades after mid-eighteenth century, there has been an on-going debate about the implications of the metaphor of enlightenment, mainly based on themes discussed in Diderot&rsquo;s and d&rsquo;Alembert&rsquo;s work. Sadly, however, one major field has been left outside; scholars have dealt with two branches of the tree of knowledge, science and the liberal arts, but ignored the branch of mechanical arts. This article takes a starting-point in the reintroduction of political economy, with division of labour, and technology into an assessment of the Enlightenment. It has the ambition of discussing the process whereby progress became a central feature of eighteenth-century thinking, as well as relating this to a discussion about travelling to other places. It deals with Swedish travellers going to Britain, and central Europe, to view differently organised trades with elaborate division of labour, more skilled artisans, fitted<br />into a commercial economy.

Netzwerktheorie und Aufklärungsforschung

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nacim Ghanbari
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Starting Point

AbstractThis essay proposes a new appraisal of eighteenth century patronage culture. To this end, findings regarding network theory arrived at in the framework of research on the Enlightenment are extremely valuable. The discussion’s starting point is a reading of Friedrich Nicolai’s novel

Comment

1999 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 229-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intellectual Challenge

The Articles By David Sorkin and Edmund Kern have a common starting point. Both address aspects of the reform movement that unfolded in the Habsburg lands under Maria Theresa. They underline an argument made by much recent work on the subject that the movement in question, though committed to substantial changes in the social and cultural fabric, was fundamentally Catholic in its inspiration and only loosely and partially aligned with either the great intellectual challenge of the Enlightenment or the fuller and later program of reconstruction that has come to be known in the Austrian context as Josephinism. Both writers acknowledge the powerful contributory stimulus from abroad to the new climate of ideas generated in the monarchy by the travails of the mid-eighteenth century, but submit that those ideas besically arose out of a domestic evolution, especially within ecclesiastical circles.

Freedom and Perfection: German Debates on the State in the Eighteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 1003-1023 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Moggach
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Political Intervention

Abstract.This paper explores eighteenth-century German debates on the relation of freedom and perfection in the course of which Kant works out his juridical theory. It contrasts the perfectionist ideas of political activity in Christian Wolff and Karl von Dalberg (a historically important but neglected figure), with Fichte's program inThe Closed Commercial State(1800), distinguishing logics of political intervention. Examining insufficiently recognized aspects of the intellectual context for Kant's distinction between happiness, right and virtue, the paper demonstrates Fichte's (problematic) application of Kantian ideas of freedom to political economy and contests current interpretations of the politically disengaged character or attenuated modernism of German political philosophy in the Enlightenment.Résumé.Ce texte étudie le rapport entre liberté et perfection dans la pensée allemande du dix-huitième siècle. C'est dans le contexte de ces débats que Kant élabore sa propre théorie juridique. En examinant les fondements théoriques de l'intervention politique, le texte fait une distinction entre le perfectionnisme éthique de Christian Wolff et de Karl von Dalberg (personnage historiquement important mais peu étudié), et le programme d'inspiration kantienne proposé par Fichte dans sonÉtat commercial fermé(1800).L'objectif du texte est de reconstruire le contexte intellectuel de la distinction kantienne entre bonheur, droit et vertu, et de démontrer l'usage problématique qu'en fait Fichte dans le domaine de l'économie politique. Le texte remet en question des interprétations récentes qui dévalorisent l'engagement politique et le modernisme des Lumières allemandes.

