Mobility and surveillance in Mulsow’s Knowledge Lost: decentring an absolutist order of knowledge and information

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

ABSTRACT Knowledge Lost revisits Paul Hazard's history of the crisis of European consciousness, Reinhardt Kosseleck's reign of criticism and Jonathan Israel's history of radical philosophies. But it does not start from a conceptual, doctrinal or religious approach to scholarly dissidence in Europe during the reign of Louis XIV. It aims to provide a material history of the intellectual techniques used by these marginal scholars to establish their criticisms. The article emphasises two ways of decentring the perspective: the study of weak knowledge instead of the strong knowledge of absolutist culture; and the insistence on mobility and the culture of travel that placed these scholars at a distance from central power.