Suchergebnisse

A review essay on books by (1) Knud Haakonssen [Ed], The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U Press, 2006); & (2) Mark Goldie & Robert Wokler [Eds], The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U Press, 2006).

Discusses punishment in the US. Although the prison of late modernity, the 'supermax' is viewed by many criminologists as a retro model of the original penitentiary, argues that this is mistaken. Supermax imprisonment rejects the very essence of the original penitentiary project, which was based on the individualizing practices of self-control. Instead, today's penal regime has as its purpose objectification, de-individualizing practices of population control. Argues that the current regime of totalitarian incarceration could not possibly be a product of the Enlightenment. (Original abstract - amended)

What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment it claims to reject? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi revisits the arguments advanced in Horkheimer and Adorno's seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Cascardi argues against the view that postmodern culture has rejected Enlightenment beliefs and explores instead the continuities contemporary theory shares with Kant's failed ambition to bring the project of Enlightenment to completion. He explores the link between aesthetics and politics in thinkers as diverse as Habermas, Derrida, Arendt, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Wittgenstein in order to reverse the tendency to see works of art simply in terms of the worldly practices among which they are situated

The Enlightenment is often seen as the great age of religious and intellectual toleration, and this 1999 volume is a systematic European survey of the theory, practice, and very real limits to toleration in eighteenth-century Europe. A distinguished international team of contributors demonstrate how the publicists of the European Enlightenment developed earlier ideas about toleration, gradually widening the desire for religious toleration into a philosophy of freedom seen as a fundamental attribute and a precondition for a civilized society. Nonetheless Europe never uniformly or comprehensively embraced toleration during the eighteenth century: although religious toleration was central to the Enlightenment project, advances in toleration were often fragile and short-lived

In the late eighteenth century, an array of European political thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism, arguing passionately that empire-building was not only unworkable, costly, and dangerous, but manifestly unjust. Enlightenment against Empire is the first book devoted to the anti-imperialist political philosophies of an age often regarded as affirming imperial ambitions. Sankar Muthu argues that thinkers such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder developed an understanding of humans as inherently cultural agents and therefore necessarily diverse. These

Main description: In the late eighteenth century, an array of European political thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism, arguing passionately that empire-building was not only unworkable, costly, and dangerous, but manifestly unjust. Enlightenment against Empire is the first book devoted to the anti-imperialist political philosophies of an age often regarded as affirming imperial ambitions. Sankar Muthu argues that thinkers such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder developed an understanding of humans as inherently cultural agents and therefore necessarily diverse. These thinkers rejected the conception of a culture-free "natural man." They held that moral judgments of superiority or inferiority could be made neither about entire peoples nor about many distinctive cultural institutions and practices. Muthu shows how such arguments enabled the era's anti-imperialists to defend the freedom of non-European peoples to order their own societies. In contrast to those who praise "the Enlightenment" as the triumph of a universal morality and critics who view it as an imperializing ideology that denigrated cultural pluralism, Muthu argues instead that eighteenth-century political thought included multiple Enlightenments. He reveals a distinctive and underappreciated strand of Enlightenment thinking that interweaves commitments to universal moral principles and incommensurable ways of life, and that links the concept of a shared human nature with the idea that humans are fundamentally diverse. Such an intellectual temperament, Muthu contends, can broaden our own perspectives about international justice and the relationship between human unity and diversity.