The French writer, explorer, and historian Constantin-François de Volney (1757–1820) has been interpreted as embracing a Eurocentric Orientalism and a typically Enlightenment progressivist historical understanding. In this article, however, I argue that, far from simply offering yet another rationalistic or teleological historical narrative, Volney set out to refound the historical discipline by erecting historiography on a firmly empirical basis in order to repudiate the idea of historical design altogether. In this respect, his best-known work, The Ruins, or Meditations on the (...) Revolutions of Empires (1791), seems to occupy a special status in his oeuvre in that it did not confine its analyses to the epistemological realm and historiographical practice, but explicitly linked historical narratives and practice to historical developments themselves, ascribing civilizational decline and devastation predominantly to ignorance and blind faith in religion or myths of the past. According to this reasoning, a new, more critical historical practice – akin to social anthropology – would, by making people conscious of their historical agency, liberate historical development itself and ideally bring an end to seemingly unending cycles of political tyranny and social destruction. (shrink)

The lasting effects of the debate over canon-formation during the 1980s affected the whole field of Humanities, which became increasingly engaged in interrogating the origin and function of the Western canon. In philosophy, a great deal of criticism was, as a result, directed at the traditional narrative of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophies—a critique informed by postcolonialism as well as feminist historiography. D. F. Norton, L. Loeb and many others1 attempted to demonstrate the weaknesses of the tripartite division between rationalism, empiricism and (...) critical philosophy.2 As time went on, symptoms of dissatisfaction with what has... (shrink)