Progress Of Enlightenment Research Articles

Morale et désenchantement: Sainte-Beuve lecteur de La Rochefoucauld

Abstract: Sainte-Beuve's literary criticism deserves consideration as part of the tradition of French moralistes and this article concentrates on his treatment of La Rochefoucauld. Their relationship sheds light, first on Sainte-Beuve's coming of age as he rids himself of the hold of both Catholicism and Romanticism, second on his discussion of self-love which is the central theme of the Maximes , and finally on his adoption of a method of skepticism which sidesteps the moral certainties of Christian charity and of Enlightenment progress. (In French)

Staging "Civilization and Enlightenment"—Yi Kwang-su's Kyuhan and the Communicability of Modern Theater Space

Abstract: Under the banner of civilization and enlightenment, new-intellectuals of the early twentieth century sought to challenge damaging past traditions and social practices to give rise to a new era for the people of Korea. Coinciding with this push toward modern progress, the theater simultaneously arose as a new feature of the urban landscape. Writers like Yi Kwang-su stressed the communicative potential of new literary trends. He was one of the earliest to turn to drama as a means of shaping a future Korea; he utilized the palpable realism fostered by stage space as a means to channel his progressive ideas to society. Published in Hakjigwang in 1917, Kyuhan (Sorrows of the Inner Room), potentially Korea's first modern play, is a work that frankly portrays the damages of dated Confucian moralities and traditions. In penning a drama that brings the modern Chosŏn intellectual of Yi's urban audience into a uniquely female space of domesticity, pain and subalternity, the audience becomes privy to the bitter realities of Chosŏn women and the importance of autonomy, education and true love. Through discussions on heterotopic space, spectatorship and the relationship between actor and audience, this study will explore Kyuhan and the birth of the modern stage. In this, we come understand Yi's vision of theater as a new site for enlightenment progress that could shock and provoke the public into action.

Charles Macklin and the Theatres of London

Charles Macklin and the Theatres of London

The dangers of mental health promotion in schools

Much of Western media has promoted the idea that we are facing an epidemic of mental illness and psychiatric emergencies in contemporary Western society and worldwide, and that young people are a particularly vulnerable group. Schools have become a prominent site of concern and focus for this discourse as mental health problems are said to start early in life; thus, targeting intervention at people in their early years and greater mental health awareness amongst staff and pupils are perceived as important mental disorder prevention strategies. However, the belief that mental disorders can be classified and investigated using the same tools as physical health has led to a system of knowledge that lacks validity being constructed. This ideology, far from leading to enlightened progress that will prevent and/or ameliorate future mental health problems, inadvertently sets young people on a path towards alienation from, and suspicion of, their emotional lives and a lack of curiosity about, or tolerance of, suffering. This article explores how a lack of understanding about what sort of ‘thing’ a mental health problem/disorder/diagnosis/illness is leads to confusion about the meaning and consequences of experiencing mental distress and/or mental difference. Interviews with secondary school teachers carried out by one of the authors (ZT) show how awareness of mental health and mental disorder has increased in UK secondary schools over the last decade and how this has led to an expansion in the numbers of students thought to have mental health problems that required professional intervention. As a result, teachers now identify many behaviours and experiences they previously deemed ordinary and/or understandable as likely mental health problems that required professional expertise they lacked. Rather than preventing mental health problems, it is likely that this ideology, and the resulting practices it encourages, are creating them.

