Historian of ideas in cultural and social context, with expertise in the age of Enlightenment and democratic revolution -- and in the social history of ideas about the Enlightenment, esp in the anglophone world, in the 20th century. Also general editor of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Phone: +1.702.895.4181 Address: Department of History, UNLV 4505 Maryland Parkway Las Vegas NV 89154-5020
Inventions of Enlightenment Since 1800. Concepts of Lumières, Enlightenment and Aufklärung, 2023
This article seeks to reset the origins of Peter Gay’s interest in the Enlightenment, and by exte... more This article seeks to reset the origins of Peter Gay’s interest in the Enlightenment, and by extension of the American scholarly engagement with the Enlightenment, in the post-war years. My contention here is that Gay, in taking up the topic in the years between 1952 and 1955, brought a complicated series of intellectual concerns to his topic, which arose from the particularities of post-war American political and intellectual culture. By considering Gay not only as a historian but also as a historical figure, as documented in his correspondence and manuscripts (and by drawing on work by previous scholars who conducted interviews with him), this article will present Gay’s entry into the field in the 1950s as an important moment in mid-20th century intellectual history.
This article argues that Gay’s approach, while both admiring of and in the tradition of Ernst Cassirer, nevertheless represents a significant break from, and challenge to, the Kantian Idealist tradition. I argue instead that the influences on Gay came from a variety of German intellectual traditions, with a focus on social scientific and social psychological methods. The article demosntrates that his interests in political theory and in social psychology informed his work on the Enlightenment – and, by extension, the field of eighteenth-century studies – from the beginning. At the same time, Gay’s turn to the Enlightenment reflected a response to specific problems in American liberal thought of the early to mid-1950s.
them as Semuren (“people of various categories”). Ranking just below the Mongols—but above the na... more them as Semuren (“people of various categories”). Ranking just below the Mongols—but above the native Chinese—in social status, the Uyghurs developed a sophisticated repertoire of strategies for building political and social networks across multiple generations. Brose has painstakingly reconstructed this Turkic ethnic minority’s pattern of dispersal from Uyghurstan into China, using biographical case studies to rethink much of the conventional wisdom about the Yuan dynasty and demonstrating that status barriers and cultural boundaries separating Mongol rulers, central Asian collaborators, and Chinese subjects were “in fact much more porous than generally assumed” (14). Brose makes a persuasive case that the four-part legal classification system of Mongols, Semu, northern Chinese, and southern Chinese rested on status distinctions rather than the modern social-science concepts of class or ethnicity and that these distinctions were frequently blurred in practice. Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of social and cultural capital with theoretical sophistication, Brose deftly explains how the precursors of the Xie family formed political networks with early Mongol rulers, their descendants earned a privileged position within the Yuan government, and later descendants built social networks with Chinese local elites. Governing the first sedentary central Asian kingdom to submit to Chinggis Qan in 1209, the Uyghur political elite possessed administrative and literacy skills that their Mongol overlords lacked. They used these intellectual and cultural resources to become a “mobilized diaspora” of high-status servants, who retained a sense of group identity even as they were scattered across the Mongol empire as administrators (57). Brose closely follows five generations of a family of Uyghur migrants, as the Mongol political system evolved from an ad hoc military occupation into a full-fledged civil bureaucracy. The Xies pursued diversified strategies of upward mobility, increasingly availing themselves of such Chinese practices as adopting Chinese surnames, mastering Confucian learning, and preparing for civil service examinations. The core chapters of Servants and Masters consist of detailed biographical studies of Uyghurs who attained high positions of political power and social status in Yuan-dynasty China. After Qubilai’s conquest of the Southern Song in 1279, members of the Xie lineage increasingly served in the regional administration in southern China, where they settled and established themselves as well-educated members of the local gentry elite. By analyzing Chinese-language biographical sources, Brose explains how the Xies accumulated cultural capital by having their ancestors portrayed by Chinese literati as exemplars of Confucian virtues of loyalty, uprightness, and filial piety. In the fourteenth century, the family’s fourth generation produced six holders of the highest civil service degree, the jinshi, acquiring status on the national level as bureaucrats and on the local level as literati and participating in state-centered and society-oriented networks of elite production. At times, however, Brose’s focus is fixed rather too narrowly on the Xies, and the reader loses sight of how their strategies compared to those of Semuren of other ethnicities, and how they were embedded into the broader sociopolitical context. Although his translations are faithful and fluid, Brose could do more to situate the Xie family’s stories within Chinese conventions of biography writing in general, by explaining why and how the narratives of Uyghur elites were reworked to accord with established Confucian values. Nevertheless, this book has added richness and complexity to our picture of Yuan society, and it deserves to be read by a wider audience of Chinese historians as well as by specialists on central Asia and the Mongol empire.
