History of European ideas

This essay explores one of the potential implications of the cross-displinary work implied in the idea of a literary instrument of enlightenment through a consideration of the relationship between James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian (1761–1763) and their most immediate social-political context, Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1769). It notes that revisionism of Macpherson that has tended to minimise the disruptive elements in Ossian in favour of a reading in terms of cultural wishfulfilment. The essay argues however that while Macpherson's prose theorising seeks to transcend the anxieties about progress and corruption articulated in the Essay, the peoms themselves offer eloquent testimony to the force of those anxieties, and rather than solving them restates them in pressing terms. This, the essay concludes by suggesting, is a measure of their literariness, and it not to be elided in the otherwise entirely appropriate reading of Ossian as a literary instrument of enlightenment.     

A Liberal History of European Integration

John Gillingham's voluminous new book chronicles the course of European integration from the 1950s to the present. It contains interesting accounts of a variety of important events, and has the merit of drawing attention to the European Union as a subject for serious historical scholarship. Some readers, however, may find certain of Gillingham's major arguments controversial, especially his insistence that integration has been and will always be primarily about economic liberalization.