Prologue

Beyond Reason ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karol Berger
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Late Works

The music-dramatic core of the book is framed by sections designed to place Wagner’s late works within the context of the political and ethical ideas of his time. The Prologue offers a genealogy of the principal worldviews available to Wagner and his contemporaries and shows how they related to one another. The options I describe are of diverse age, some with roots going as far back as the antiquity (the Judeo-Christian religious outlook), some characteristic of the modern age (the Enlightenment), some arising even more recently in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the main currents of the Counter-Enlightenment that proceed under the banners of History, Nation, and Will). Deposited at different times, they all actively shaped the landscape in which Wagner found himself and left traces on his music dramas.

2. Revolutions

2018 ◽  
pp. 24-49
Author(s):  
James Marten
Keyword(s):  
Public Education ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
The Political ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Impact

The succession of revolutions that followed the long medieval period in Europe profoundly affected childhood. The Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the political revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to an expansion of democratic governments and the concomitant development of public education and social welfare programs. They also led to efforts by Western nations to eliminate, to separate, and, eventually, to integrate (on Western terms) subjugated peoples—often by manipulating children and forcing deep changes in child-rearing practices. “Revolutions” considers common childhood experiences around the world; the impact of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment on childhood; and how indigenous and colonial customs impacted on each other.

Histories of Heterodoxy

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Bivins
Keyword(s):  
Professional Development ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Alternative Systems ◽  
Age Of Exploration ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Marketplace ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Heterodox captures the oppositional qualities of ‘alternative’ without insisting on them and thereby ruling out complementarity. This article summarizes the history of heterodox medicine. This survey uses brief case studies to examine the emergence of a global medical marketplace and ideas from the Age of Exploration to the end of the Enlightenment. It focuses on heterodox medicine in Europe and the post-Columbian Americas because it is in these cultures that a self-identified and deliberately exclusive orthodoxy has been at the heart of medical ideology and professional development and fundamental to medical consumerism. This article then turns to the rise of explicitly ‘alternative’ systems like mesmerism and homoeopathy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the incorporation of some of those systems into biomedicine in the twentieth century. Finally, it looks at the recent historiography of heterodox medicine, and lays out potential directions for future scholarship.

8. Reviewing the ‘classical’ legacy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Wetherly
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dominant Ideology ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Ideological Debate ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Western Democracies

This chapter examines the legacy of the ‘classical’ ideologies in terms of their European origins, expansion, and dominance. Classical ideologies such as liberalism, conservatism, and socialism can be understood as contrasting responses to the intellectual, social, and economic transformations known as the Enlightenment and modernization, especially industrialization and the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chapter first considers the idea that liberalism constitutes a dominant ideology before discussing the relationship between ideological principles, party politics, and statecraft. It then analyses the relationship between the classical ideologies in terms of the Enlightenment and the left–right conception of ideological debate. It also introduces the notion of ‘new’ ideologies and the extent to which the dominance of the classical ideologies can be seen in the character of the political parties that have dominated Western democracies.

scholarly journals Social Peace and Political Pluralism

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 267-270
Author(s):  
Vereno Brugiatelli
Keyword(s):  
Minority Groups ◽  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
The Political ◽  
Michael Walzer ◽  
Political Pluralism ◽  
Cultural Minority ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Universal Principles ◽  
Modern Age

In the modern age cultural and political pluralism received the serious consideration of the Enlightenment philosophers. In the contemporary age, it is the centre of attention of several thinkers that tackle the often dramatic problems related with the misrecognition of rights and freedoms in cultural minority groups. Liberalism in its multiple formulations puts the universal principles that ignore differences at the base of its reflections. Philosophers such as Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer often insisted on the political necessity to face the problem of differences, denouncing the historical and cultural limits of the different forms of liberal universalism. By examining the contraposition between universalism and communitarism, in this paper I intend to give a theoretical solution to such a contrast. In order to outline a perspective able to overcome conflicts in a pacified society, I consider the resources of the recognition of the rights to capabilities, public debate and practical wisdom.

THE “HARD FORM” OF SCULPTURE: MARBLE, MATTER AND SPIRIT IN EUROPEAN SCULPTURE FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT THROUGH ROMANTICISM

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINDA WALSH
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
External Appearance ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Familiar World ◽  
A Site ◽  
Aesthetic Values

The apparently distinct aesthetic values of naturalism (a fidelity to external appearance) and neoclassicism (with its focus on idealization and intangible essence) came together in creative tension and fusion in much late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century sculptural theory and practice. The hybrid styles that resulted suited the requirements of the European sculpture-buying public. Both aesthetics, however, created difficulties for the German Idealists who represented a particularly uncompromising strain of Romantic theory. In their view, naturalism was too closely bound to the observable, familiar world, while neoclassicism was too wedded to notions of clearly defined forms. This article explores sculptural practice and theory at this time as a site of complex debates around the medium's potential for specific concrete representation in a context of competing Romantic visions (ethereal, social and commercial) of modernity.

