Andrew Dickson White played a pivotal role in constructing the image of a necessary, and even violent, confrontation between religion and science that persists to this day. Though scholars have long acknowledged that his position is more complex, given that White claimed to be saving religion from theology, there has been no attempt to explore what this means in light of his overwhelming attack on existing religions. This essay draws attention to how White's role as a historian was decisive in (...) allowing him to posit a future for religion purified of dogma by science. It argues, furthermore, that this effort is better understood as religious innovation, rather than a plea for strictly secular science. In so doing it hopes to lay the foundation for a more fruitful historical treatment of White, and a range of other figures whose devotion to science has otherwise been difficult to grasp. (shrink)

This study argues that the English-born, Edinburgh-educated and Bath-based physician William Falconer (1744–1824) authored the only stadial history published during the British Enlightenment that analysed the influence of socio-economic context upon religious belief. A survey of the conjectural histories of religion written by the leading literati demonstrates that discussion of religion by the Scottish literati was undertaken separate from the “Scottish narrative” of stadial economic and political progress. We have to turn to Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781) (...) to see a four-stage history of religion that related belief and practice to wider social and economic developments. While heavily derivative of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois (1748), Falconer’s Remarks has some claim to theoretical innovation and used his conjectural history to tell a story of English (not British) religious exceptionalism. Moreover, the work was received as a serious contribution to the late Enlightenment’s science of human nature and society. (shrink)

The meaning of ‘moderate enlightenment’ has been monopolised by Jonathan Israel. In this guise, ‘moderate enlightenment’ is built atop a compromise between authority and innovation, between reason and revelation, and amounts to an intellectually subordinate counterpart to the Radical Enlightenment. This ‘negative’ definition obstructs serious interpretation of what ‘moderate enlightenment’ can mean. This essay progresses instead an enquiry into a ‘positive’ definition of ‘moderate enlightenment’ – an enlightenment defined by moderation. It does so by surveying key lineaments within a century (...) of historiography on the enlightenment, from the 1920s to the present. It focuses on the contributions to that historiography by two titanic figures of twentieth-century scholarship and political thought: Leo Strauss and J.G.A. Pocock. Strauss and Pocock are shown to have advanced equally substantive, if fundamentally distinct, concepts of ‘moderate enlightenment’. Searching for ‘moderate enlightenment’, aided by Strauss and Pocock, raises new vistas in both eighteenth century intellectual history and twentieth century historiography – and the pertinence of both for the history of political thought. It also brings into question the political-philosophical substance of the ‘moderation’ which underpins a positively defined ‘moderate enlightenment’. (shrink)

RESUMO O presente artigo discute o papel de Christian Thomasius como pioneiro da Aufklärung, bem como a especificidade desta no contexto mais amplo do Iluminismo. A partir de uma discussão sobre os recentes estudos acerca do Iluminismo, será extraída uma diretriz interpretativa para avaliar a peculiaridade política e filosófica da Aufklärung. ABSTRACT This paper discusses the role of Christian Thomasius as a pioneer of the Aufklärung and the specific position of the latter in the broader context of the Enlightenment. Departing (...) from a review of recent studies on the Enlightenment, this paper will draw an interpretative guideline to assess the political and philosophical peculiarity of the Aufklärung. (shrink)

Russian public opinion in the first half of the nineteenth century was buffeted by a complex of cultural, psychological, and historiosophical dilemmas that destabilized many conventions about Russia's place in universal history. This article examines one response to these dilemmas: the Slavophile reconfiguration of Eastern Christianity as a modern religion of theocentric freedom and moral progress. Drawing upon methods of contextual analysis, the article challenges the usual scholarly treatment of Slavophile religious thought as a vehicle to address extrahistorical concerns by (...) placing the writings of A. S. Khomiakov and I. V. Kireevskii in the discursive and ideological framework in which they originated and operated. As such, the article considers the atheistic revolution in consciousness advocated by Russian Hegelians, the Schellingian proposition that human freedom and moral advancement were dependent upon the living God, P. Ia. Chaadaev's contention that a people's religious orientation determined its historical potential, and the Slavophile appropriation of Russia's dominant confession to resolve the problem of having attained historical consciousness in an age of historical stasis. (shrink)

Volume 51, Issue 9, August 2019, Page 886-894.

