Voyages,mobilités,lumières

For a very long time and still today, travel stories have fascinated a vast public. It is important to debate their role and the model for intellectual and sensitive construction they propose. An essential link for the European elite's acculturation, they cannot for as much be separated from a much wider circulation which concerns society as a whole. In relation to the social morals of our past, the concept of mobility allows us to appreciate the totality of social practices and to confront the notions of movement and localization. The main cultural categories of space, time, sociability, social constraints and freedoms, are thus creating a structure for our understanding of change.     

France,Patrie, Nation: figures de lutte et discours national (XVIème–XIXème siècles)

This article explores the conceptual changes and semantic shifts of ‘patrie’ and of nation from the Renaissance up to the French Revolution and the First Empire. It emphasises the causes and consequences of both concepts' occurrence and tries to discover their fundamental differences synchronically and diachronically. A brief comparison with other European countries allows us to understand that both concepts are not typically French and highlights the very fact that they are interactive, discontinuous, and at the same time evolutionary, since they are successively inserted in a specific historical context. Above all, ‘patrie’ and nation turn out to be used more often during national and international political conflicts, even though they did not have the same connotation and register. It is therefore interesting to consider precisely what characterises both concepts, and to reflect upon the origins of the modern meaning of nation.     

L’autobiographie allemande du XVIIIe siècle,interprétée à la lumière de la sociologie de niklas Luhmann

With the help of Luhmann’s theory, this essay tries to define the connection between the boom of autobiographical writing in the late 18th century and the rise of the middle classes. Central to this, is his definition of “career”, with which he describes the individuals’ behaviour in the new functional bourgeois society. Strictly speaking, the individual gains personal and social identity, through his or her spoken or written autobiography as can be seen clearly in Jung-Stilling’s autobiography, which was published bit by bit. The individual hereby improves its prospects of social advancement. On the other hand, K. P. Moritz in hisAnton Reiser describes his hero’s life as the “career” of a failure whose hyperactive imagination interferes with the formation of his identity. Thus autobiographical writing in the 18th century shows itself as the literary autopoiesis of the authors’ concrete individuality.     

Diderot: Les Dernières Années, 1770–84

This article provides an account of the Enlightenment dispute over hermeneutical skepticism with particular reference to the idea of hermeneutical probability in the philosophical work of Christian August Crusius. The essay sheds new light on the hermeneutical issues addressed in the philosophical school of the so-called Thomasians based mainly in Leipzig in the first half of the eighteenth century (inter alia Rüdiger, Hoffmann, and Crusius). The paper deals with Crusius’ wide-ranging efforts to cope with the uncertain character of most parts of human knowledge and his attempts to construct a workable theory of hermeneutical probability. This raises points of central interest relating to probabilism in the methodology of textual interpretation and connects Crusius to contemporary discussions of hermeneutical skepticism.