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The Story of an Architect King
In this book the author explores the representational strategies of the modern period and their relation to political life through the story of Stanislas Leszczynski, architect king and roi bienfaisant, 'a king that does good'. The ingredients of his story are compelling. They include: an exiled king (who makes a cameo appearance in Voltaire's Candide and corresponds with Rousseau); a collection of writings that include aphorisms, political treatises, and a utopian novel; gardens that include a grotto of eighty-six life-size automata and an experimental village of courtiers; and architecture and landscapes that traverse the contested boundaries of central Europe, imaginary constructions of t...
Politics and Aesthetics in the Arts
This volume brings together essays from distinguished scholars in a variety of disciplines - philosophy, history, literary studies, art history - to explore various ways in which aesthetics, politics and the arts interact with one another. Politics is an elastic concept, covering an oceanic breadth of mechanisms for conducting relations between empowered groups, and these essays offer a range of perspectives, including nations, classes, and gendered subjects, which examine the imbrication of politics with arts. Together they demonstrate the need to counteract the reductionist view of the relationship between politics and the arts which prevails in different ways in both philosophy and critical theory, and suggest that the irreducibility of the aesthetic must prompt us to reconceive the political as it relates to human cultural activity.
The Enlightenment
This book tells nothing less than the story of how the modern, Western view of the world was born. Cultural and intellectual historian Anthony Pagden explains how, and why, the ideal of a universal, global, and cosmopolitan society became such a central part of the Western imagination in the ferment of the Enlightenment - and how these ideas have done battle with an inward-looking, tradition-oriented view of the world ever since. Cosmopolitanism is an ancient creed; but in its modern form it was a creature of the Enlightenment attempt to create a new 'science of man', based upon a vision of humanity made up of autonomous individuals, free from all the constraints imposed by custom, prejudice...
The academy
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The Life of David Hume
Mossner's Life of David Hume remains the standard biography of this great thinker and writer. First published in 1954, and updated in 1980, this excellent life story is now reissued in paperback, in response to an overwhelming interest in Hume's brilliant ideas. Containing more than a simple biography, this exemplary work is also a study of intellectual reaction in the eighteenth century. In this new edition are a detailed bibliography, index, and textual supplements, making it the perfect text for scholars and advanced students of Hume, epistemology, and the history of philosophy. It is also ideal for historians and literary scholars working on the eighteenth century, and for anyone with an interest in philosophy.
Three Critics of the Enlightenment
This book brings together three major studies from Isaiah Berlin's central intellectual project – to explain the opposition to the excessively scientistic French Enlightenment by getting under the skin of its critics and giving a sympathetic account of their views. The contributions of these particular critics could hardly be more important. Giambattista Vico estabished that the humanties are and must remain crucially different from the sciences: J G Herder – sometimes called the father of European nationalism – originated populism, expressionism and pluralism (an idea which Berlin enriched and made powerfully his own); and the anti-rationalist J.G. Hamann lit the fuse of romanticism, ...
Bureaucrats and Bourgeois Society
Between 1789 and 1848, clerks modified their occupational practices, responding to political scrutiny and state-administration reforms. Ralph Kingston examines the lives and influence of bureaucrats inside and outside the office as they helped define nineteenth-century bourgeois social capital, ideals of emulation, honour, and masculinity.
The Art Collector
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French Inventions of the Eighteenth Century
The eighteenth century, age of France's leadership in Western civilization, was also the most flourishing period of French inventive genius. Generally obscured by England's great industrial development are the contributions France made in the invention of the balloon, paper-making machines, the steamboat, the semaphore telegraph, gas illumination, the silk loom, the threshing machine, the fountain pen, and even the common graphite pencil. Shelby T. McCloy believes that these and many other inventions which have greatly influenced technological progress made prerevolutionary France the rival, if not the leader, of England. In his book McCloy analyzes the factors that led to France's inventive activity in the eighteenth century. He also advances reasons for France's failure to profit from her inventive prowess at a time when England's inventions were being put to immediate and practical use.
The Age of Projects
"The Projecting Age" was a term the English novelist Daniel Defoe used to describe the end of the seventeenth century. This term could just as easily be used, however, to describe the period known as the "Long Eighteenth Century" (1660-1789). The Age of Projects uses the notion of a project as a key to understanding the massive social, cultural, political, literary, and scientific transitions that occurred in Europe during this time. The contributors to this collection examine fraudulent, grandiose, altruistic, and idealistic projects that reveal the period's radical breaks from the past and its preoccupation with the future. Examining topics as diverse as Jonathan Swift's satire on the possibility of a computer, to Gottfried Leibniz's effort to build one, and Edmund Burke's prediction that the project of democratic governance would be taken over by greedy adventurers, this volume provides significant insight into the period's ambitions for an improved future. A well-balanced collection by leading scholars from diverse disciplines, The Age of Projects is a significant contribution to intellectual history, literary history, and the history of science.
