Abstract
Our story starts with Voltaire, who lived and wrote in the midst of scientific progress, intellectual optimism, and the increasing momentum of economic production.1 The century of the Enlightenment would end with the French Revolution, Napoleon’s fanatical wars, increasingly strong economic ties among European states, and the advent of the bourgeoisie. Voltaire, it can be said, was a transitional figure in the Enlightenment. Though ever hopeful about the future, he was also earnestly ironic about his Utopian and excessively optimistic and good-natured Enlightenment comrades.
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Notes
Voltaire was born in 1694 and died in 1778, about a decade before the beginning of the French Revolution.
Letter of November 30, 1735, to Abbe d’Olivet. Quoted in John U. Nef, Western Civilization since the Renaissance. New York: Harper [1950] 1963, p. 277.
Francois de Voltaire, Candide. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1949, p. 100.
Ibid., p. 2.
Alfred Cobban, In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History. New York: George Braziller, 1960.
Ibid., pp. 220–221.
Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy. Trans. Harriet Martineau. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1893, p. 37.
Alvin W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books, 1970.
Ibid., p. 92 (emphasis added).
Ibid., p. 102.
Alvin W. Gouldner, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. New York: Free Press, 1954.
Alvin W. Gouldner (ed.), Studies in Leadership. New York: Harper, 1950.
Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, op. cit., p. 484. Positivism, it can be added, is a slippery term. When it is often taken to mean that a social scientist accepts empirical data as “real,” Gouldner centers attention on the problems of theory. Clifford Geertz, as will be discussed below, shifts attention back to empirical data.
Ibid., pp. 494–495.
Alvin W. Gouldner, Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory. New York: Basic Books, 1965.
Ibid., pp. 112, 387.
T.B. Bottomore, Sociology as Social Criticism. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974, pp. 87–88.
Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, op. cit., p. 490; also see Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms. New York: Seabury Press, 1980, p. 24.
Bottomore, op. cit., p. 54.
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 48–49.
Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution Voll. From Its Origins to 1793. Trans., Elizabeth Moss Evanson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962, p. 38.
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 334.
Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Analytical Debates,” pp. 1–30 in Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman (eds.), Culture and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
See Tzvetan Tudobov, The Deflection of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford Humanities Center, 1989.
Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 68–69.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract. Trans, and Introduction, Charles Frankel. New York: Hafner, 1947 [1762].
For a summary about this debate, see Irving M. Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1987, pp. 19–28.
Rousseau, op. cit., p. 5.
Ibid., p. 79.
Ibid. pp. 124–125.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Ed., Friedrich Engels. Trans., Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: The Modern Library, 1906, pp. 46–47, 54.
Karl Marx, “On James Mill.” Excerpt from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke, Schriften, Briefe, Vol. 1(3), pp. 425ff. Translation in David McLelland (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 115–123.
David Harvey, The Limits to Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 14.
Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture and Society. New York: Random House, 1976; Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 29.
Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986 [1984].
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1967] 1974, pp. 158–159.
As Jameson notes, the deconstruction of Derrida and that of de Man differs in that “Derrida’s argument requires the political and intellectual precondition that we go on ‘believing’ in the difference…. De Man’s fictionality no longer seems to stage that agonizing double bind.” Fredric Jameson, Post-modernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991, pp. 226–227.
Ibid., p. 220.
Rousseau, op. cit., p. 155.
Jameson, op. cit., p. 239.
Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso, 1991, p. 219.
Archer, op. cit., p. xi.
Alexander, Steven Seidman (eds.), Culture and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 op. cit., p. 1.
Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives. Stanford University Press, 1988.
Ibid., p. 145.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973, pp. 443–448.
Elman R. Service, “The Law of Evolutionary Potential,” pp. 93–122 in Marshall D. Sahlins and Elman R. Service (eds.), Evolution and Culture. Foreword by Leslie A. White. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988.
Peter M. Blau, Inequality and Heterogeneity. New York: Free Press, 1977.
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1989.
Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, op. cit., p. 104.
See James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990, especially pp. 21–23.
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(1993). Tumbling toward Two Thousand. In: Social Contracts and Economic Markets. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28187-2_2
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