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A revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science. The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to...
The Retirement Series documents Jefferson's written legacy between his return to private life on 4 March 1809 and his death on 4 July 1826. During this period Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and sold his extraordinary library to the nation, but his greatest legacy from these years is the astonishing depth and breadth of his correspondence with statesmen, inventors, scientists, philosophers, and ordinary citizens on topics spanning virtually every field of human endeavor.--From publisher description.
This volume examines the issue of the timing of cultural change, problems of Revolutionary anticipations and reverberations, and the relationship between culture, politics, and society. Individual essays combine both old and new approaches, ranging from textual analysis to the study of local judicial records, from the psychohistorical to the demographic. But they all demonstrate the usefulness of linking social and cultural history, broadly conceived, and of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of events. Part One addresses directly the creation of French Revolutionary culture. The contributors describe the physical act of dismantling and redefining the culture of the Ancien Regime for ...