Abstract
Renaissance ideas of pride and authenticity had a historical impact, I claim. Can ideas have historical impact at all? Isn’t it interests that move? According to Max Weber:
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Notes
- 1.
H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber. New York: Oxford University Press (1946), 1958, 280.
- 2.
I thank John Connolly for reminding me of this fact. Cp. also Gill 2005, and Ettenhuber 2011, on the Renaissance and Augustine.
- 3.
Nietzsche 2006, sec. 237.
- 4.
Burckhardt loc. cit. 79 and 121.
- 5.
Cp. Burckhardt loc. cit. 334.
- 6.
- 7.
Toulmin 1990, 23. Cp. Steinvorth 2013 Chap. 4.
- 8.
Toulmin 1990, 37.
- 9.
Toulmin 1990, 27. ‘Nothing human is foreign’ is taken from Terence (Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto). On the roles of humanists (to write state correspondence and public speeches) cp. Burckhardt 2004, 175; on their “inordinate pride,” ibid. 210. Though Machiavelli was born only two years after Erasmus, Toulmin rightly takes him as a representative of the later humanists of the 16th century, as he differs by his clarity and lack of attitudinizing from the earlier humanists who inclined to “humanistic bombast” (Burckhardt 2004 79 and 207ff).
- 10.
Cp. Connolly 2014, 207.
- 11.
Sun Yat-sen, one of the Chinese revolutionaries who started China’s modernization, urged the Chinese to become a modern society like England, however, “not so that they might become English but so that they might become more authentically Chinese.” (Fitzgerald 1996, 106). Also Samuel Huntington, in his Clash of Civilizations, presupposes collective selves when he assumes that Russia and Turkey are split nations. He assumes that these nations are superficially Western but in their deeper layers are not.
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Steinvorth, U. (2016). The Renaissance: Doing Things for Their Own Sake. In: Pride and Authenticity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-34117-0_6
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