A Liquid Africa

Abstract This essay coins the term liquid Africa to describe the continent as protean and fluid, a convergence point of diverse ideas and influences, shaped by the tidal wash of local, regional, and international cultural influences. The notion of a liquid Africa opposes long-standing representations of the continent in the Western imaginary as a homogenous landmass sunk in a perpetual past, suspended outside progress, and the antithesis of modernity. Through study of Samuel Bazawule's short film Diasporadical Trilogía (2017) and a number of other recent films primarily by creative practitioners of African origin, liquidity is addressed here as a curatorial category, denoting a shared versatility of practice, and in aesthetic, geographic, and temporal terms. Aesthetic strategies such as the use of water as a thematic device and of music to weave a tapestry of auditory affinities across place and time act as means of conjuring narratives of collective memory, of multiple pasts always within reach of the present, across the African diaspora. Finally, the essay considers how Diasporadical Trilogía in particular embraces fantasy as a liberatory form, a means of resistance to notions of Enlightenment progress, and a route toward an epistemic decentering based on Africa's vast cosmology of myths and beliefs.

From Pennsylvania to Transylvania: August Ludwig Schlözer and the decentering of Enlightenment

This article analyzes the historical and political thinking of the eighteenth-century German historian August Ludwig Schlözer, in the context of the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. The article argues that Schlözer's disillusionment with these transformative events led him to identify the German settlers in medieval Transylvania as agents of a better Enlightenment. In doing so, Schlözer constructed the history of the Transylvanian German colony as an antithesis to American colonial endeavors, while redefining the frameworks and history of enlightened progress in both time and space. In this way, Schlözer translated the history of a marginal East–Central European region into a world-historical narrative.

Estética, ética e formação na perspectiva adorniana

O artigo discute a relação entre estética, ética e formação na perspectiva adorniana. A pesquisa, de natureza bibliográfica, compreende a algumas obras de Adorno e de seus intérpretes. Na Dialética do Esclarecimento, Adorno e Horkheimer (1985) discutem criticamente a relação entre o mito e a racionalidade instrumental, pois o progresso do esclarecimento, ao valorizar uma razão de característica abstrata e dominadora, enfraqueceu o exercício da autorreflexão crítica e promoveu a regressão da consciência, cujo processo se expressa na semicultura e na barbárie. A obra de arte e a estética se opõem a esse processo e fortalecem a consciência e a razão emancipatória, constituindo-se em referencial de liberdade e de integração entre o trabalho intelectual e o manual.

Anomaly and Danger: Politics of the Impure in Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea

Anomaly and Danger: Politics of the Impure in Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea Joel B. Lande (bio) I. Revolution, Evolution For many German-speaking intellectuals around 1800, the events surrounding the French Revolution assumed pivotal importance. Beyond the first-hand reports from prominent authors, including Georg Forster und Joachim Heinrich Campe, there were also figures further removed from the epicenter of revolutionary events, who felt personally addressed by the upheaval.1 Perhaps the most prominent instance of such engagement can be found in the final text Immanuel Kant published during his lifetime, the Conflict of the Faculties (1798). From his far-flung university town along the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea, Kant asserted his belief that the ongoing Revolution was of universal human importance. At the heart of Kant’s observations is the set of concerns expressed in the following paragraph The revolution which we have seen taking place in our own times in a nation of gifted people may succeed, or it may fail. It may be so filled with misery and atrocities that no right-thinking man would ever decide to make the same experiment again at such a price, even if he could hope to carry it out successfully at the second attempt. But I maintain that this revolution has aroused in the hearts and desires of all spectators who are not themselves [End Page 572] caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm, although the very utterance of this sympathy was fraught with danger. It cannot therefore have been caused by anything other than a moral disposition within the human race. (Kant, Political Writings 182)2 Kant’s suspicion that the fall of the monarchy, along with the accompanying order of the estates, enjoys a significance untethered from a specific time or place, is closely linked to his philosophical-historical interest in the progress of human society in general. Kant insists on the pivotal place of the Revolution in the course of human history, not because he believes it will immediately result in the realization of the historically ideal form of government—a republican constitution founded on universal principles of natural right—but rather because he senses its potential contribution to that still-distant goal. And so he uses an act of lexical and conceptual sleight-of-hand in order to hide the fact that the events in France since 1789 have involved what he regards as the ultimate political evil, war. Kant’s surprising linguistic move has its source in a problematic aptly described by Hannah Arendt in her study On Revolution. Arendt’s book introduces the claim that “revolutions are the only political events that confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning” (21). Kant, for one, responds to this confrontation by distancing himself from abrupt change; in fact, one can reasonably conjecture that a radical start may well have appeared to him irredeemably linked to the post-1790 violence abroad. In his sleight-of-hand, Kant draws on a subtle terminological choice he encountered in a treatise by his student Johann Benjamin Erhard. He picks up on the description of the events in France as a form of “evolution,” as a contingent and flawed stage in the unforeseeable and intractable path traced by humankind. The choice of the word “evolution” was highly unconventional—it was an essentially unused term in the German language of the time, but was also one that Kant, with his Latin education, could easily make his own. To the eighteenth-century German ear, the Latin evolutio or evolvo possessed a less problematic set of associations than the French loanword “revolution.” Both terms had historically promoted the imagination of a uniform and repetitive temporality (the Vulgate speaks of “anni circulus fuerit evolutus”). But for a mode of Enlightenment thought [End Page 573] searching for a way to describe time linearly, the cluster of prefixes ec-, ex-, e- conjured a more congenial set of associations than re-. Erhard’s use of the term “evolution” has a clear vector of movement—toward a “progress of Enlightenment,” as he says (188–189). The recourse of both Erhard and his teacher Kant to this unusual term testifies to...

