HIST 358: The Self before the Selfie (HC): Public Opinion

The Conversational Enlightenment traces the spread of the concept of conversation during the Enlightenment, including the project of politeness, the fine arts, philosophy and public opinion. The book narrates this triumph of conversational style and thought partly as a succession to the oratorical rhetoric that characterised the Renaissance and partly as the victory of the only mode of speech that recognised women as women, and not as imitation men. Key Features: Synthesises a great deal of Enlightenment intellectual history within the frameworks of rhetoric and conversation; Puts women's speech at the heart of the history of Enlightenment rhetoric; Fuses Habermas' historical-theoretical framework to the history of rhetoric.

"Slander has always been a nasty business, Robert Darnton notes, but that is no reason to consider it an unworthy topic of inquiry. By destroying reputations, it has often helped to delegitimize regimes and bring down governments. Nowhere has this been more the case than in eighteenth-century France, when a ragtag group of literary libelers flooded the market with works that purported to expose the wicked behavior of the great. Salacious or seditious, outrageous or hilarious, their books and pamphlets claimed to reveal the secret doings of kings and their mistresses, the lewd and extravagant activities of an unpopular foreign-born queen, the affairs of aristocrats and men-about-town as they consorted with servants, monks, and dancing masters. These libels often mixed scandal with detailed accounts of contemporary history and current politics. And though they are now largely forgotten, many sold as well as or better than some of the most famous works of the Enlightenment." "Darnton here weaves a tale so full of intrigue that it may seem too extravagant to be true, although all its details can be confirmed in the archives of the French police and diplomatic service. Part detective story, part revolutionary history, The Devil in the Holy Water has much to tell us about the nature of authorship and the book trade, about Grub Street journalism and the shaping of public opinion, and about the important work that scurrilous words have done in many times and places."--BOOK JACKET.

An overview of clandestine satirical biographies of key figures in the French 18th century followed by a dictionary of these biographies.

Long recognized as more than the writings of a dozen or so philosophes, the Enlightenment created a new secular culture populated by the literate and the affluent. This is the first comprehensive history of Enlightenment freemasonry, from the roots of the society's political philosophy and evolution in seventeenth-century England and Scotland to the French Revolution. Based on never-before-used archival sources, it will appeal to anyone interested in the birth of modernity in Europe or in the cultural milieu of the European Enlightenment.

What is the Enlightenment? Why do we need to reflect on this original project of the emancipation and redemption of man by man that the West produced in the eighteenth century? To what extent are we the heirs? Conceived in the form of a dictionary, so dear to the fathers of the Encyclopedia, this work draws a general map of our knowledge of the Enlightenment. From morality to the idea of civilization, from architecture to music, from religion to science, it offers multiple keys to understanding the ideas and values that are then in place, the transformations they imply in society and culture, and shows their influences in the major European countries as well as the United States.

From 1770 to 1789 a succession of highly publicized cases riveted the attention of the French public. Maza argues that the reporting of these private scandals had a decisive effect on the way in which the French public came to understand public issues in the years before the Revolution.

Author Matytsin describes how skeptical rhetoric forced philosophers to formulate the principles and assumptions that they found to be certain or, at the very least, highly probable. In attempting to answer the deep challenge of philosophical skepticism, these thinkers explicitly articulated the rules for attaining true and certain knowledge and defined the boundaries beyond which human understanding could not venture. Matytsin shows that these exchanges transformed skepticism by mitigating its arguments while broadening the learned world's confidence in the capacities of reason by moderating its aspirations. Ultimately, the debates about the powers and limits of human understanding led to the making of a new conception of rationality that privileged practicable reason over speculative reason.