The enlightenment project as betrayed by modernity

History of European Ideas

Volumn 24, Issue 4-5, 1998, Pages 301-313

  Wokler, Robert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 0032116895     PISSN: 01916599     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/S0191-6599(99)00006-6     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. 1. Cf. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: 1932), pp. 102-103 (in the twenty-fourth printing of 1964); Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: 1952), pp. 3-11; and Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London: 1989), pp. 441-455 and 619-639.
2. 1. Cf. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: 1932), pp. 102-103 (in the twenty-fourth printing of 1964); Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: 1952), pp. 3-11; and Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London: 1989), pp. 441-455 and 619-639.
3. 1. Cf. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: 1932), pp. 102-103 (in the twenty-fourth printing of 1964); Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: 1952), pp. 3-11; and Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London: 1989), pp. 441-455 and 619-639.
4. 2. Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: 1947), pp. 5-57 and 100-143; MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: 1981), pp. 38-59; and Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: 1989), pp. 1-30. I shall address at least some of the already vast literature on this subject in The Enlightenment Project and its Critics, of which a kind of prefatory outline, bearing the same title, appears in S.-E. Liedman (Ed.), The Post-modernist Critique of the Project of Enlightenment, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities (vol. 58), 13-30.
5. 2. Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: 1947), pp. 5-57 and 100-143; MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: 1981), pp. 38-59; and Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: 1989), pp. 1-30. I shall address at least some of the already vast literature on this subject in The Enlightenment Project and its Critics, of which a kind of prefatory outline, bearing the same title, appears in S.-E. Liedman (Ed.), The Post-modernist Critique of the Project of Enlightenment, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities (vol. 58), 13-30.
6. 2. Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: 1947), pp. 5-57 and 100-143; MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: 1981), pp. 38-59; and Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: 1989), pp. 1-30. I shall address at least some of the already vast literature on this subject in The Enlightenment Project and its Critics, of which a kind of prefatory outline, bearing the same title, appears in S.-E. Liedman (Ed.), The Post-modernist Critique of the Project of Enlightenment, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities (vol. 58), 13-30.
7. 2. Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: 1947), pp. 5-57 and 100-143; MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: 1981), pp. 38-59; and Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: 1989), pp. 1-30. I shall address at least some of the already vast literature on this subject in The Enlightenment Project and its Critics, of which a kind of prefatory outline, bearing the same title, appears in S.-E. Liedman (Ed.), The Post-modernist Critique of the Project of Enlightenment, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities (vol. 58), 13-30.
8. 3. See especially the preface to Hazard's La crise de la conscience européenne (1680-1815) (Paris: 1935), and Foucault's Les mots et les choses (Paris: 1968), chaps. 8 and 10.
9. 3. See especially the preface to Hazard's La crise de la conscience européenne (1680-1815) (Paris: 1935), and Foucault's Les mots et les choses (Paris: 1968), chaps. 8 and 10.
10. 4. Above all, perhaps, in the campaigns on behalf of the freedom of worship of Erasmians, Socinians and Anabaptists.
11. 5. E. Gibbon, in J. B. Bury (Ed.), The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: 1909-1929), chap. lxxi, 7.321.
12. 6. See Sievès, in R. Zappieri (Ed.), Qu'est que le tiers-état? (Geneva: 1970), p. 151. In all subsequent editions, for la science sociale Sieyès substituted the expression la science de l'ordre social. His inaugural use of the term is noted by Brian Head in The Origins of "La Science sociale" in France, 1770-1800', Australian Journal of French Studies, 19 (1982), 115-132. In Les mots et les choses (see pp. 238 and 263), Foucault contends that 1795 was a pivotal year within the wider period of twenty or thirty years that comprises the epistemic metamorphosis of modernity. I have addressed these issues in my 'Saint-Simon and the Passage from Political to Social Science', in A. Pagden (Ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: 1987), pp. 325-338, and in 'The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary birth pangs of modernity' (see n. 13 below).