GEOGRAPHY, ENLIGHTENMENT, AND IMPROVEMENT Geography and Enlightenment. Edited by David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. viii+455. ISBN 0-226-48720-2 (hb). $52·00. 0-226-48721-0 (pb). $25·00. Nature's government: science, imperial Britain, and the ‘improvement’ of the world. By Richard Drayton. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xxi+346. ISBN 0-300-05976-0. £25·00. Enlightenment geography: the political languages of British geography, 1650–1850. By Robert J. Mayhew. London: Macmillan, 2000. Pp. viii+324. ISBN 0-333-79186-X. £45·00.

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
FELIX DRIVER
Keyword(s):  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Botanic Garden ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Lecture Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

What is Enlightenment? Few questions in the history of ideas can have given rise to more controversy, sustained over more than two centuries and extending into the furthest reaches of contemporary thought. In comparison, the ‘where’ of Enlightenment – the sites from which philosophes garnered their evidence, the settings in which their ideas took shape, the networks through which they were disseminated, the contexts in which they were interpreted – has received much less attention. It is not that these geographies have been altogether neglected. Distinctions between different ‘national’ Enlightenments (French, Scottish, English, and so on) are familiar, perhaps all too familiar, to historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At a smaller scale, it is difficult to imagine historical accounts of the Enlightenment world without some sort of tour of those paradigmatic sites – the coffee house, the botanic garden, the lecture theatre. There is a geography here, of sorts: but in truth it is often simply a stage for action, a passive background (sometimes ‘national’, sometimes ‘local’) to the real business of social and intellectual change. In recent years, however, intellectual historians in general, and historians of science in particular, have begun to pay more attention to these and many other sites, not simply as inert contexts but as vital components of the making and communication of new knowledge. Thus is a genuine geography of knowledge in the making.

scholarly journals The Birth of the Idea of Perfectibility: From the Enlightenment to Transhumanism

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 113-131
Author(s):  
O. A. Vinogradova ◽  
A. V. Ugleva (Yastrebtseva)
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Historical Science ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment ◽  
Human Feature ◽  
Favorable Conditions ◽  
Modern Technologies

Starting from the Age of Enlightenment, a person’s ability of self-improvement, or perfectibility, is usually seen as a fundamental human feature. However, this term, introduced into the philosophical vocabulary by J.-J. Rousseau, gradually acquired additional meaning – largely due to the works of N. de Condorcet, T. Malthus and C. Darwin. Owing to perfectibility, human beings are not only able to work on themselves: by improving their abilities, they are also able to change their environment (both social and natural) and create favorable conditions for their existence. It is no coincidence that perfectibility became the key concept of the idea of social progress proposed by French thinkers in the Age of Enlightenment, despite the fact that later it was criticized, above all, by English authors, who justified its organic and biological nature and gave a different evolutionary interpretation to this concept, without excluding perfectibility from the philosophical vocabulary. In this article, we address the opposition and mutual counterarguments of these two positions. Beyond that, we draw a parallel with some of the ideas of S. Kapitsa, who proved to be not only a critic of Malthusianism but also a direct disciple of Condorcet. In the modern age, the ideas of human self-improvement caused the development of transhumanist movement. Condorcet is more relevant than ever, and today his theory of the progress of the human mind, which influenced the genesis of modern historical science, needs a re-thinking in the newest perspective of improving the mental and physical human nature with the help of modern technologies.

scholarly journals Ethnographic Memories

1969 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-18
Author(s):  
Maxime Polleri
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Personal Knowledge ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Politics Of Knowledge ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
History Of

This article explores the similarities between a memoir and an ethnographic work. A memoir stands as an historical account written from personal knowledge. It is a form of writing that should resonate deeply within the heart of the anthropologist, whose very own specificity is to be, first and foremost, an ethnographer. That is, anthropologists are individuals full of (hi) stories, contingence, and subjectivity, who nevertheless struggle to bring “objective” accounts of what had happened under their eyes during fieldwork. I use this short comparative act as a jumping board to examine the politics of knowledge in the history of anthropological inquiry since the Enlightenment. More precisely, this comparison represents an opportunity to look at what is silently invested in the practices of ethnographical writing. In a brief discussion, I highlight the political implications that surround issues of knowledge production, expert voices, and translation amidst the discourse and narrative of anthropologists.

USURPATION AND “THE SOCIAL” IN BENJAMIN CONSTANT'S COMMENTAIRE

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
GIANNA ENGLERT
Keyword(s):  
Social Issues ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
Central Elements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Elements ◽  
Liberal Thought

As part of Benjamin Constant's academic “revival,” scholars have revisited the political and religious elements of his thought, but conclude that he remained uninterested in the nineteenth century's major social and economic questions. This article examines Constant's response to what would later become known as “the social question” in his Commentary on Filangieri's Work, and argues that his claims about poverty and its alleviation highlight central elements of his political liberalism, especially on the practice of citizenship in the modern age. By interpreting social issues through his original political lens of “usurpation,” Constant encouraged skepticism of social legislation and identified the political implications of a “disinherited” poor class. The lens of usurpation ultimately limited the scope of Constant's solutions to poverty. But his attention to social and economic issues prompts us to reexamine the category of “the social” and its uses in the history of liberal thought, particularly the place of class concerns in the French liberal tradition.

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