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HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE IMAGINATION IN ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES

Review products

JohnRobertson, The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)
James A.Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
GenevieveLloyd, Enlightenment Shadows (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2018

ANTHONY J. LA VOPA
ANTHONY J. LA VOPA*
Affiliation:
Department of History, North Carolina State University E-mail: anthony_lavopa@ncsu.edu
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Extract

“The Enlightenment,” Anthony Pagden writes in the conclusion to The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters, “quite simply created the modern world.”1 It would have been more prudent to say that the Enlightenment created “the conditions of possibility” of modernity; or, more prudent still, that it was critical to forming certain values and institutions that we (or some of us) consider modern. Precisely because the latter way of putting it is so anemic, it is one of the rare few statements that would be acceptable across the spectrum of opinions in debates over the last half-century about the Enlightenment and modernity. Acceptable, though, only because it provides a terrain for waging a thicket of wars, at once ideological and disciplinary, between a historians’ Enlightenment and a philosophers’ Enlightenment and within each of these camps.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 279 - 302
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

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References

1 Pagden, Anthony, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (New York, 2013), esp. 389Google Scholar. For a more balanced defense of the Enlightenment “project” and its legacies see Todorov, Tzvetan, In Defense of the Enlightenment, trans. Gila Walker (London, 2009)Google Scholar.

2 Rorty, Richard, “The History of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in Rorty, Richard, Schneewind, J. B., and Skinner, Quentin, eds., Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy (Cambridge, 1984), 49–75, esp. 52–6, 70–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I discuss Rorty's position at greater length in “Doing Fichte: Reflections of a Sobered (but Unrepentant) Contextual Biographer, in Bödeker, Hans Erich, ed, Biographie schreiben (Göttingen, 2003), 109–71Google Scholar.

3 An excellent example is Nakhimovsky, Isaac, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton and Oxford, 2011)Google Scholar.

4 Herzog, Lisa, Inventing the Market: Smith, Hegel, and Political Theory (Oxford, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While diverging from much of Quentin Skinner's approach to intellectual history, Herzog explores Skinner's idea that, by practicing a “kind of exorcism” on texts like Smith's, we can “stand back from the intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of inquiry what we should think of them.” Quoted in ibid., 14.

5 van Damme, Stephane, À toutes voiles vers la verité: Une autre histoire de la philosophie au temps des Lumières (Paris, 2014), 10–16Google Scholar, original emphasis. Cf. Chartier, Roger, “On the Relation of Philosophy and History,” in Chartier, , Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Ithaca, 1988), 53–70Google Scholar, which argues for an interaction between the two disciplines as each tries to clarify its epistemology and practices.

6 See esp. Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara, “Was heist Kulturgeschichte des Politischen?”, in Stollberg-Rilinger, , ed., Was heisst Kulturgeschichte des Politischen? (Berlin, 2005), 9–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 On networks see Comsa, Maria Teodora, Edelstein, Dan, Chloe Summers Edmondson, and Calude Willan, “The French Enlightenment Network,” Journal of Modern History, 88/3 (2016), 495–534CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Hesse, Carla, “Towards a New Topography of Enlightenment,” in Hanley, Ryan Patrick and McMahon, Darrin M., eds., The Enlightenment: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, vol. 4 (London and New York, 2010), 346–56, at 354Google Scholar.

9 An important exception is Gierl, Martin, Pietismus und Aufklärung: Theologische Polemik und die Kommunikationsreform der Wissenschaft am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1997)Google Scholar.

10 Jacob, Margaret C., Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York and Oxford, 1991Google Scholar.

11 See the careful discussion of these questions in Sebastiani, Silvia, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress (New York, 2013), esp. 163–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 A particularly successful example of this kind of work is Rosenfeld, Sophia, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge, MA, 211)Google Scholar. Less successful but still inventive is Sheehan, Jonathan and Wahrman, Dror, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 2016)Google Scholar.

13 See esp. Mack, Phyllis, “Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency: Reflections on Eighteenth-Century Quakerism,” in Knott, Sarah and Taylor, Barbara, eds., Women, Gender, and Enlightenment (New York and Basingstroke, 2005), 434–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Ahnert, Thomas, The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690–1805 (New Haven, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; La Vopa, Anthony J., The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures (Philadelphia, 2017), esp. 182–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Sheehan and Wahrman, Invisible Hands. The role of science is stressed in the argument for a new cultural history in Vincenzo Ferrone, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea (Princeton, 2015).

16 Lloyd, Genevieve, Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature (London and New York, 1993), esp. 1–8, 162–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ricoeur, Paul, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (London and New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

17 Lloyd, Being in Time, 7–8. On the role of metaphor in gendered philosophical discourse see Lloyd, ’s “Maleness, Metaphor, and the ‘Crisis’ of Reason,” in Anthony, Louise M. and Witt, Charlotte E., eds., A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 73–89Google Scholar.

18 Griswold, Charles L. Jr, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1999)Google Scholar; Brown, Vivienne, Adam Smith's Discourse: Canonicity, Commerce and Conscience (London, 1994)Google Scholar.

19 See also Donoghue, Denis, Metaphor (Cambridge, MA and London, 2014), esp. 64–5Google Scholar.