The Transvaluation of Critique in the Anthropocene

This article considers the transvaluation of critique through the lens of the new affirmative critical approaches of the Anthropocene. The first section introduces the problematic of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch and also as symptomatic of the end of modernist ontological and epistemological assumptions of the divide between culture and nature. The second section then highlights how the Anthropocene thesis poses a problem for critique through fundamentally decentring the human as subject and challenging the temporal claims of Enlightenment progress. The third section analyses the implications of this closure for critical approaches and the shift towards a more positive view of the present: no longer seeking to imagine alternative futures but rather drawing out alternative possibilities that already exist. Critique thus becomes additive, affirmative and constructive. The final section expands on this point and concludes with a consideration of how contemporary theoretical approaches articulate the transvaluation of critique.

Planetary Boundaries and the Challenge to Governance in the Anthropocene

This article considers the challenge to governance posed by new Anthropocene discourses of planetary boundaries. The first section introduces the problematic of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch and also as symptomatic of the end of modernist ontological and epistemological assumptions of the divide between culture and nature. The Anthropocene is thus seen to fundamentally decentre the human as subject and the temporal linearity of Enlightenment progress. The second section analyses the implications of this closure for critical approaches to governance, which increasingly accept and reproduce these ontopolitical assumptions. The tasks of governance thus become transformed, no longer seeking to imagine alternative futures but rather drawing out alternative possibilities that already exist in the present. Governance becomes increasingly an act of affirmation rather than a discourse of change and transformation. The third section expands on this point to consider how contemporary governance approaches articulate the status quo in increasingly radical and enabling ways.

DéborahDanowski and Eduardo ViveirosdeCastroThe Ends of the WorldMalden, MA: Polity Press, 2017. 180 p. $19.95 (pbk.).

