Abstract
It is as true of the human sciences as of the sciences of nature that, by and large, only the most recent formulations of their overriding principles are deemed worthy of scientific scrutiny. The rudiments of physical anthropology and then biology and linguistics around the end of the eighteenth century, followed by sociology and social statistics in the early nineteenth century, and economics and political science in the early twentieth century, were characteristically sketched by pioneers whose fresh perspectives were in each case designed to free themselves of the excess baggage of their precursors. In virtually all disciplines, each major step is portrayed as if it were a new beginning, marking a conceptual revolution which relegates antecedent approaches to the defunct realm of the history of ideas.
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Notes
See Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1952)
Lester Crocker, Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963)
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981)
John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995)
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947)
and Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).
For Koselleck’s account of such changes, see especially his Kritik und Krise (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1959) and his collection of essays dating from 1965 to 1977, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 1979). He frequently objects that he has been misunderstood, however, and in seminars and private discussions over many years he has suggested that he never had in mind any generalized notion of a Sattelzeit at all. For Foucault’s perspective on the conceptual metamorphoses of the same period, see Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). The central themes of these texts are usefully summarized by Keith Tribe, in the introduction to his translation of Vergangene Zukunft, under the title, Futures Past (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), on the one hand; and by Pamela Major-Poetzl, in Michel Foucault’s Archeology of Western Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), on the other.
The seven volumes of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972–1992) have been edited by the late Otto Bruner and Werner Conze as well as Koselleck, but it is Koselleck in particular who has been the work’s principal guiding spirit since its inception. On the general methodology of Begriffsgeschichte in the manner in which he has pursued it, see especially ed. Koselleck, Historische Semantik und Begriffsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979)
and Melvin Richter, “Begriffsgeschichte and the History of Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987), 247–263
and The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For an account of how the late eighteenth– and early nineteenth-century Sattelzeit, or pivotal period, of linguistic, political and social change in Germany, as he conceived it, marks the advent of a new epoch in its history and thus informs the structure of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe as an historical lexicon, see Koselleck’s own introduction to vol. 1, especially pp. xiv–xvi. In several of the essays of his Vergangene Zukunft, Koselleck stresses the importance of the emergence of new words, and of changing linguistic fashion, as encapsulating a perceptible ideological shift to a neue Zeit or even Neuzeit of modernity, for instance in the terminological displacement of Historie by Geschichte in German historical writing and discourse from around 1750. But just on account of their political and social ramifications, the pivotal linguistic and conceptual changes which he depicts do not lend themselves to compression or precise dating within a short span of years. The Sattelzeit of modernity traced in his writings sometimes appears to embrace the period from around 1770 to 1800 or 1830 rather than from 1750 to 1850, and occasionally it seems to have been initiated as early as 1700. In Das Zeitalter der europäischen Revolution (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1969), a work produced collectively by Koselleck with Louis Bergeron and François Furet, the period portrayed as forming the nexus of Europe’s modern political and social history extends from 1780 to 1848.
With respect to the pivotal significance, for Foucault, of the year 1795, see Les Mots et les choses, pp. 238 and 263. In Power/Knowledge, explaining his notion of historical discontinuity, he contends that “the great biological image of a progressive maturation of science…does not seem to me to be pertinent to history.” Pointing to medicine’s “gradual transformation, within a period of twenty-five or thirty years,” around the end of the eighteenth century, he remarks that there were not just new discoveries: “There is a whole new ‘regime’ in discourse and forms of knowledge. And all this happens in the space of a few years,” ed. Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 54. See also Foucault’s more general delineation of an age of Enlightenment, again associated predominantly with the last decades of the eighteenth century, and including not only new regimes of science but also the establishment of capitalism and a new political order, in “Qu’est ce que la critique? [Critique et Aufklärung],” Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 84 (1990), 35–63. With respect to the doctrines of the idéologues, dating as well from the 1790s, see especially vol. VIII (La Conscience révolutionnaire: Les idéologues), published in 1978, of Gusdorf, Les Sciences humaines et la pensée occidentale, 8 vols. (Paris: Payot, 1966–1978)
Moravia, Il pensiero degli idéologues: scienza e filosofia in Francia (1780–1815) (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1974)
Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of “Ideology” (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978)
Staum, Cabanis and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)
Welch, Liberty and Utility: The French Ideologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)
and Head, Ideology and Social Science: Destutt de Tracy and French Liberalism (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1985).
