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The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Historians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Leonard Krieger
Leonard Krieger
Affiliation:
Mr. Krieger is professor of history in the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
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Extract

It has been perhaps half a century since an historian could make a reputation by solemnly affirming, against the established nineteenth-century belief, the congeniality of history to eighteenth-century thinking. Hence the familiar, unrevised approach to eighteenth-century historiography is not the archaic notion of its essentially anti-historical character but rather the subsequent scheme, popularized by Carl Becker in the early 1930s, which acknowledged the importance of “the new history” in the philosophes' “heavenly city.” According to this scheme, “the new history” was an integral production of the philosophes' intellectual enterprise because it was “philosophy teaching by example”—because, that is, it was associated with the philosophes' own religiosity, which was negatively related to the traditional doctrine of a Christian dispensation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , September 1978 , pp. 279 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1978

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References

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55. Thus Manuel: “Eighteenth-century writers were notoriously oblique; ideas of the gods often covered other concerns.” Ibid., p. viii.

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