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Intellectual History Commons

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2008

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Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Intellectual History

Rousseau, The Anticosmopolitan?, Helena Rosenblatt Jul 2008

Rousseau, The Anticosmopolitan?, Helena Rosenblatt

Publications and Research

Rousseau's repeated criticisms of the Enlightenment's ideal of cosmopolitanism has led to his thought being characterized as 'anticosmopolitan'. His work abounds in denunciations of the ideals of equality of treatment and universal rights supported by his contemporaries. Moreover, his liking of solitude, introspection and socialization in small circles and his preference for patriotism over equity among all men seem to set him up as the counterpoint of the universalism his contemporaries defended. However, a deeper insight into the work of the author of The Reveries of the Solitary Walker shows that, far from being incompatible with true cosmopolitanism, the moral …


Edwards On The Will: A Century Of American Theological Debate, Allen C. Guelzo Mar 2008

Edwards On The Will: A Century Of American Theological Debate, Allen C. Guelzo

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

Jonathan Edwards towered over his contemporaries--a man over six feet tall and a figure of theological stature--but the reasons for his power have been a matter of dispute. Edwards on the Will offers a persuasive explanation. In 1753, after seven years of personal trials, which included dismissal from his Northampton church, Edwards submitted a treatise, Freedom of the Will, to Boston publishers. Its impact on Puritan society was profound. He had refused to be trapped either by a new Arminian scheme that seemed to make God impotent or by a Hobbesian natural determinism that made morality an illusion. He …


The Concept Of The General Will In The Writings Of Rousseau, Sièyes, And Robespierre, Stephen Carruthers Jan 2008

The Concept Of The General Will In The Writings Of Rousseau, Sièyes, And Robespierre, Stephen Carruthers

Articles

This paper outlines the views on the General Will of Rousseau, as set out in The Social Contract, and compares them to the views developed by Sieyès in Qu'est-ce que le Tiers état? and by Robespierre, most notably in his speeches delivered during the ‘Reign of Terror’ from the establishment of the Committee of Public Safety on 6 April 1793 to his death on 28 July 1794


A. Lincoln, Philosopher: Lincoln’S Place In 19th-Century Intellectual History, Allen C. Guelzo Jan 2008

A. Lincoln, Philosopher: Lincoln’S Place In 19th-Century Intellectual History, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The nineteenth century in Europe and America was an era of second thoughts. Those second thoughts were largely about the Enlightenment, which had been born in the mid-1600s as a scientific revolution and blossomed into the Age of Reason in the 1700s, when it seemed that no puzzle was beyond the grasp of scientific rationality. That blossom was snipped all too quickly by the French Revolution, which drowned rationality in human politics in a spray of Jacobin-terrorized blood, then by the revulsion of European art and music from the Enlightenment’s canons of balance and symmetry in favor of the Romantic …


Forging Literary History: Historical Fiction And Literary Forgery In Eighteenth-Century Britain, Anne H. Stevens Jan 2008

Forging Literary History: Historical Fiction And Literary Forgery In Eighteenth-Century Britain, Anne H. Stevens

English Faculty Research

In this essay, I wish to explore a similar dialectic of historical positivism and skepticism in eighteenth-century Britain. Over the course of the century, but particularly in the second half, new and more scientific standards of historical investigation developed, with practitioners expressing a greater confidence about their ability to know the past. During these years, a series of monumental achievements in historiography appeared: David Hume’s History of England (1754–62), Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), and William Robertson’s History of Scotland (1759), to name just three of the most celebrated. As part of this increased interest …


Evolutionism And Historical Particularism At The St. Petersburg Museum Of Anthropology And Ethnography, Sergei Kan Jan 2008

Evolutionism And Historical Particularism At The St. Petersburg Museum Of Anthropology And Ethnography, Sergei Kan

Dartmouth Scholarship

The paper describes the early 20th century debates between several leading Russian anthropologists, including Lev Shternberg, on the best way of displaying artifacts in the newly refurbished Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in St. Petersburg. These debates revealed major tensions and contradictions between evolutionism and historical particularism, as well as universalism and nationalism within Russian anthropology of that era.


The Nobel Effect: Nobel Peace Prize Laureates As International Norm Entrepreneurs, Roger P. Alford Jan 2008

The Nobel Effect: Nobel Peace Prize Laureates As International Norm Entrepreneurs, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

For the first time in scholarly literature, this article traces the history of modern international law from the perspective of the constructivist theory of international relations. Constructivism is one of the leadings schools of thought in international relations today. This theory posits that state preferences emerge from social construction and that state interests are evolving rather than fixed. Constructivism further argues that international norms have a life cycle composed of three stages: norm emergence, norm acceptance (or norm cascades), and norm internalization. As such, constructivism treats international law as a dynamic process in which norm entrepreneurs interact with state actors …