All recent commentators on this subject owe a debt to the seminal work of François Picavet, Les Idéologues (Paris: F. Alcan, 1891).
See, for instance, Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945)
ed. Katherine Faull, Anthropology and the German Enlightenment (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995)
eds. Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich, The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
and John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660–1750 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976).
See Sievès, Qu’est que le tiers-état?, ed. Robert Zappieri (Geneva: Droz, 1970), p. 151.
In all subsequent editions, for la science sociale Sieyès substituted the expression la science de l’ordre social. His inaugural use of the term is noted by Brian Head in “The Origins of ‘La Science sociale’ in France, 1770–1800,” Australian Journal of French Studies 19 (1982), 115–132.
See the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève, ms. Dumont 45, fo. 19. Dumont reports of Sieyès that he hardly sees anyone else in the world but himself: “Il auroit voulu trouver une douzaine de personnes qui voulussent approfondir avec lui l’art social, c’est à dire qu’il lui falloit des Apôtres, car il a dit en propres termes que la politique etoit une science qu’il croyoit avoir achevée.” The passage is cited by J. Bénétruy in L’Atelier de Mirabeau: quatre proscrits genevois (Paris: Picard, 1962), p. 399.
For these earliest recorded references to the term science sociale, see especially Keith Baker, “The Early History of the Term ‘Social Science’,” Annals of Science 20 (1964), 211–226
Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 391–395
Head, “The Origins of ‘La Science sociale’ in France”; and my “Saint-Simon and the Passage from Political to Social Science,” in ed. Anthony Pagden, The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 325–338.
On the term’s English adaptation from the French in early nineteenth-century socialist writings, in the first instance apparently by William Thompson in 1824, see Gregory Claeys, “‘Individualism,’ ‘Socialism,’ and ‘Social Science,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986), 81–93.
On the history of the Société de 1789, see Augustin Challamel, Les Clubs contre-révolutionnaires (Paris: Cerf, 1895)
and Baker, “Politics and Social Science in Eighteenth-Century France: ‘the Société de 1789’,” in ed. J. F. Bosher, French Government and Society, 1500–1850 (London: Athlone Press. 1973), pp. 208–230.
See de Tracy, Commentaire sur l’“Esprit des lois” de Montesquieu (Paris: Delaunay, 1819), p. vii.
The suggestion that Volney in particular anticipated the Annales school, by virtue of the global historical approach he adopted in his Leçons d’histoire (delivered at the École normale in 1795 and first published in 1800), has been made by Staum in a notable discussion of the idéologues’ influence upon the French educational curriculum in the period 1795–1802 (see his “Human, Not Secular Sciences: Ideology in the Central Schools,” Historical Reflections 12 (1985), 72). On the influence especially of the Classe des sciences morales et politiques, but also of other classes of the Institut national over the same period, see also Jules Simon, Une Académie sous le Directoire (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1885)
Staum, “The Class of Moral and Political Sciences, 1795–1803,” French Historical Studies 11 (1980), 371–397
Staum “Images of Paternal Power: Intellectuals and Social Change in the French National Institute,” Canadian Journal of History 17 (1982), 425–444
Staum “The Enlightenment Transformed: The Institute Prize Contests,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 19 (1985–1986), 153–179
Staum “The Institute Historians: Enlightenment and Conservatism,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 13 (1986), 122–130
Staum “Individual Rights and Social Control: Political Science in the French Institute,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987), 411–430
Staum “Human Geography in the French Institute,” The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 23 (1987), 332–340
Staum “The Public Relations of the Second Class of the Institute in the Revolutionary Era, 1795–1803,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 16 (1989), 212–222
Staum “‘Analysis of Sensations and Ideas’ in the French National Institute (1795–1803),” Canadian Journal of History 26 (1991), 393–413; and Minerv’s Message: Stabilizing the French Revolution (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, forthcoming).
Diverse treatments of this theme can be found in Pierre Ansart, La Sociologie de Saint-Simon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970)
Robert Carlisle, The Proffered Crown: Saint-Simonianism and the Doctrine of Hope (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)
Henri Gouhier, La Jeunesse d’Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme, 3 vols (Paris: Vrin, 1933–1941)
Frank Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962)
W. Jay Reedy, “The Historical Imaginary of Social Science in Post Revolutionary France: Bonald, Saint-Simon, Comte,” History of the Human Sciences 7 (1994), 1–26
Steven Seidman, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983)
and Robert Spaemann, Der Ursprung der Soziologie aus dem Geist der Restauration (München: Kosel, 1959).
Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle III, lines 303–304. Much of what comprises the second section of this essay, as well as some material from the fifth section, is developed from my “Saint-Simon and the passage from political to social science.” See also Baker, “Closing the French Revolution: Saint-Simon and Comte,” in eds. Furet and Mona Ozouf, The Transformation of Political Culture, forming vol. 3 of eds. Furet et al., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 1789–1848 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987–1989), pp. 323–339.
See the summary of Foucault’s lectures on “Sécurité, territoire et population”, offered at the Collège de France in 1977–1978, in his Résumé des cours, 1970–1982 (Paris: Julliard, 1989), pp. 99–106. His treatment of the subject first appeared in print in an Italian translation in the journal Aut…aut in 1978, and then in English as “Governmentality,” in Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979), 5–21; this essay is reprinted in eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester, 1991), pp. 87–104.
For comparisons of modern republicanism in eighteenth-century America and France, see especially R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–1964)
and Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
See Hegel, Über die englische Reformbill, first published in the Allgemeine preußische Staatzeitung, in his Politischen Schriften. Nachwort von Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), p. 310. This text is included in an English translation, by T. M. Knox, of Hegel’s Political Writings, ed. Z. A. Pelczynski (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), where the passage about Sievès figures on p. 322. It must be noted that Hegel here refers, not to Sievès’ role in establishing the National Assembly in 1789, but to his authorship of the constitution of the year VIII, which he drafted as provisional consul a decade later, following the bloodless coup d’état of the eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte that marked the transition of France’s revolutionary government from the Directoire to the Consulat. As First Consul, Bonaparte altered Sievès’ scheme to suit his own advantage and ambition.
See Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, eds. Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heede, in Hegel’s Gesammelte Werke, published by the Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaten (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968–), vol. IX, p. 315, lines 14–15 and 27–28.
In the English translation by A.V. Miller of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), see §§ 584 and 585, pp. 356–357.
See especially Gueniffey, “Les assemblées et la représentation,” in ed. Colin Lucas, The Political Culture of the French Revolution, pp. 233–257; Gueniffey, Le Nombre et la raison (Paris: Editions de l’école des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1993)
and Jaume, Le Discours jacobin et la démocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1989). Pierre Rosanvallon’s Le Sacre du citoyen (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), in large measure devoted to the theory and practice of citizenship in the course of the French Revolution, traces the progressive establishment of universal suffrage in France since 1789.
See, in particular, Bastid, Sieyès et sa pensée (Paris: Hachette, 1939)
Forsyth, Reason and Revolution: The Political Thought of the Abbé Sieyès (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987)
Pasquino, “Emmanuel Sieyes, Benjamin Constant et le ‘Gouvernement des Modernes,’” Revue française de science politique 37 (1987), 214–228
Bredin, Sieyès: La clé de la Révolution française (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1988)
Baker, “Sieyès,” in eds. Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), pp. 334–345
and Baker, “Sieyès,”in eds. Furet and Ozouf, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Antoine de Baecque, Le Corps de l’histoire: Métaphores et politique (1770–1800) (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993)
William H. Sewell, Jr., A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and “What is the Third Estate?” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994)
and Istvan Hont, “The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: ‘Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State’ in Historical Perspective,” in Political Studies (1994), special issue on Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State?, ed. John Dunn, pp. 166–231.
In the version of his lectures, dating from 1819–1820, that were to form his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Hegel put forward, in starker terms than in any other passage of his writings, a critique of what he took to be Rousseau’s individualist notion of the will in so far as it distorted the very foundations of the state. As transcribed by an anonymous student, the passage, which corresponds to § 258 of the standard edition of this work, reads as follows: “Rousseau hat in neuern Zeiten die soeben erwähnte Ansicht vorzüglich durchgeführt…Rousseau hat das grosse Verdienst gehabt, dass, indem er den Willen der Einzelnen zum Prinzip des Staats gemacht, hat, er damit einen Gedanken, und zwar den Gedanken des Willens, zum Prinzip gemacht hat…Rousseau hat so überhaupt den Grund gelegt, dass über den Staat gedacht worden ist…Das Schiefe an Rousseaus Theorie ist, dass er nicht den Willen als solchen als Grundlage des Staats gefasst hat, sondern den Willen als einzelnen in seiner Punktualisierung…Rousseau hat also einerseits dem wahrhaften Denken über den Staat den Impuls gegeben, auf der andern Seite hat er aber die Verwirrung hereingeführt, dass die Einzelne als dass Erste betrachtet Wurde und nicht das Allgemeine” (Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts. Die Vorlesung von 1819/1820 in einer Nachschrift, ed. Dieter Henrich (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp. 212–213).