13. 6. See Sievès, in R. Zappieri (Ed.), Qu'est que le tiers-état? (Geneva: 1970), p. 151. In all subsequent editions, for la science sociale Sieyès substituted the expression la science de l'ordre social. His inaugural use of the term is noted by Brian Head in The Origins of "La Science sociale" in France, 1770-1800', Australian Journal of French Studies, 19 (1982), 115-132. In Les mots et les choses (see pp. 238 and 263), Foucault contends that 1795 was a pivotal year within the wider period of twenty or thirty years that comprises the epistemic metamorphosis of modernity. I have addressed these issues in my 'Saint-Simon and the Passage from Political to Social Science', in A. Pagden (Ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: 1987), pp. 325-338, and in 'The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary birth pangs of modernity' (see n. 13 below).
14. 6. See Sievès, in R. Zappieri (Ed.), Qu'est que le tiers-état? (Geneva: 1970), p. 151. In all subsequent editions, for la science sociale Sieyès substituted the expression la science de l'ordre social. His inaugural use of the term is noted by Brian Head in The Origins of "La Science sociale" in France, 1770-1800', Australian Journal of French Studies, 19 (1982), 115-132. In Les mots et les choses (see pp. 238 and 263), Foucault contends that 1795 was a pivotal year within the wider period of twenty or thirty years that comprises the epistemic metamorphosis of modernity. I have addressed these issues in my 'Saint-Simon and the Passage from Political to Social Science', in A. Pagden (Ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: 1987), pp. 325-338, and in 'The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary birth pangs of modernity' (see n. 13 below).
15. 6. See Sievès, in R. Zappieri (Ed.), Qu'est que le tiers-état? (Geneva: 1970), p. 151. In all subsequent editions, for la science sociale Sieyès substituted the expression la science de l'ordre social. His inaugural use of the term is noted by Brian Head in The Origins of "La Science sociale" in France, 1770-1800', Australian Journal of French Studies, 19 (1982), 115-132. In Les mots et les choses (see pp. 238 and 263), Foucault contends that 1795 was a pivotal year within the wider period of twenty or thirty years that comprises the epistemic metamorphosis of modernity. I have addressed these issues in my 'Saint-Simon and the Passage from Political to Social Science', in A. Pagden (Ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: 1987), pp. 325-338, and in 'The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary birth pangs of modernity' (see n. 13 below).
16. 7. See Hegel's Politischen Schriften (Frankfurt: 1966), p. 310. It must be noted, however, that Hegel here refers, not to Sieyès' role in establishing the National Assembly in 1789, but to his authorship of the constitution of the year VIII, which he drafted as provisional consul a decade later, following the bloodless coup d'état of the eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte that marked the transition of France's revolutionary government from the Directoire to the Consulat. As First Consul, Bonaparte altered Sieyès' scheme to suit his own advantage and ambition.
17. 8. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in his Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: 1968), 9.295-6, p. 320.
18. 9. With respect to the political symbolism of this subject, see especially A. Duprat, Le roi décapité: Essai sur les imaginaires politiques (Paris: 1992).
19. 10. In particular, in chap. 16 of this text, which I take to be of seminal significance with respect to its prefiguration, in theory, of the modern practice of representative democracy to the extent that representative democracy provides for the popular election of absolutist governments.
20. 11. A particularly notable treatment of this subject can be found in David Runciman's Pluralism and the personality of the state (Cambridge: 1997).
21. 12. See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951 (2nd edn, London: 1958), pp. 230-231.
22. 13. This essay closely follows a public lecture which I delivered at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences on 10 March 1998. It draws upon three recent publications: 'The French Revolutionary Roots of Political Modernity in Hegel's Philosophy, or the Enlightenment at Dusk', Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 35 (1997), pp. 71-89; 'The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary birth pangs of modernity', in J. Heilbron et al. (Eds.), The Rise of Social and the Formation of Modernity, Sociology of the Sciences: Yearbook 1996 (vol. 20, 1998), pp. 35-76; and 'Contextualizing Hegel's Phenomenology of the French Revolution and the Terror', Political Theory, 26 (1998), pp. 33-55. Part of the first section as well as the final paragraph are adapted from my 'Ethnic cleansing and multiculturalism in the Enlightenment', to be published in O. P. Grell and R. Porter (Eds.), Toleration in Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: in press). A much fuller version, embracing additional material on Diderot, Goethe and the eighteenth-century Querelle des Bouffons, comprises my own contribution, entitled The Enlightenment, the nation-state and the primal patricide of Modernity', to a collection of essays on The Enlightenment and Modernity, which I am currently editing jointly with Norman Geras.