... CONTENTS Daniel Gordon INTRODUCTION: POSTMODERNISM AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 1 Malick W. G... more ... CONTENTS Daniel Gordon INTRODUCTION: POSTMODERNISM AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 1 Malick W. Ghachem Arthur Goldhammer Daniel ... Sophia Rosenfeld WRITING THE HISTORY OF CENSORSHIP IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT 1 1 7 Alessa Johns ...
... He would like to thank the following for commenting on earlier versions of this essay: David ... more ... He would like to thank the following for commenting on earlier versions of this essay: David Cannadine, Priscilla Parkhurst F erguson , Paul Friedland, Robert Nemes, Jeffrey Ravel, David Schalk, Isser Woloch, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal. ...
Although the distinction between legality and legitimacy might seem arcane to the twenty-first ce... more Although the distinction between legality and legitimacy might seem arcane to the twenty-first century mind, it was clearly and painfully evident to Andebez de Mongoubert. In February 1775, this aspiring writer proposed to the royal theater his first work, a classical tragedy about the biblical king Abimelech. Writing in an elite genre, on a religious topic, and for a monopolistic state theater, Andebez appears to have conformed entirely to Old Regime norms. Moreover, his text neither expressed Enlightened ideals nor scandalously libeled leading figures of the court. His play was duly accepted into the royal theater repertory and gained the approval of the royal censor. Thus, in legal terms, he had become a writer. Yet Andebez still lacked the legitimacy necessary to be considered a writer by court elites and commercial theatergoers; accordingly, the royal troupe scheduled his play after forty-seven other new tragedies already in its repertory. So he tried to circumvent the royal theater, using the censorial approbation already issued for the play to publish it with the Parisian bookseller Ruault.1 Although he explained in a preface that he had printed the work for “the public,” the royal troupe responded by dropping the play entirely. Andebez thus found himself excluded from literary life not for his dissidence or for having acted illegally but for illegitimate publication. He had learned the hard way that a new writer had to achieve legitimacy by gaining acceptance within literary institutions before seeking publication
Contents: Preface Introduction: Men of letters and literary sociability in 18th-century France An... more Contents: Preface Introduction: Men of letters and literary sociability in 18th-century France An association of men of letters: the formation of the Society of Dramatic Authors Beaumarchais at court: on the civility and cultural power of Gens de lettres Playwrights, print and publicity: the success and failure of the SAD in 1780 Literary sociability and the Revolution: social interests, politics and literary property, July 1789-January 1791 From liberty to patriotism Conclusion: copyright, community and enlightenment Select bibliography Index.
Les technologies nouvelles permettant de mettre en ligne a la disposition des etudiants des conna... more Les technologies nouvelles permettant de mettre en ligne a la disposition des etudiants des connaissances, des sources, des cours entiers sont appelees a renouveler profondement l’enseignement de l’histoire. Gregory Brown explique que ces evolutions, pour avoir ete plus lentes dans le domaine des etudes sur l’histoire de France que dans d’autres, n’en sont pas moins rapides et a meme de favoriser de nouvelles formes d’apprentissage. Il esquisse ici un etat des lieux, cote americain, de ces innovations qui bousculent les habitudes des enseignants dans leur rapport au savoir et a sa diffusion, presentant le contexte juridique, des exemples de ressources existantes (des sites) ainsi que des elements de sa propre pratique d’enseignant.
... Voir Sophie WILMA DEIERKAUF -HOLSBOER, Vie d'Alexandre Hardy, nouv. ... d'auteurs q... more ... Voir Sophie WILMA DEIERKAUF -HOLSBOER, Vie d'Alexandre Hardy, nouv. ... d'auteurs qui, s'étant mis d'accord avec la troupe dans des « conventions », ont dû également lui réécrire pour rappeler les conditions de l'arrangement, avec Dudoyer ( 1773) et Le Blanc ( 1775): BCF ...
Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2005
This paper proposes a new interpretation of Beaumarchais in French public life on the eve of the ... more This paper proposes a new interpretation of Beaumarchais in French public life on the eve of the Revolution, as well as an exemplary, interdisciplinary encounter between history and literature. A recent rethinking of the relationship between historiography and literature, in the early modern period and as academic disciplines today, has focused on the institutions underlying each of these respective 'intellectual fields', in the sense of the term given by Pierre Bourdieu and modified by Alain Viala. This literary-historical scholarship has focused on institutions as sites in which participants reproduce and modify existing languages and practices in strategic response to multiple, competing imperatives. These imperatives, for writers, include the constraints imposed by constituted political authorities, the need for personal standing and legitimacy within a peer group, and the need for material support from some combination of patronage and commercial revenues. The texts produced in response to these imperatives, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, might be considered either 'literature' or 'history', and these same texts are today used as sources for both literary criticism and historiography. To offer a case study of this approach, this paper studies Beaumarchais's experiences in I784 and I785 not as lived social experience (a 'life') that is explained by the literary characters in the play (the 'work'), but instead as a study of the rhetorical figures deployed by Beaumarchais and others to represent his experiences with the predominant institutions and norms of late eighteenth-century French public life. Through Beaumarchais, this case study proposes a rethinking of the literary characters that have been read as social realities in the established Enlightenment narrative of dissident writers triumphing over Old Regime hierarchies and authorities -thus creating and embodying the liberty of the Revolution. The goal of this paper is to shed new light on the life and works of Beaumarchais -and to demonstrate the efficacy of this form of interdisciplinarity, in which a writer's social experience and intellectual contribution cannot be distinguished neatly into categories of 'life' and 'works', nor can Old Regime social institutions be distinguished from the rhetoric and figures of Enlightenment rhetoric - namely, acculturation or civility, expressed as honnetete, and dissidence or autonomy, expressed as civic-minded patriotism.
Inventions of Enlightenment Since 1800. Concepts of Lumières, Enlightenment and Aufklärung, 2023
This article seeks to reset the origins of Peter Gay’s interest in the Enlightenment, and by exte... more This article seeks to reset the origins of Peter Gay’s interest in the Enlightenment, and by extension of the American scholarly engagement with the Enlightenment, in the post-war years. My contention here is that Gay, in taking up the topic in the years between 1952 and 1955, brought a complicated series of intellectual concerns to his topic, which arose from the particularities of post-war American political and intellectual culture. By considering Gay not only as a historian but also as a historical figure, as documented in his correspondence and manuscripts (and by drawing on work by previous scholars who conducted interviews with him), this article will present Gay’s entry into the field in the 1950s as an important moment in mid-20th century intellectual history.
This article argues that Gay’s approach, while both admiring of and in the tradition of Ernst Cassirer, nevertheless represents a significant break from, and challenge to, the Kantian Idealist tradition. I argue instead that the influences on Gay came from a variety of German intellectual traditions, with a focus on social scientific and social psychological methods. The article demosntrates that his interests in political theory and in social psychology informed his work on the Enlightenment – and, by extension, the field of eighteenth-century studies – from the beginning. At the same time, Gay’s turn to the Enlightenment reflected a response to specific problems in American liberal thought of the early to mid-1950s.
them as Semuren (“people of various categories”). Ranking just below the Mongols—but above the na... more them as Semuren (“people of various categories”). Ranking just below the Mongols—but above the native Chinese—in social status, the Uyghurs developed a sophisticated repertoire of strategies for building political and social networks across multiple generations. Brose has painstakingly reconstructed this Turkic ethnic minority’s pattern of dispersal from Uyghurstan into China, using biographical case studies to rethink much of the conventional wisdom about the Yuan dynasty and demonstrating that status barriers and cultural boundaries separating Mongol rulers, central Asian collaborators, and Chinese subjects were “in fact much more porous than generally assumed” (14). Brose makes a persuasive case that the four-part legal classification system of Mongols, Semu, northern Chinese, and southern Chinese rested on status distinctions rather than the modern social-science concepts of class or ethnicity and that these distinctions were frequently blurred in practice. Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of social and cultural capital with theoretical sophistication, Brose deftly explains how the precursors of the Xie family formed political networks with early Mongol rulers, their descendants earned a privileged position within the Yuan government, and later descendants built social networks with Chinese local elites. Governing the first sedentary central Asian kingdom to submit to Chinggis Qan in 1209, the Uyghur political elite possessed administrative and literacy skills that their Mongol overlords lacked. They used these intellectual and cultural resources to become a “mobilized diaspora” of high-status servants, who retained a sense of group identity even as they were scattered across the Mongol empire as administrators (57). Brose closely follows five generations of a family of Uyghur migrants, as the Mongol political system evolved from an ad hoc military occupation into a full-fledged civil bureaucracy. The Xies pursued diversified strategies of upward mobility, increasingly availing themselves of such Chinese practices as adopting Chinese surnames, mastering Confucian learning, and preparing for civil service examinations. The core chapters of Servants and Masters consist of detailed biographical studies of Uyghurs who attained high positions of political power and social status in Yuan-dynasty China. After Qubilai’s conquest of the Southern Song in 1279, members of the Xie lineage increasingly served in the regional administration in southern China, where they settled and established themselves as well-educated members of the local gentry elite. By analyzing Chinese-language biographical sources, Brose explains how the Xies accumulated cultural capital by having their ancestors portrayed by Chinese literati as exemplars of Confucian virtues of loyalty, uprightness, and filial piety. In the fourteenth century, the family’s fourth generation produced six holders of the highest civil service degree, the jinshi, acquiring status on the national level as bureaucrats and on the local level as literati and participating in state-centered and society-oriented networks of elite production. At times, however, Brose’s focus is fixed rather too narrowly on the Xies, and the reader loses sight of how their strategies compared to those of Semuren of other ethnicities, and how they were embedded into the broader sociopolitical context. Although his translations are faithful and fluid, Brose could do more to situate the Xie family’s stories within Chinese conventions of biography writing in general, by explaining why and how the narratives of Uyghur elites were reworked to accord with established Confucian values. Nevertheless, this book has added richness and complexity to our picture of Yuan society, and it deserves to be read by a wider audience of Chinese historians as well as by specialists on central Asia and the Mongol empire.
... CONTENTS Daniel Gordon INTRODUCTION: POSTMODERNISM AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 1 Malick W. G... more ... CONTENTS Daniel Gordon INTRODUCTION: POSTMODERNISM AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 1 Malick W. Ghachem Arthur Goldhammer Daniel ... Sophia Rosenfeld WRITING THE HISTORY OF CENSORSHIP IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT 1 1 7 Alessa Johns ...
... He would like to thank the following for commenting on earlier versions of this essay: David ... more ... He would like to thank the following for commenting on earlier versions of this essay: David Cannadine, Priscilla Parkhurst F erguson , Paul Friedland, Robert Nemes, Jeffrey Ravel, David Schalk, Isser Woloch, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal. ...
Although the distinction between legality and legitimacy might seem arcane to the twenty-first ce... more Although the distinction between legality and legitimacy might seem arcane to the twenty-first century mind, it was clearly and painfully evident to Andebez de Mongoubert. In February 1775, this aspiring writer proposed to the royal theater his first work, a classical tragedy about the biblical king Abimelech. Writing in an elite genre, on a religious topic, and for a monopolistic state theater, Andebez appears to have conformed entirely to Old Regime norms. Moreover, his text neither expressed Enlightened ideals nor scandalously libeled leading figures of the court. His play was duly accepted into the royal theater repertory and gained the approval of the royal censor. Thus, in legal terms, he had become a writer. Yet Andebez still lacked the legitimacy necessary to be considered a writer by court elites and commercial theatergoers; accordingly, the royal troupe scheduled his play after forty-seven other new tragedies already in its repertory. So he tried to circumvent the royal theater, using the censorial approbation already issued for the play to publish it with the Parisian bookseller Ruault.1 Although he explained in a preface that he had printed the work for “the public,” the royal troupe responded by dropping the play entirely. Andebez thus found himself excluded from literary life not for his dissidence or for having acted illegally but for illegitimate publication. He had learned the hard way that a new writer had to achieve legitimacy by gaining acceptance within literary institutions before seeking publication
Contents: Preface Introduction: Men of letters and literary sociability in 18th-century France An... more Contents: Preface Introduction: Men of letters and literary sociability in 18th-century France An association of men of letters: the formation of the Society of Dramatic Authors Beaumarchais at court: on the civility and cultural power of Gens de lettres Playwrights, print and publicity: the success and failure of the SAD in 1780 Literary sociability and the Revolution: social interests, politics and literary property, July 1789-January 1791 From liberty to patriotism Conclusion: copyright, community and enlightenment Select bibliography Index.
Les technologies nouvelles permettant de mettre en ligne a la disposition des etudiants des conna... more Les technologies nouvelles permettant de mettre en ligne a la disposition des etudiants des connaissances, des sources, des cours entiers sont appelees a renouveler profondement l’enseignement de l’histoire. Gregory Brown explique que ces evolutions, pour avoir ete plus lentes dans le domaine des etudes sur l’histoire de France que dans d’autres, n’en sont pas moins rapides et a meme de favoriser de nouvelles formes d’apprentissage. Il esquisse ici un etat des lieux, cote americain, de ces innovations qui bousculent les habitudes des enseignants dans leur rapport au savoir et a sa diffusion, presentant le contexte juridique, des exemples de ressources existantes (des sites) ainsi que des elements de sa propre pratique d’enseignant.
