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FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE TERROR: NEW GENEALOGIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2013

ANNELIEN DE DIJN
ANNELIEN DE DIJN*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

Dan Edelstein is a prolific author. In less than two years he has produced not one but two books. His first, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution, was published by The University of Chicago Press in October 2009. Its Irish twin, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy, appeared with the same press in the fall of 2010. Each of these books deals with a much-studied subject—respectively the Terror and the Enlightenment—the kind of subject, in other words, about which even the most recent literature alone can fill entire libraries. Yet in both cases, Edelstein manages to make a contribution of startling originality and importance. It is clear that this literary scholar—Edelstein is a professor of French and Italian at Stanford University—is one of the most important new voices in the field of eighteenth-century French intellectual history. In this review, I will start by discussing both of his books separately. I will then conclude with some reflections on what Edelstein's work contributes to our understanding of eighteenth-century intellectual history when read as a whole.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , April 2013 , pp. 153 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

1 Gueniffey, Patrice, La politique de la Terreur: Essai sur la violence révolutionnaire, 1789–94 (Paris, 2000)Google Scholar; Martin, Jean-Clément, Violence et Révolution: Essai sur la naissance d'un mythe national (Paris, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 A good overview and critique of the revisionist interpretation of the differences between the French and American Revolutions can be found in Van Kley, D. (ed.) The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights in 1789 (Stanford, 1994), 8–9Google Scholar.

3 Zuckert, Michael, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton, 1998)Google Scholar; and Zuckert, , The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (Notre Dame, 1997)Google Scholar.

4 See, for instance, Cobban, Alfred, In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History (London, 1960).Google Scholar More recently, Todorov, Tzvetan, In Defense of the Enlightenment, trans. Walker, Gila (London, 2009)Google Scholar, has defended the Enlightened idea of human rights as a necessary antidote to cultural relativism.

5 Habermas's, Jürgen 1962 study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society was translated into English by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA)Google Scholar in 1989 and has exercised a considerable influence on Enlightenment studies in the anglophone world since the 1990s. See, for instance, Goodman, Dana, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994)Google Scholar. For a more general appraisal of the turn away from intellectual history since the 1970s see Hesse, C., “Towards a New Topography of Enlightenment,” European Review of History 13 (2006), 499–508CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Gay, P., The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York, 1966–69)Google Scholar.

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8 Voltaire, , “Le Mondain,” in Les oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Mason, H.T., vol. 16, Writings of 1736 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2003), 269–314Google Scholar. The translation is my own.

9 Israel, Jonathan, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modernity (Princeton, 2010)Google Scholar.

10 On this eighteenth-century historical debate see Ellis, Harold, Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy: Aristocratic Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca and London, 1988)Google Scholar. For a broader and more philosophical take on the same debate see Foucault, Michel, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976, ed. Bertani, M., trans. Davidson, A. (New York, 2003), 115–215Google Scholar.