In the twenty-first century the relationship between population and environment has reemerged as a central question for demography. Consensus has been reached that we live in the Anthropocene, a geological era in which human activity is determining environmental trends. The Ends of the World is written for those who seek to answer the question: what might come next? Déborah Danowski, Professor of Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, engage this question with passion. They note the dire consequences human activity is having on our world. The pace of global warming, climate change, and rising sea levels is accelerating, and with the proliferation of nuclear weapons the threat of humans ending all life on the planet is a constant possibility. This leads the authors to see the Anthropocene as necessarily being a temporary era. The first five chapters give an account of how we have arrived at a point where envisioning our future is a depressing endeavor. This is done largely through a critical review of the works of four scholars: Günther Anders, an Austrian philosopher and early critic of the role of technology in modern life; Dipesh Chakrabarty, a University of Chicago historian focusing on post-colonial and subaltern studies; Isabelle Stengers, a Belgian philosopher of science noted for her ideas on cosmopolitics; and Bruno Latour, a French philosopher and anthropologist known for questioning the superiority of modern (Western) thoughts and values. During the past 400 years, Enlightenment progress has allowed humans to exert ever-greater control over nature, and industrial capitalism has spread over much of the globe. These two trends are identified as prime causes of the present perilous relationship between humanity and the planet. Although heavy going in places, this discussion is enlivened by references to relevant fiction and films. For example, a parallel is drawn between the situation depicted in the film Melancholia, where a large asteroid is on a collision course with earth, and the current situation where human actions threaten our existence. With this view of the present, what possible futures do the authors envision? One is a human-free world, much like the one that existed before the arrival of Homo sapiens, that re-emerges after the passing of our species. Another is a world much less hospitable to life, only capable of supporting a human population greatly reduced in numbers and living conditions. A third is one in which human technological innovation manages to restore the environment to a pristine condition and to provide everyone with a bountiful life. The last, the authors judge, is the most unlikely. The final three chapters look to Amerindian groups living at the periphery of the modern world for a way of dealing with the present. Their creation myths allow for a world without endless progress, and during the last 400 years they have persevered after their worlds had ended with the devastation of their populations and cultures. The authors find in the Amerindian “subvival” a blueprint for our future: to live democratically with “comparatively modest populations” and “relatively simply technologies” while making the best of the “world we have left them.”

Taqizadeh and European Civilisation

The leading Iranian intellectual and nationalist Hasan Taqizadeh has been roundly condemned by posterity for his call to Iranians to embrace European civilisation in its entirety without qualification or compromise. Taqizadeh himself later conceded that the form of words he had used were injudicious, but he added that his intention had been to galvanise Iranians out of their self-destructive political stupor and it remains a reality that many of Taqizadeh's contemporaries were supportive of his call to arms. This paper reassesses Taqizadeh's position in the context of his historical and intellectual environment, which it is argued drew heavily from a “Whig” reading of the Enlightenment progress. It shows that Taqizadeh was not alone in drawing on this narrative while maintaining an important distinction between the positive aspects of British political thought and the shortcomings of British policy.

Bóg i religia człowieka oświeconego według Kanta

Having revealed an illusion of man’s cognitive efforts, Kant sealed the progress of enlightenment inscribed into a historical process, with a deep conviction that an ancient Greek prescription to „know thyself” was finally fulfilled. A man became aware of being equipped with a mind, and accordingly, with freedom as well as the ability to act morally, still of remaining a finite natural being with cognitive skills limited. This critical self-knowledge of an enlightened man relieved him of his nonage to open his eyes for a new vision of both the world and a man himself regarded as a self-conscious subject and active creator of his fate.

Impostors: Performance, Emotion, and Political Economics in the Lettre à d'Alembert