... Voir Sophie WILMA DEIERKAUF -HOLSBOER, Vie d'Alexandre Hardy, nouv. ... d'auteurs q... more ... Voir Sophie WILMA DEIERKAUF -HOLSBOER, Vie d'Alexandre Hardy, nouv. ... d'auteurs qui, s'étant mis d'accord avec la troupe dans des « conventions », ont dû également lui réécrire pour rappeler les conditions de l'arrangement, avec Dudoyer ( 1773) et Le Blanc ( 1775): BCF ...
Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2005
This paper proposes a new interpretation of Beaumarchais in French public life on the eve of the ... more This paper proposes a new interpretation of Beaumarchais in French public life on the eve of the Revolution, as well as an exemplary, interdisciplinary encounter between history and literature. A recent rethinking of the relationship between historiography and literature, in the early modern period and as academic disciplines today, has focused on the institutions underlying each of these respective 'intellectual fields', in the sense of the term given by Pierre Bourdieu and modified by Alain Viala. This literary-historical scholarship has focused on institutions as sites in which participants reproduce and modify existing languages and practices in strategic response to multiple, competing imperatives. These imperatives, for writers, include the constraints imposed by constituted political authorities, the need for personal standing and legitimacy within a peer group, and the need for material support from some combination of patronage and commercial revenues. The texts produced in response to these imperatives, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, might be considered either 'literature' or 'history', and these same texts are today used as sources for both literary criticism and historiography. To offer a case study of this approach, this paper studies Beaumarchais's experiences in I784 and I785 not as lived social experience (a 'life') that is explained by the literary characters in the play (the 'work'), but instead as a study of the rhetorical figures deployed by Beaumarchais and others to represent his experiences with the predominant institutions and norms of late eighteenth-century French public life. Through Beaumarchais, this case study proposes a rethinking of the literary characters that have been read as social realities in the established Enlightenment narrative of dissident writers triumphing over Old Regime hierarchies and authorities -thus creating and embodying the liberty of the Revolution. The goal of this paper is to shed new light on the life and works of Beaumarchais -and to demonstrate the efficacy of this form of interdisciplinarity, in which a writer's social experience and intellectual contribution cannot be distinguished neatly into categories of 'life' and 'works', nor can Old Regime social institutions be distinguished from the rhetoric and figures of Enlightenment rhetoric - namely, acculturation or civility, expressed as honnetete, and dissidence or autonomy, expressed as civic-minded patriotism.
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Papers by Gregory Brown
complicated series of intellectual concerns to his topic, which arose from the particularities of post-war American political and intellectual culture. By considering Gay not only as a historian but also as a historical figure,
as documented in his correspondence and manuscripts (and by
drawing on work by previous scholars who conducted interviews with
him), this article will present Gay’s entry into the field in the 1950s as
an important moment in mid-20th century intellectual history.
This article argues that Gay’s approach, while both admiring of
and in the tradition of Ernst Cassirer, nevertheless represents a significant
break from, and challenge to, the Kantian Idealist tradition. I argue
instead that the influences on Gay came from a variety of German
intellectual traditions, with a focus on social scientific and social
psychological methods. The article demosntrates that his interests in political theory and in social psychology informed his work on the Enlightenment – and, by extension, the field of eighteenth-century studies – from the beginning. At the same time, Gay’s turn to the Enlightenment reflected a response to specific problems in American liberal thought of the
early to mid-1950s.
complicated series of intellectual concerns to his topic, which arose from the particularities of post-war American political and intellectual culture. By considering Gay not only as a historian but also as a historical figure,
as documented in his correspondence and manuscripts (and by
drawing on work by previous scholars who conducted interviews with
him), this article will present Gay’s entry into the field in the 1950s as
an important moment in mid-20th century intellectual history.
This article argues that Gay’s approach, while both admiring of
and in the tradition of Ernst Cassirer, nevertheless represents a significant
break from, and challenge to, the Kantian Idealist tradition. I argue
instead that the influences on Gay came from a variety of German
intellectual traditions, with a focus on social scientific and social
psychological methods. The article demosntrates that his interests in political theory and in social psychology informed his work on the Enlightenment – and, by extension, the field of eighteenth-century studies – from the beginning. At the same time, Gay’s turn to the Enlightenment reflected a response to specific problems in American liberal thought of the
early to mid-1950s.