9 - Europe’s Eighteenth Century and the Quest for the Nation’s Origins

Summary

Some years ago, the intellectual historian Bronisław Baczko noted that a crucial feature of eighteenth-century thought was its all-pervasive desire for a “return to origins,” a fixation emerging through a quasi-obsessive quest for the beginning of all sorts of social, political, and religious institutions as well as moral principles.¹ Indeed, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1754), Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Johann Gottfried Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), and the Essai sur l’origine des connaissance humaines (1778), by the abbé de Condillac, are just a few works that testify, by their titles alone, to the eighteenth-century preoccupation with “origins.” But many more could be added. From the late seventeenth century onwards, innumerable scholars across Europe produced a plethora of tracts, pamphlets, articles, and books to investigate and dissect the origins of languages, knowledge, feelings, prejudice, and, importantly for us, nations.