Impostors:Performance, Emotion, and Political Economics in the Lettre à d'Alembert Jeffrey M. Leichman "Un spectacle [...] unique sur la terre."1 To contemporary theatregoers, this phrase resembles marketing copy intended to attract an audience, which makes it all the more surprising that Jean-Jacques Rousseau uses it to describe an idealized community in his famously vehement anti-theatrical screed, the Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles. At the midpoint of the Lettre, this description leads into his reminiscence about the Montagnons, an agrarian people inhabiting the sparsely populated countryside outside of Neuchâtel. However, Rousseau conjures this remembered spectacle of virtuous equilibrium and harmony only to destroy it subsequently, imagining the financial ruin and moral degradation that ineluctably follow upon the introduction of a public theatre. As the avowedly fictitious performances of the stage are constructed from the same emotional material that serves as the foundation for Rousseau's claims to moral authenticity, the spectacle of the Montagnon idyll serves as the central illustration of the existential threat to Rousseau's political and moral philosophy posed by theatrical acting. The allegory of the Montagnons is the centerpiece of an energetic critique of theatre in the Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles, penned in response to the suggestion (in d'Alembert's article "Genève" from volume seven of the Encyclopédie) that a permanent comédie be established within the Calvinist city of Rousseau's birth. The ferocity of the Lettre, in which Rousseau builds on the arguments that had earned him widespread notoriety in his two polemical Discours while simultaneously articulating central principles of the political theory that would be his most lasting legacy, points to the importance of the theatrical question for Rousseau in 1758, when he was himself at a crucial turning point in his career as a public intellectual.2 Theatre was not only the most prestigious literary form in eighteenth-century France, but the public character of its performance also made it an esthetic practice with far-reaching political repercussions. The manipulation of sentiment and pitié inherent to stage acting, the intense atmosphere of comparison engendered by the theatrical event, and the drama's reliance on love-plots that place women in positions of power over men, are all intolerable affronts to Rousseau, and the arguments against such performances that he rehearses in the Lettre exercised a [End Page 94] significant influence on the major works (La Nouvelle Héloïse, Émile, and Du contrat social) that he was composing at the time. This essay will propose that Rousseau's most original critique of theatre in the Lettre à d'Alembert combines his cultural and philosophical arguments with a uniquely political conception of affective economy, establishing the state and the stage as competitors for the limited resource of the public's emotions. In the course of his diatribe against the portrait of human passions presented on the stage, Rousseau nevertheless reasserts the assumption of fundamental human morality that underpins his attack on Enlightenment progress in the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes. The affirmation in the Lettre that "l'homme est né bon; je le pense et crois l'avoir prouvé" (OC 5:22) marks a radical break with the Christian tradition of antitheatricality, whose critique assumes the indelible taint of original sin behind all human passion.3 Rousseau's assertion of the already "proven" goodness of human instinct before the advent of societies refers to the speculative anthropology of an innocent primitive humanity in the second Discours. In this work, he imagines the foundational moments of human society as a performance ("On s'accoûtuma à s'assembler devant les Cabanes ou autour d'un grand Arbre: le chant et la danse, vrais enfans de l'amour et du loisir, devinrent [...] l'occupation des hommes et des femmes oisifs et attroupés,"4 before presenting the modern theatre as society's evolutionary culmination in the Lettre. Thus despite the physical proximity of the spectators when watching a play, Rousseau asserts they are unaware of each other: "L'on croit s'assembler au Spectacle, et c'est là que chacun s'isole; c'est là qu'on va oublier...

Autotrophic Ethos in Mill's Arboretum

In this paper, I use the tree analogy at the heart of Mill’s discussion of individuality as a lens through which to interpret On Liberty and its connection to Utilitarianism. I propose five alternative interpretations: (1) the tree as a symbol for Enlightenment progress as an outgrowth of originality, (2) the tree as a symbol for the capacity for choice within Mill’s hedonistic conception of happiness, (3) the tree as the mystery of human choice, (4) the tree as the uninhibited human spirit, arising out of a plant-animal dialectic, and (5) the tree as the embodied ideal conception of the self. I then argue that the multiplicity of interpretations lends itself to an autotrophic intellectual ethos, wherein the tree becomes as a symbol of the liberty of interpretation.

Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (review)

'Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic. By Seth Cotlar. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 201 1. Pp. 269. Cloth, $35.00.)Reviewed by David GellmanTom Paine returned to America in 1802 a goat rather than a hero. If we are to gauge the radicalism of the American Revolution, historians must account for the dramatically diminished reputation of the age's preeminent English-speaking revolutionary writer. The appropriate tools are not so much those of a biographer or even a political historian, but instead those of an intellectual historian, carefully recovering lost or marginalized ideas. Paine inspired a group of self-consciously democratic printers in the 1790s, largely shunted aside in accounts of the founding generation. Meanwhile, the famous Paine helped keep the fires of democratic argument burning through the publication, most notably in Rights of Man, of his evolving political principles, produced against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Collectively, the democratic writerpublishers of the 1 790s offered readers and rivals choices about how inclusive, mobilized, and cosmopolitan American political culture should be. By spurning these radical alternatives, Cotlar argues, Federalists and, ultimately, Jeffersonian Republicans opted for a politics circumscribed by nationalism, electioneering, and economic inequality.The book captures the protean nature of the early 1 790s, when political parties did not exist and newspapers served powerful agents of community-formation (31). An informal network of editors spread French Revolution-inspired ideas about popular politics. For these editors, the work of revolution had not ended and was not exclusively an American project. Elites, whether old world aristocrats or new world self-styled natural aristocrats, would have to cede authority to a critically engaged citizenry. The democrats hoped to do far more than create a better informed electorate. They imagined the people as ongoing participants in the formulation of policy, organizing in order to influence every stage of governmental deliberation. The precise mechanisms for inserting public opinion into everyday politics were never fully articulated, though the Democratic-Republican clubs became the short-lived prototype.Their opponents, congealing into the Federalist Party, found the internationalism of these papers particularly troubling. The democrats identified with radical overseas aspirations and groups, including those of the Jacobins and the United Irishmen. The French Terror, as well as the comparatively tame Whiskey Rebellion at home, suggested an alarming precedent for populist-inspired change. But the philosophical and rhetorical battle lines went beyond particular crises. The radicals suggested that true democrats should invest their loyalties and energies not in a single nation-state but rather in the principles of liberty and enlightened progress that bound people together across the Atlantic. Given the initial support most Americans expressed for the French Revolution, as well as increasing immigration to the United States, such boundary crossing seemed promising for some, threatening for others. Cotlar argues that American nationalism emerged in large part to blunt the threat that Americans would translate their identification with foreign causes into challenges to elite-dominated politics at home.Cotlar's analysis of radical democracy hits full stride when taking up egalitarian economics. Writers such as Robert Coram and William Manning believed that the economic system should complement and promote democracy. To them, this meant finding ways to support the equalization of property holding rather than, in the manner of Alexander Hamilton, encouraging the concentration of wealth. …

The Nomadic Existence of the Eternal Improviser and Diasporic Co-Poiesis in the Era of Mega-Speed

The history of transcendence and nomadism in face of the call for ‘home-returning’ is marked figuratively by four milestones: (1) the ‘era’ of immanence and dwelling in total harmony as a manifestation of self-sustained holiness; (2) the ‘era’ of relating to holiness by mediation of God, especially in the monotheistic religions; (3) the ‘era’ of killing-God-each-moment-anew as a path for regaining contact with holiness in Enlightenment's progress and the deification of humanity; and (4) the ‘era’ of the exile of the killer of God and the forgetfulness of the holy imperative of the progressive deification of humanity and the sacred work of killing-God-each-moment-anew. These four milestones are paralleled by growing changes and speeding of (de)constructions as part of the de-positioning of the human as dweller of this world or, alternatively, as a genuine Diasporic nomad. The current change in the history of human's search for itself, its meaning and its telos is realized in an historical moment of change: from rapid changes into an arena of mega-speed, an era in which the sacred work of killing-God-each-moment-anew is replaced by the exile of the killer of God and the forgetfulness of the humanist's telos within the immanence of the present dull anti-metaphysical moment within which the relations between space and time are transformed; both the quest for redemption/home-returning and the call for revolutionary progress and human's self-edification are forgotten, ridiculed, deconstructed and swallowed into the postmodern-neo-liberal system. Linear time and the quest for transcendence are overwhelmed by punctual time, end of historical consciousness, quasinomadism and the possibility to solve all human responsibility and shortcomings by plugging in to the pleasure machine. In face of this reality Diasporic philosophy and its improvised co-poiesis become relevant for the possibility of counter-education.

