Enlightenment Virtue, 1680-1794

Enlightenment Virtue, 1680-1794 PDF Author: James Fowler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781789620412
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
In a speech delivered in 1794, roughly one year after the execution of Louis XVI, Robespierre boldly declared Terror to be an 'emanation of virtue'. In adapting the concept of virtue to Republican ends, Robespierre was drawing on traditions associated with ancient Greece and Rome. But Republican tradition formed only one of many strands in debates concerning virtue in France and elsewhere in Europe, from 1680 to the Revolution. This collection focuses on moral-philosophical and classical-republican uses of 'virtue' in this period - one that is often associated with a 'crisis of the European mind'. It also considers in what ways debates concerning virtue involved gendered perspectives. The texts discussed are drawn from a range of genres, from plays and novels to treatises, memoirs, and libertine literature. They include texts by authors such as Diderot, Laclos, and Madame de Staël, plus other, lesser-known texts that broaden the volume's perspective. Collectively, the contributors to the volume highlight the central importance of virtue for an understanding of an era in which, as Daniel Brewer argues in the closing chapter, 'the political could not be thought outside its moral dimension, and morality could not be separated from inevitable political consequences'.

Enlightenment Virtue, 1680-1794

Enlightenment Virtue, 1680-1794 PDF Author: James Fowler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781789620412
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a speech delivered in 1794, roughly one year after the execution of Louis XVI, Robespierre boldly declared Terror to be an 'emanation of virtue'. In adapting the concept of virtue to Republican ends, Robespierre was drawing on traditions associated with ancient Greece and Rome. But Republican tradition formed only one of many strands in debates concerning virtue in France and elsewhere in Europe, from 1680 to the Revolution. This collection focuses on moral-philosophical and classical-republican uses of 'virtue' in this period - one that is often associated with a 'crisis of the European mind'. It also considers in what ways debates concerning virtue involved gendered perspectives. The texts discussed are drawn from a range of genres, from plays and novels to treatises, memoirs, and libertine literature. They include texts by authors such as Diderot, Laclos, and Madame de Staël, plus other, lesser-known texts that broaden the volume's perspective. Collectively, the contributors to the volume highlight the central importance of virtue for an understanding of an era in which, as Daniel Brewer argues in the closing chapter, 'the political could not be thought outside its moral dimension, and morality could not be separated from inevitable political consequences'.

Women Moralists in Early Modern France

Women Moralists in Early Modern France PDF Author: Julie Candler Hayes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197688608
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Julie Candler Hayes explores the contributions of seventeenth and eighteenth-century French women philosophers and intellectuals to moralist writing, a genre focusing on dispassionate observations on the human condition and traditionally viewed through its best-known male writers. This study, the first of its kind, includes both famous thinkers--such as Émilie Du Châtelet and Germaine de Staël--and nearly two dozen of their contemporaries. Hayes demonstrates how, through their critique of institutions and practices, their valorization of introspection and self-expression, and their engagement with philosophical issues, women moralists carved out an important space for the public exercise of their reason.

Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment

Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: David Allan
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748673881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
This is a reassessment of the moral and theological foundations of modern Europe. It challenges a number of deeply rooted assumptions about the basis of both Scottish culture and of Enlightenments in general. It argues that the formidable dual influences of humanism and Calvinism forced a discussion about the essentially moral function of scholarship and learning to the very centre of intellectual debate in early modern Scotland, and that this in turn led to the growth of an "e;enlightened"e; community amongst the Scottish literati. As such, the text is a direct challenge to conventional accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment as an unanticipated, short-lived explosion of ideas.

Political Ideas of Enlightenment Women

Political Ideas of Enlightenment Women PDF Author: Lisa Curtis-Wendlandt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317078756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This edited collection showcases the contribution of women to the development of political ideas during the Enlightenment, and presents an alternative to the male-authored canon of philosophy and political thought. Over the course of the eighteenth century increasing numbers of women went into print, and they exploited both new and traditional forms to convey their political ideas: from plays, poems, and novels to essays, journalism, annotated translations, and household manuals, as well as dedicated political tracts. Recently, considerable scholarly attention has been paid to women’s literary writing and their role in salon society, but their participation in political debates is less well studied. This volume offers new perspectives on some better known authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as neglected figures from the British Isles and continental Europe. The collection advances discussion of how best to understand women’s political contributions during the period, the place of salon sociability in the political development of Europe, and the interaction between discourses on slavery and those on women’s rights. It will interest scholars and researchers working in women’s intellectual history and Enlightenment thought and serve as a useful adjunct to courses in political theory, women’s studies, the history of feminism, and European history.

Conflict and Enlightenment

Conflict and Enlightenment PDF Author: Thomas Munck
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521878071
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
This novel study of political culture in Enlightenment Europe analyses print, public opinion and the transnational dissemination of texts.

Sentimental Savants

Sentimental Savants PDF Author: Meghan K. Roberts
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022638425X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
An illuminating study of the marriages and family lives of Diderot, Lavoisier, and other geniuses of the Age of Reason. We may imagine the lone scientific or philosophical genius generating insights in isolation—but in reality, the families of scientists and philosophers during the Enlightenment played a substantial role, not only making space for inquiry within the home but also assisting in observing, translating, calculating, and illustrating. Sentimental Savants is the first book to explore the place of the family among the savants of the French Enlightenment, a group that openly embraced their families and domestic lives, even going so far as to test out their ideas, from education to inoculation, on their own children. Meghan K. Roberts delves into the lives and work of such major figures as Denis Diderot, Emilie Du Chatelet, the Marquis de Condorcet, Antoine Lavoisier, and Jerome Lalande to paint a striking portrait of how sentiment and reason interacted in the eighteenth century to produce not only new kinds of knowledge but new kinds of families as well. “[A] well-crafted study…an important contribution to what Robert Darnton has called ‘the social history of ideas.’”—Choice

The Political Economy of Virtue

The Political Economy of Virtue PDF Author: John Shovlin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801474187
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
'The Political Economy of Virtue' offers an interpretation of political economy in the second half of the 18th century. It covers the key turning points in the development of French political economy.

Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment

Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: T. Ahnert
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230119956
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
An interdisciplinary examination of the Enlightenment character and its broader significance. Whilst the main focus of the book is the Scottish Enlightenment, contributors also employ a transatlantic scope by considering parallel developments in Europe, and America.

Republicanism and the Origins of French Liberalism, 1794-1804

Republicanism and the Origins of French Liberalism, 1794-1804 PDF Author: Andrew J. S. Jainchill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description


From Deficit to Deluge

From Deficit to Deluge PDF Author: Dale Van Kley
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804772819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
Seven authorities in their respective fields come together to offer a new interpretation of the French Revolution: they show how the French monarchy's clumsy efforts to solve a fiscal crisis politicized long-standing structural problems, metastasizing an apparently fairly "normal" fiscal crisis into a revolution.