Rousseau’s reception as an Epicurean: from atheism to aesthetics

ABSTRACT

What did Rousseau's readers mean when they called him an ‘Epicurean’? A seemingly simple question with complex implications. This article attempts to answer it by reconstructing Rousseau's contemporary reception as an Epicurean thinker. First, it surveys the earliest and most widely read critics of the second Discourse: Prussian Astronomer Royal Jean de Castillon, Jesuit priest Louis Bertrand Castel, and Hanoverian biblical scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus. These readers branded Rousseau an Epicurean primarily to highlight his atheism, his anti-providential and materialist natural philosophy. Then, it discusses Genevan pastor Jacob Vernet's positive assessment of Rousseau as a critic of ‘fashionable’ Epicureanism, before reconstructing Rousseau's critique of the reception of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man as an Epicurean text. These sources elucidate Rousseau's engagement with a range of ideas and argumentative positions that would inform his later self-identification as a ‘refined’ Epicurean. In particular, they highlight his interest in how a sentimental awareness of beauty might mitigate the potentially vicious effects of hedonism. The article concludes with novelist Mme. de Genlis’ critique of Rousseau's Wise Materialism, using his thoughts on the imagination to suggest some of the ways the neglected aesthetic dimensions of Rousseau's reception of Epicureanism might be developed.     

Milton,the passions,and the knowing body

ABSTRACT

This paper challenges the notion that Galenic humouralism stripped the early modern body of agency and argues that some accounts of early modern materialism were connected to epistemology. It evidences how Milton’s passions are inscribed with the shocking language of agency and moral responsibility to overturn the assumption of “passive”, unconscious passions. It explores two pictures of passions in connection with knowledge: passions as obstacles to knowledge, and passions as sources as knowledge. Both images recast the material body as a knowing agent, but do so with complications. Agency-ridden passions complicate a straightforward notion of agency, and seem to leave early moderns with the option of blaming their passions instead of themselves for deception. Frequent references to internal passions in political discourses also suggests an unsettling degree of comfort with subjectivity in making knowledge-statements, but it is a version of subjectivity that seems far more public than private.     

多学科研究与新时期中国马克思主义史学的发展

新时期历史研究采用多学科理论与方法的讨论与实践经历了借助自然科学方法研究的尝试和讨论、计量与比较方法及心理学理论等被引入史学并得到初步运用、人文与社会科学多种学科理论与方法渗透于历史研究三个阶段。学者在探讨马克思主义唯物史观指导与运用多学科方法的关系方面,取得丰硕的理论成果,并在运用多学科理论与方法的实践中取得丰硕的研究成果。     

Reformulating Identities: British Settlers in Early Nineteenth-Century South Africa

This paper examines the formation of a colonial identity among settlers from the British Isles who were relocated to the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in 1820. It suggests that material aspirations united certain of the settlers in a political programme, and thus began the erosion of imported class (and other) divisions. However, it argues that their establishment as a capitalist colonial class is an insufficient explanation for their construction of a shared and emotive British settler identity. The settlers modified their inherited discourses of class, race, gender and nationality in order to forge solidarity, and the imperative for solidarity derived not so much from their mutual desire for accumulation, but from a corresponding collective insecurity. Not only were settlers afraid of Khoikhoi labour rebellion and Xhosa reprisals for land loss; they also feared abandonment by a seemingly unsympathetic metropole. Their aggressive capitalist endeavour, and collective fear of its destabilizing consequences, were two sides of the same coin, informing the development of a unifying social identity. The paper goes on to consider the mechanisms through which that identity was sustained, including acts of landscape representation, the textual generation of collective memory and the practice of communally binding, quotidian, gendered routines.     