The Quiet Scientific Revolution: Problem-Solving and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of “Newtonian” Mechanics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mathematical Treatment ◽  
Newtonian Mechanics ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Select Group ◽  
Starting Point

A narrative is proposed for eighteenth-century origins of “Newtonian” mechanics, according to which there are two relevant streams of development. One was the popularization of Newtonian natural philosophy, particularly in France in connection with the philosophe movement and the Enlightenment. This movement was inspired primarily by the example of Newton’s Opticks and embraced induction from observation and experiment. Newton’s Principia (1687), on the other hand, and its mathematical treatment of forces and motion, was exceedingly difficult. Solving novel problems in mechanics not addressed in the Principia required the kind of training possessed by a select group of mathematicians, most of whom were already engaged in a program of mathematical mechanics and did not identify as Newtonians nor took Principia as their starting point. The loudly celebrated, popular Newtonianism was lacking a program in mechanics until the end of the eighteenth century, when it subsumed, ironically, the mechanics of the non-Newtonians.

Flaubert versus the Enlightenment: The Libidinal Economy of Knowledge in Bouvard et Pécuchet

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-218
Author(s):  
James Ramsey Wallen
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Effective Response ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Bouvard Et Pecuchet

Abstract This article reads Flaubert's unfinished final novel Bouvard et Pécuchet as a two-volume epic that demonstrates the secret of the encyclopedia: the fact that different calculi of truth functions can be seen to operate independently in different areas of knowledge, that knowledge itself contains contradictions. Taking Lukács's distinction between “narrative” and “descriptive” realism as a starting point, I argue that Bouvard in fact “narrates” the very changes Lukács describes, depicting a historical shift that speaks not only to changes in literary practice but to fundamental changes in the theory and organization of knowledge itself (compare Umberto Eco's From Tree to Labyrinth). Drawing on Bernard Stiegler's theory of the “proletarianization of consumption” in the postmodern “libidinal economy,” I read Flaubert as offering a prophetic Marxist critique of the political economy (centered around the consumption of information) that determines Bouvard and Pécuchet's estate. The novel's structure as an immoralist bildungsroman—in which the protagonists’ faithful pursuit of Enlightenment ideals eventually leads them to directly reject those ideals—corresponds to and predicts the situation diagnosed by Stiegler in For a New Critique of Political Economy. Finally, I point to a cycle of sublimation and desublimation in the novel regarding knowledge and stupidity, a complex cycle that nonetheless makes it possible to read the ascetic-aesthetic copy-mapping project of volume 2 (the Sottisier) as a cynical but effective response to dehumanizing capitalist processes like proletarianization and the desublimation of knowledge.

The Enlightenment at War

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1851-1854 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine Dobie
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Cultural Minority ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Low Profile ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Status ◽  
Indian War ◽  
Global War

Though few today, even in academic circles, can say with certainty when, where, or over what issues the seven years' war was fought, this mid-eighteenth-century conflict can fairly be characterized as the first global war. It was fought on three continents—Europe, North America, and Asia—and there were significant encounters in West Africa and the Caribbean. It engaged all the European powers, and it is estimated to have cost over a million lives. The historian Linda Colley has characterized the Seven Years' War as “[t]he most dramatically successful war the British ever fought” (101). From the standpoint of empire, this assessment is accurate. The war established the contours of the vast British Empire and brought the rival French presence in North America and India to a sudden end. It also had transformative outcomes for the populations caught in the crossfire. Terms such as global, diaspora, refugee, and cultural minority are more widely applied in discussions of contemporary transnational warfare, but they helpfully illuminate the upheavals associated with this eighteenth-century conflict. The global warfare of the 1750s–60s relegated the indigenous population of North America to the status of an embattled cultural minority, and it turned thousands of francophone Canadians into refugees. Yet despite its scale and the social and political fallout it occasioned, the Seven Years' War has never occupied a central place in the national narratives of its major contestants or in the historiography of the Enlightenment. The main reason for this low profile, I think, is that the war was a many-sided conflict, fought on both metropolitan and colonial fronts. Because of this multilateralism, the war has had a fragmented historical reception, a fracture reflected in the various names by which it has come to be known. The label Seven Years' War is generally used to refer to the fighting that took place in Europe. The war in North America, on the other hand, goes under the name French and Indian War, though in Quebec it is remembered more acrimoniously as the War of Conquest. Histories of India often inventory the warfare of the 1750s–60s under the academic-sounding title Third Carnatic War; a more meaningful characterization would be that it marked the starting point of British rule in India.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT ABOVE NATIONAL CONTEXT: POLITICAL ECONOMY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SCOTLAND AND NAPLES