23. 13. This essay closely follows a public lecture which I delivered at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences on 10 March 1998. It draws upon three recent publications: 'The French Revolutionary Roots of Political Modernity in Hegel's Philosophy, or the Enlightenment at Dusk', Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 35 (1997), pp. 71-89; 'The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary birth pangs of modernity', in J. Heilbron et al. (Eds.), The Rise of Social and the Formation of Modernity, Sociology of the Sciences: Yearbook 1996 (vol. 20, 1998), pp. 35-76; and 'Contextualizing Hegel's Phenomenology of the French Revolution and the Terror', Political Theory, 26 (1998), pp. 33-55. Part of the first section as well as the final paragraph are adapted from my 'Ethnic cleansing and multiculturalism in the Enlightenment', to be published in O. P. Grell and R. Porter (Eds.), Toleration in Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: in press). A much fuller version, embracing additional material on Diderot, Goethe and the eighteenth-century Querelle des Bouffons, comprises my own contribution, entitled The Enlightenment, the nation-state and the primal patricide of Modernity', to a collection of essays on The Enlightenment and Modernity, which I am currently editing jointly with Norman Geras.
24. 13. This essay closely follows a public lecture which I delivered at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences on 10 March 1998. It draws upon three recent publications: 'The French Revolutionary Roots of Political Modernity in Hegel's Philosophy, or the Enlightenment at Dusk', Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 35 (1997), pp. 71-89; 'The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary birth pangs of modernity', in J. Heilbron et al. (Eds.), The Rise of Social and the Formation of Modernity, Sociology of the Sciences: Yearbook 1996 (vol. 20, 1998), pp. 35-76; and 'Contextualizing Hegel's Phenomenology of the French Revolution and the Terror', Political Theory, 26 (1998), pp. 33-55. Part of the first section as well as the final paragraph are adapted from my 'Ethnic cleansing and multiculturalism in the Enlightenment', to be published in O. P. Grell and R. Porter (Eds.), Toleration in Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: in press). A much fuller version, embracing additional material on Diderot, Goethe and the eighteenth-century Querelle des Bouffons, comprises my own contribution, entitled The Enlightenment, the nation-state and the primal patricide of Modernity', to a collection of essays on The Enlightenment and Modernity, which I am currently editing jointly with Norman Geras.
25. 13. This essay closely follows a public lecture which I delivered at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences on 10 March 1998. It draws upon three recent publications: 'The French Revolutionary Roots of Political Modernity in Hegel's Philosophy, or the Enlightenment at Dusk', Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 35 (1997), pp. 71-89; 'The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary birth pangs of modernity', in J. Heilbron et al. (Eds.), The Rise of Social and the Formation of Modernity, Sociology of the Sciences: Yearbook 1996 (vol. 20, 1998), pp. 35-76; and 'Contextualizing Hegel's Phenomenology of the French Revolution and the Terror', Political Theory, 26 (1998), pp. 33-55. Part of the first section as well as the final paragraph are adapted from my 'Ethnic cleansing and multiculturalism in the Enlightenment', to be published in O. P. Grell and R. Porter (Eds.), Toleration in Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: in press). A much fuller version, embracing additional material on Diderot, Goethe and the eighteenth-century Querelle des Bouffons, comprises my own contribution, entitled The Enlightenment, the nation-state and the primal patricide of Modernity', to a collection of essays on The Enlightenment and Modernity, which I am currently editing jointly with Norman Geras.