On Their Tiptoes: Political Time and Newspapers during the Advent of the Radicalized French Revolution, circa 1792–1793

In his 1937 magnum opus, The Historical Novel, Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukacs suggested that new ideas about - and implicitly, about time itself- laid foundation for development of historical novel. According Lukacs, the quick succession of . . . upheavals associated with the French Revolution, revolutionary wars and rise and fall of Napoleon . . . for first time made a mass experience.'''' Whereas individuals during Enlightenment viewed Progress ... as an essentially unhistorical struggle between humanist reason and feudal-absolutist unreason, succeeding generations came think of time in terms of the inner conflict of social forces, so that history itself is bearer and realizer of Lukacs wrote from a Marxist perspective and was therefore deeply concerned with showing diverse ways in which writers in post-Napoleonic era addressed question of modern bourgeois society arose out of class struggles between nobility and bourgeoisie. No matter how one views Lukacs's politics, it is hard deny potential explanatory power of his insight that the huge, rapidly successive changes of French Revolution and Napoleonic rule pushed humans to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned.1That insight was fully explored only as a generation of revisionist scholars began challenging Marxist interpretation of French Revolution. More specifically, historians like Mona Ozouf, Lynn Hunt, and Jeremy Popkin revitalized scholarship on French Revolution by paying close attention previously understudied elements like festivals and press. The collective emphasis on textual analysis and cultural symbols brought into relief French revolutionaries' dynamic understanding of temporality. New ideas about time and history, it seems, were intimately related far-reaching transformations in political culture, and any attempt explain either of two phenomena must necessarily consider other.2Taken together, prescient analysis of Lukacs and wave of innovative work on French Revolution invite new ways of evaluating various aspects of early United States. In particular, they draw attention way in which advent of radicalized French Revolution - series of international events taking place between imprisonment of King Louis XVI (August 10, 1792) and onslaught of Terror (September 5, 1793) - prompted American newspaper writers and readers address concepts of contemporaneity in a more rigorous fashion than ever before. This sustained engagement with notions of time did not materialize without problems, and partisan discussions of proper mode of interpreting recent events and newspapers ensued. The resulting cacophony, which revolved around Federalist challenges Democratic-Republicans' belief that revolutionary time moved more quickly than regular time, destabilized traditional efforts pinpoint present moment on a preordained timeline. French Revolutionary intelligence thus assumed prominence as both cause and reflection of initial American encounters with a concept of political time divorced from inherited notions of Protestant providence, Whig cyclical history, and Scottish enlightenment progress. In a halting, unintended manner, American newspaper writers and readers broached subject of contingency.3A study of newspapers in 1792-1793 also reveals, more broadly, how profoundly radicalized French Revolution molded American political culture. Historians have known for years that French Revolution influenced United States, but too often they have been content assert existence of that influence without probing its nature in full. That is unfortunate because certain parallels between Gallic and American political development are sufficiently striking that they provide a case study of transnational history, of way in which various forces cross over political boundaries and spur same type of change in multiple national entities. …

HALAKHIC NIDDAH CONSULTANTS AND THE ORTHODOX WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IN ISRAEL

This article takes a critical look at the story of enlightened progress that has informed analyses of Israeli Orthodoxy in recent years. Celebrating the successes of Orthodox reformists, this narrative brands resistance to challenges to traditional institutions, authority structures and cultural norms as unenlightened fundamentalism, patriarchal backlash or unreflexive apologetics. The article offers a more nuanced interpretation through an analysis of the training of women as halakhic niddah consultants and the context in which this profession emerged. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data and content analysis, the author considers the training and certification of halakhic consultants; their pathways into training; their multiple roles and venues of operation; the legal advice they provide; and the sensibilities and interpretative strategies that shape their reading of the Halakha. At each juncture, it is demonstrated that halakhic consultants bear concurrent traditionalist and reformist potentialities. Contextualizing the emergence of women halakhic consultants within other changes in the social organization of niddah, it is argued that halakhic consultants are more appropriately understood as part of a conversation about niddah within the Orthodox community. The article concludes that religious change is not produced by renegade mavericks, but is rather the product of negotiations between a range of voices as they respond to and attempt to accommodate internal and external pressures and challenges.

Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (review)

Reviewed by: Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution Liam Riordan (bio) Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution. By David Waldstreicher. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. Pp. 336. Cloth, $25.00; Paper, $15.00.) When an amazon.com keyword search yields nearly 4,000 hits for Benjamin Franklin under the "biography and memoir" heading alone (over 30,000 for a general search) one might fairly ask if we really need another close study of this most famous early American. In the wake of the tercentenary of his birth we have been showered with so much about the man that one begins to suspect that Franklinmania has reached a point of diminishing returns. Yet Franklin continues to surprise, confound, and remain relevant, and nowhere more so than in this remarkable book that emphasizes the central place of slavery in eighteenth-century America. Countering the long-dominant view of Franklin as "the root of things [End Page 788] American and middle-class" (87), and spurning an "embraceable Franklin" (229), David Waldstreicher presents his subject as a politically savvy, sharp-dealing smooth talker, profoundly shaped by his experience of servitude. Runaway America is far too capacious to be fairly categorized as a biography. While a life story provides its binding, Waldstreicher ambitiously unites "the social history of unfree labor to the political history of nation-making" (xiv) to demonstrate how Franklin constructed a personal and a national ethos that "escapes all traces of the legacy of slavery" (239). To repair this denial of slavery, the book explores freedom and bondage as two sides of the same coin, especially Franklin's "knack for eloquently finessing" slavery's "continuous presence in his life, thought, and politics" (xiii). Although the meaning of race for Franklin and his time remains elusive and the broadly ranging analysis is occasionally difficult to follow, this book makes a totally original contribution to the rich historiography of the "problem" and "paradox" of slavery's place vis-à-vis the American Revolution. If a less-than-heroic protagonist emerges whose "antislavery credentials have been greatly exaggerated" by others (xii), Franklin's significance is not at all reduced. While not a work of Founding Father hagiography, it also eschews mere condemnation, and judges Franklin's importance to arise from his long "mediation of slavery, freedom, and revolution" that helped give "Americans the cultural tools of denial and forgetting as well as the political wherewithal to resist a national and international attack" on slavery (xiii–xiv). The book's three parts are centrally informed by the fundamental manner in which American shortage of labor and abundance of land distinguished it from Europe. In Part One we meet Franklin as a servant, runaway, and struggling printer where the servant/slave gradations of unfreedom were closely calibrated with one another. In Part Two Franklin's perspective as a master becomes dominant, both in the quotidian sense of how his rise benefited from the unpaid labor of servants, slaves, and wife and in his expression of masterdom in varied texts. Throughout the book Franklin is contextualized via his relationships with individuals from two key groups of which he had once been part: runaways who attempted to refashion themselves as self-made men and young printers (most of them dependent upon Franklin), almost all of whom fail. The recovery of numerous stories of unknown (or little known) figures like John Holt, Charles Roberts, Jean Montague, Benjamin Mecom, and Venture Smith, and taking Franklin's measure by them, [End Page 789] is one of the signal achievements of this book. In the workaday world of these relationships one cannot doubt that Franklin shrewdly protected his own interests at every turn. Franklin's engagement with slavery in print receives close attention, especially his evocation of a "[r]acial nationhood" to unite Anglo-America as a white empire (135). Franklin's "expansionist, cosmopolitan, and pro-master politics" repeatedly addressed the labor question and the "threat of the runaway" (143) and did so by "pairing enlightenment progress with racism and opposition to slavery" (139). Critical to the assessment of Franklin's relationship to antislavery is an understanding of his "role-playing approach to public life" (57) that...