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 667-697 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN ROBERTSON
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Common Point ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
National Context ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Poor Countries ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Kingdom Of Naples

It is now common to study the Enlightenment ‘in national context’, and in few cases has the approach been more fertile than in the study of the Scottish Enlightenment. The danger of this approach, however, is that it deflects attention from the international connections of the Enlightenment, fragmenting the movement as a whole. It is argued here that the Enlightenment is better understood as an intellectual movement which was both cosmopolitan and patriotic, and that this is particularly evident in its commitment to political economy, as the key to improving the human condition in this world. The argument is developed through a comparison of Scottish and Neapolitan political economy from the mid- to the later eighteenth century. Though set apart by very different economic circumstances, the Scots and the Neapolitans had a common point of reference in French economic writings, and through these Hume's ideas in particular were transmitted to Naples. It was from within this common intellectual framework that the Scots and the Neapolitans elaborated their distinctive positions on the scope for free trade between nations. If Hume and Smith believed that poor countries such as Scotland would prosper through greater free trade, while Genovesi and Galiani argued that only by measures of protection could the abundant natural resources of the kingdom of Naples be harnessed to its benefit, their differences derived from shared premises, and a comparable fear of the inclination of the leading mercantile powers, Britain and France, to control trade to their sole advantage.

Ilustración y nuevo humanismo en la España dieciochesca

2018 ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Philip Deacon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Judicial System ◽  
New Humanism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
El Sistema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Historian

RESUMENEn "The Enlightenment: History of an Idea" el historiador italiano Vincenzo Ferrone reivindica lo que llama el nuevo humanismo del siglo XVIII, componente significativo, en su opinión, de la mentalidad ilustrada. Este trabajo considera el humanismo español dieciochesco dentro de una mentalidad ilustrada, partiendo del principio fundamental de la dignidad e importancia de cada ser humano. Explora el significado de la palabra ‘humanidad’ en los textos de varios autores —Foronda, Jovellanos, Meléndez Valdés, "El Censor" y otros— en que aluden a comportamientos humanistas, y a continuación subraya el empleo de la palabra humanidad en "El delincuente honrado" de Jovellanos, drama que cuestiona el sistema judicial español del siglo XVIII. Finalmente analiza la comedia de Comella "Federico segundo en Glatz o la humanidad" en que el dramaturgo presenta aspectos del sistema judicial de Prusia, examinando la práctica de la tortura y su abolición por el rey.PALABRAS CLAVEIlustración, humanismo, Jovellanos, Comella, sistema judicial, tortura. TITLEEnlightenment and the new humanism in eighteenth-century SpainABSTRACTIn "The Enlightenment: History of an Idea" the cultural historian Vincenzo Ferrone identifies humanism as a major component of Enlightenment thought. The present study focuses on characteristics of this new humanism in eighteenth-century Spanish discourse. Its starting point is the principle of humanism which affirms the dignity of human behaviour, seeing it as a motivating and guiding force in society. It explores the significance of the word ‘humanity’ in texts of various authors —Foronda, Jovellanos, Meléndez Valdés, "El Censor" and others— who consider it a necessary human virtue. This leads to a brief examination of the word ‘humanidad’ in "El delincuente honrado" by Jovellanos, a play which questions the Spanish judicial system. Finally, there is a more detailed analysis of Comella’s sentimental drama "Federico segundo en Glatz o la humanidad", in which the dramatist highlights aspects of the Prussian prison system and condemns the practice of torture prior to its abolition.KEY WORDSEnlightenment, humanism, Jovellanos, Comella, legal system, torture.

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