Enlightenment and EmancipationSusan Manning, Peter France Enlightenment and Emancipation as separate issues have received much critical attention, but the complicated interaction of these two great shaping forces of modernity has never been scrutinized in depth. The Enlightenment has been represented in radically opposing ways: on the one hand, as the unshackling of the chains of superstition, custom, and usurped authority; on the other hand, in the Romantic period, but also more recently, as what Michel Foucault termed the grate confinement, in which mind-forged manacles imprison the free and irrational spirit. The debate about the Enlightenment project remains a topical one, which can still arouse fierce passions. This collection of essays by distinguished scholars from many disciplines addresses the central question: Was Enlightenment a force for emancipation? Their responses, working from within and across history, political thought and economics, music, literature and aesthetics, art history and film, reveal unsuspected connections and divergences even between well-known figures and texts, in their turn suggesting the need for further inquiry in areas that turn out to be very far from closed. importance emerge and familiar texts are shown to embody strange and unexpected implications. Susan Manning is Grierson Professor of English Literature and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Now retired, Peter France is a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of Edinburgh University. |
Contents
Introduction | 9 |
Condorcet and the Abolition of Slavery in the French Colonies | 15 |
Cest la faute a Voltaire? | 30 |
Paradox Rhetoric and the Enlightenments of Rousseau and Burke | 44 |
Playing to the Crowd in the American and French Revolutions | 63 |
History and the Teleology of Civility in the Scottish Enlightenment | 81 |
Science and Sedition in Spanish America | 97 |
Enlightenment Emancipation and the Queen Consort | 118 |
The Radical and Utopian Politics of Robina Millar and Frances Wright | 145 |
Diderots Salons and the Task of Enlightenment | 160 |
Musical Enlightenment in Revolutionary America | 174 |
Enlightened Texts and Decaying Evidence | 193 |
Truffaut Itard and the Two Faces of Enlightenment | 212 |
Notes on Contributors | 225 |
| 228 | |
Madame Roland Mary Wollstonecraft and Emancipation by the Pen | 132 |
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American appear argued August authority became become British Burke Cambridge century Christiane civil classical colonial common Condorcet Correspondence critical culture Diderot early Edinburgh effect eighteenth Eighteenth-Century emancipation English Enlightenment essay established example expressed figure followed France Franklin freedom French give human Hume ideas important independence influence intellectual interest Itard James John kind land later less letter liberty literature living London Madame March Mary means ment Millar moral nature original Otis Oxford paradox Paris particular past period philosophical play political practice present progress Protestants published radical reason references reform remains revolutionary rhetorical Roland Rousseau Salons Scotland Scottish seems sense slaves social society Spanish speech suggested taste thinking thought tion tradition turn United University Press Voltaire women writing wrote