What are the debts that the modern world owes to the political culture of the Enlightenment? For historians of political thought this is a widely debated subject. Throughout Europe, the Enlightenment provided the critical lens for a widespread reassessment of the nature of political authority. Much of the intellectual history of the eighteenth century focuses on this reassessment and the debates over the nature of good government, liberty and sovereignty. The discussion of these issues is linked to the history of (...) liberalism, democratic republicanism, popular sovereignty, and the nature of the modern political world itself. (shrink)

Whilst Edward Gibbon's Memoirs of My Life comprise a notoriously complex document of autobiographical artifice, there is no reason to question the honesty of its revelation of his attitudes to geography and its relationship to the historian's craft. Writing of his boyhood before going up to Oxford, Gibbon commented that his vague and multifarious reading could not teach me to think, to write, or to act; and the only principle, that darted a ray of light into the indigested chaos, was (...) an early and rational application of the order of time and place. The maps of Cellarius and Wells imprinted in my mind the picture of ancient geography: from Stranchius I imbibed the elements of chronology: the Tables of Helvicus and Anderson, the Annals of Usher [ sic ] and Prideaux, distinguished the connection of events. . . This seems a fairly direct comment on Gibbon's attitude to geography as a historian in that it is confirmed by various of his working documents and commonplace book comments not aimed at posterity and by the practice embodied in his great work that was thus targeted, the Decline and Fall. Taking Gibbon's private documents, the first manuscript we have in his English Essays, for example, is a tabulated chronology from circa 1751 when Gibbon was fourteen years old, which begins with the creation of the world in 6000 BC and runs up to 1590 BC, this being exactly the sort of material which could be commonplaced from the likes of Ussher and Prideaux. Matching this attention to chronology is a concern with geography, and indeed the two are coupled together as in his comment in the Memoirs. Thus in his Index Expurgatoris, Gibbon berates Sallust as “no very correct historian” on the grounds that his chronology is not credible and that “notwithstanding his laboured description of Africa, nothing can be more confused than his Geography without either division of provinces or fixing of towns”. In this regard, Gibbon the author of the Decline and Fall was a “correct” historian, in that he was careful to frame each arena in which historical events were narrated in the light of a prefatory description of the geography of the location under discussion. This is most readily apparent in the second half of the opening chapter of the work, where Gibbon proceeds on what his “Table of Contents” calls a “View of the Provinces of the Roman Empire”, starting in the West with Spain and then proceeding clockwise to reach Africa on the other side of the Pillars of Hercules, a pattern of geographical description directly mirroring ancient practice in Strabo's Geography and Pomponius Mela's De Situ Orbis. But this practice of prefacing a historical account with geographical description repeats itself at various points in the work, as when, approaching the end of his grand narrative, Gibbon reaches the impact of “Mahomet, with sword in one hand and the Koran in the other” on “the causes of the decline and fall of the Eastern empire”. Before discussing the birth of Islam, Gibbon treats his readers to a discussion of the geography of Arabia, beginning with its size and shape before moving on to its soils, climate and physical–geographic subdivisions. (shrink)

Historians of nineteenth and twentieth century Ireland have often overlooked the role of ideas, preferring instead to focus on socio-economic, political and demographic factors. This is never more pronounced then when religion is addressed, and where the influence of religious thought and theology is often folded neatly away into issues of sectarian division and institutional power. This article introduces a collection of essays that attempt to rectify this issue, by drawing out some of their corresponding features and locating them in (...) shared thematic debates. It sets out the historiographical background and examines Ireland’s tangential position within the wider field of intellectual history. Looking specifically at the ideologically symbiotic relationship between Catholic and republican political thought, it argues that developing forms of neo-Thomism which sought to establish a rights-based defence of individual personality against the perceived incursions of both the market and the state, aligned closely with popular radical and republican notions of economic value and justice in Ireland. (shrink)

This paper explores the political thought of Andrew Michael Ramsay with particular reference to his highly acclaimed book called A New Cyropaedia, or the Travels of Cyrus (1727). Dedicated to Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, to whom he was tutor, this work has been hitherto viewed as a Jacobite imitation of the Telemachus, Son of Ulysses(1699) of his eminent teacher archbishop Fénelon of Cambrai. By tracing the dual legacy of the first Persian Emperor Cyrus in Western thought, I (...) demonstrate that Ramsay was as much indebted to Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet's Discourse on Universal History (1681)as he was to Fénelon's political romance. Ramsay took advantage of Xenophon's silence about the eponymous hero's adolescent education in his Cyropaedia, or the Education of Cyrus (c.380B.C.), but he was equally inspired by the Book of Daniel, where the same Persian prince was eulogised as the liberator of the Jewish people from their captivity in Babylon. The main thrust of Ramsay's adaptation was not only to revamp the Humanist- cum-Christian theory and practice of virtuous kingship for a restored Jacobite regime, but on a more fundamental level, to tie in secular history with biblical history. In this respect, Ramsay's New Cyropaedia, or the Travels of Cyrus, was not just another Fénelonian political novel but more essentially a work of universal history. In addition to his Jacobite model of aristocratic constitutional monarchy, it was this Bossuetian motive for universal history, which was first propounded by the German reformer Philipp Melanchthon in his Chronicon Carionis (1532), that most decisively separated Ramsay from Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, author of another famous advice book for princes of the period, The Idea of a Patriot King (written in late 1738 for the education of Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, but officially published in 1749). (shrink)