通识 专精 信念——瞿林东教授著《20世纪中国史学散论》读后

瞿林东教授勤于笔耕,著述丰富。他在中国古代史学史研究取得大量成果的基础上,对20世纪中国史学的研究又表现出特殊的重视。近十多年来,不断发表关于20世纪中国史学的长篇大作,在史学界产生了较大影响。瞿教授选取有代表性的论文24篇,另选2篇作为附录,结集为《20世纪中国史学散论》(以下简称《散论》)。     

关于真理的几个问题新议

在实践唯物主义精神的指引下,遵循实践哲学的方法原则,正确对待真理的主观特征和主体本性,挖掘深藏其中的主观意蕴,是关乎真理论研究和发展方向的重大问题,是唯物主义反映论的基本要求。真理作为主体对客体的正确反映,即科学的理论,它包含认识和正确的认识两个规定性,简而言之,真理是特殊的认识。     

马克思恩格斯派生性社会发展观研究

原生性社会发展与派生性社会发展的问题,实质上是文明的创造与文明的传播问题。马克思、恩格斯的历史观自始就是原生论与派生论相统一的历史观。但马克思、恩格斯逝世后,唯物史观却在基本理论的层次上被彻底地误读为了只讲原生性社会发展、不讲派生性社会发展的“单纯原生论的唯物史观”。这就造成了严重的理论倒退和普遍的理论混乱,极大地削弱了唯物史观的历史解释力,严重地限制和阻碍了我国的历史学和历史理论的正常发展。这种状况,亟待改变。     

Searching for the Material in Peter K. Andersson’s ‘How Civilized Were the Victorians?’

This article is a response to Peter K. Andersson’s arguments about the ‘civilizing thesis’ in Victorian Studies. It examines his approach in relation to class, discourse, and structure, particularly in relation to the working classes and future directions in approaches to nineteenth-century sources. It suggests that Victorian scholars can learn from labour geographers, who offer new models that highlight structural inequalities while maintaining a sensitivity to post-structural cultural understandings of gender, race, and class.     

Narratives in Anecdotes,Memory and Interlocutors: An Early Engagement with Neville Alexander’s Story

In this article, I present a story about South African Marxist and activist-scholar Neville Edward Alexander. As historians, social scientists and intellectuals embedded in the humanities, a part of the job we have awarded ourselves or that we assume to be part of our disciplinary reasoning, our intellectual orbit, is to bring to life the periods that, and the people about whom, we reflect. This we do through writing and telling stories, often constructed with a “moral message” of sorts. In these acts of writing and story-telling, objectivity plays a disputed and a precarious role, and misrepresentations could be conscious or unwitting. The lack of objectivity in bringing to life the period and the people we talk about in our stories, in our exaggeration and our understatement about what we have read, about what we have heard, and then about what we write, is part of an academic’s narrative. These human traits of exaggeration and understatement can lead to historical error. In this early exploration of seeking answers to the questions, “Who is Neville Alexander?” and “What can we learn from his writings?” I offer two anecdotes about the man. My proposition is that overcoming historical error does not rest exclusively with factual verification. It has to factor in an appraisal of the ideological intention or even political wish of the people telling the stories, in written texts and orally, and of the interlocutors’ context that we recover in our historical studies. In writing this preliminary sketch of Alexander, I take a detour into higher education issues, particularly the field of doctoral studies, and I paraphrase some of the concerns that have been raised by Alexander. I conclude this introductory study with some thoughts on Alexander’s contributions to social change, to “race,” and to language policy and multilingualism.     

“The Glorified Municipality”: State formation and the urban process in North America

This article revisits the debate over whether and to what extent the cities of the United States and Canada can be understood as a common ‘North American city’ by reconsidering the role of the their common federal system of government. Drawing on a Marxist theory of the capitalist state and the municipal histories of New York State and the Province of Ontario, the article traces the institutions and patterns of urbanization in the two countries to a dialectic of political conflict between the sub-national states and the industrializing cities, conditioned by federal divisions of sovereignty and grounded in the expanding social property relations of capital. The final section connects this dialectic to historically new conditions for the expanded reproduction of capital, specifically in the constitution of land as a commodity form. It also speculates briefly on the implications of this analysis for a more spatially informed theory of the capitalist state.