This article focuses on the evolution of the concept of civilisation in the French language through the analysis of socio-political discourse from Enlightenment to the Revolution and of the Anglo-French transfers and translations of different English historians and philosophers who first started using the concept in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the interaction between the French and English Lumières, civilization came forward as a meta-concept pitted against that of the contract theory advanced by authors such as Adam Ferguson, with a distinct perspective of an overarching natural history of mankind. Drawing upon the results produced by Frantext and a history of the use of concept in different theoretical frameworks, the author demonstrates the construction of civilisation in its relationship to various antonyms (barbare, sauvage, barbarie), rhetorical uses and conceptions of history.
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In Contributions to the History of Concepts
- Published (Print):
- 01 Apr 2008
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 106–136 (31 total)
Ah-reum Kim
dated back to the Chosŏn dynasty of Korea, underwent semantic transformations throughout the early modern, colonial, and post-liberation periods. In this regard, this article adopts a diachronic approach that examines the pre-modern, Korean enlightenment
In Contributions to the History of Concepts
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 23–44 (22 total)
Charles Bradford Bow
professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University Dugald Stewart (1753–1828). Although Dalgarno developed his view of natural language while living in Oxford before the ideological origin of the Scottish Enlightenment, which was rooted in the 1707 Anglo
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 22–41 (20 total)
Nicholas F. Russell
only they followed Chinese precepts closely enough. It was the difference between these two cases—the one representing an era’s finest hopes, and the other their barrenness—that bespoke the enlightenment’s doom. Sinophiles believed that the needs of the
Twilight of the Enlightenment
The Art Fair, the Culture Industry, and the ‘Creative Class’
Judith Kapferer
The complicity of the arts and the state in the mutual legitimation of corporate market practice is addressed in this critique of the so-called culture industries and 'Creative Class' of late capitalist imagination. The certification of the state-market couple as the dominant ideology of national, transnational, and post-national politics and economics is examined through an analysis of the Frieze Art Fair between 2006 and 2009. I contend that the decline of a culture-debating society and the rise of a culture-consuming society herald the waning of a habit of independent rationality and informed argument that characterized Horkheimer and Adorno's 'Enlightenment project'. The managerialist moment in the arts (as in education) signifies the diminishing status of culture as the cornerstone of an enlightened social formation.
David Allen Harvey
Despite its long-standing reputation for skepticism and irreverence, the Enlightenment took religion quite seriously. Historians have long recognized this fact, and have often represented the intellectual history of the eighteenth century in terms of the struggle between religious faith and philosophical skepticism. One common view of the period holds that religious dogmatism and intolerance, memorably condemned by Voltaire as l’Infâme, served as the negative pole against which the positive Enlightenment ideals of secularism, reason, and tolerance were articulated. Nearly a century ago, Ernst Cassirer characterized this view (which he did not entirely share) by writing, “French Encyclopedism declares war openly on religion,” accusing it of “having been an eternal hindrance to intellectual progress.” Around the same time, Carl Becker argued that the eighteenth-century philosophes sought to recast the “heavenly city” imagined by church fathers such as St. Augustine into a vision of a terrestrial utopian future. A generation later, Peter Gay described the philosophes as “modern pagans,” who “used their classical learning to free themselves from their Christian heritage.” For such scholars, the historical signifi cance of the Enlightenment lay in its break with religious tradition and embrace of “modernity”, defined primarily by secularism and rationality.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2014
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- 1–6 (6 total)
Constructing Aboriginal Australians, 1930-1960
Projecting False Memories
Keith Crawford
This article offers a critical exploration of social studies textbooks and allied curriculum materials used in New South Wales primary schools between 1930 and 1960, and of the way in which these texts positioned, discussed, and assessed Aboriginal Australians. With reference to European commitments to Enlightenment philosophies and social Darwinian views of race and culture, the author argues that Aboriginal peoples were essentialized via a discourse of paternalism and cultural and biological inferiority. Thus othered in narratives of Australian identity and national progress, Aboriginal Australians were ascribed a role as marginalized spectators or as a primitive and disappearing anachronism.
In Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2013
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 90–107 (18 total)
Robert R. Palmer's Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France
An Overdue Tribute
Dale K. Van Kley
Robert R. Palmer wrote his first book, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France, under the influence of his mentor at Cornell University, Carl L. Becker. Whereas Becker had claimed that the "enlightened" French philosophes were more indebted to Christianity than they recognized, Palmer argued that French Catholic apologists in the eighteenth century were also more "enlightened" than they knew. The two theses are complementary sides of Becker's wider point that beneath an intellectual debate in the public sphere there lay certain shared assumptions that make discussion possible, or what Alfred Whitehead had called a common "climate of opinion." Devoted to the subsequent historiography of Palmer's subject, this article argues that although research has since vindicated aspects of Palmer's portrait of French "enlightened" Jesuits, it has also altered Palmer's picture of French Jansenists as being globally unenlightened. This development in historiography enlarges Palmer's own notion of a "climate of opinion," while challenging the coherence of recent notions of a single "Catholic Enlightenment."
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2011
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 18–37 (20 total)
Rousseau's Turban
Entangled Encounters of Europe and Islam in the Age of Enlightenment
Ian Coller
The relationship of the European Enlightenment to Islam has usually been analyzed by collating “attitudes” toward a religion conceived as constitutively non-European. Enlightenment thinkers made use of Islam and other major revealed religions to relativize and to mock the claims of the Christian church. However, the notion of Islam as irredeemably “other” to Europe is a modern projection. Many eighteenth-century people passed back and forth between Europe and lands dominated by Islam, changing their identity, language, or religion, seeking refuge or a reversal of fortunes. One such figure was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's father, Isaac. Rousseau was marked in multiple ways by the mobility between Europe and the Muslim world, and by the new ideas these crossings engendered. This study of Rousseau's treatment of Islam and the Islamic world in his life and work proposes another model for thinking about Europe and Islam in the Age of Enlightenment.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 56–77 (22 total)
Science, Customs, and the Modern Subject
From Emulation to Education in the Semantics of Spanish Enlightenment
Pablo Sánchez León
commerce, and projects of reform—played a crucial role in the displaying of the Enlightenment as a whole. 6 Bourbon Spain was not exceptional in this regard. 7 Along the siècle des Lumières , political economy was in the making, however, and tended to
In Contributions to the History of Concepts
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 98–120 (23 total)