“Consequently,” continues the more familiar format of 1821 in its most recent translation by H. B. Nisbet, “when these abstractions were invested with power, they afforded the tremendous spectacle, for the first time we know of in human history, of the overthrow of all existing and given conditions within an actual major state and the revision of its constitution from first principles…These…abstractions divorced from the Idea…turned the attempt into the most terrible and drastic event.” According to Hegel, therefore, the French Revolution was fundamentally shaped from “false theories…which originated largely with Rousseau” and was drawn above all from the “attempts to put these theories into practice” (Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 277, 279).
For detailed accounts of Hegel’s reading of Rousseau, see especially eds. Hans Friedrich Fulda and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Rousseau, die Revolution und der junge Hegel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), Pierre Méthais, “Contrat et volonté générale selon Hegel et Rousseau,” in ed. Jacques d’Hondt, Hegel et le siècle des lumières (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), and my “Hegel’s Rousseau: The general will and civil society,” in ed. Sven-Eric Liedman, ‘Deutscher Idealismus,’ Arachne (1993), viii. 7–45. On Hegel’s more general interpretation of the conceptual origins of the French Revolution, see also Luc Ferry, “Hegel,” in eds. Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, pp. 974–977
Furet, Marx et la Révolution française (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), pp. 18–25 and 78–84
Lewis Hinchman, Hegel’s Critique of the Enlightenment (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984), pp. 141–154
Joachim Ritter, Hegel und die französische Revolution (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965); and my “Contextualizing Hegel’s Phenomenology of the French Revolution and the Terror,” (Political Theory, forthcoming).
On Hegel’s interpretation of civil society and its distinction from the state, see especially ed. Zbigniew Pelczynski, The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel’s Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Manfred Riedel, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft und Staat bei Hegel (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1970)
and Norbert Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of “Civil Society” (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988).
With respect to Sieyès’ debt to the Hobbesian theory of representation, see especially Forsyth, “Thomas Hobbes and the constituent power of the people,” Political Studies 29 (1981), 191–203. In his own notable treatment of Sieyès’ conception of the nation-state, Hont concludes that “as a political definition of the location of sovereignty, Hobbes’s “state” and Sieyès’ “nation” are identical. Sieyès’ “nation” is Hobbes’s “Leviathan”. Both are powerful interpretations, in a sharply converging manner, of the modern popular civitas’ (“The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind,” p. 203). With respect to the contrast between Sieyès’ and Rousseau’s conceptions of representation, but also the apparent convergence of their ideas of the general will and indivisible sovereignty, see Bronislaw Baczko, “Le contrat social des Français: Sieyès et Rousseau,” in ed. Baker, The Political Culture of the Old Regime, comprising vol. 1 of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, pp. 493–513.
For Habermas’ conception of the public sphere, see above all his Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand, 1962), of which an English translation, mainly by Thomas Berger, is available under the title, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). For a Straussian censure of modernity, with a Rousseauist flavour, see Pierre Manent, Naissance de la politique moderne (Paris: Payot, 1977).
In Politics and Vision (New York: Little, Brown & Co, 1960), Wolin frames his critique of modern political thought in large measure around conflicting images of community and organization. With respect to notions of a public sphere in France in the age of Enlightenment and the Revolution, see especially Baker, “Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas,” in ed. Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 181–211
Dena Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime,” History and Theory 31 (1992), 1–20
and the contributors to the forum, Dena Goodman “The Public Sphere in the Eighteenth Century,” French Historical Studies 17 (1992), 882–956.
Most of these authors also address the problem of the place of women within the public sphere of the period, on which Goodman’s line of argument, in particular, contrasts with that pursued by Joan Landes, in Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
The abruptness and decisiveness of the break in French history which was occasioned by the establishment of the National Assembly was of course much discussed by both participants and contemporary observers, of whom, among the Revolution’s critics, Burke was perhaps foremost in his conviction that no more awful drama had ever been enacted so abruptly upon the stage of human history. Other commentators took a more sanguine view of such upheavals in France. “How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world,” exclaimed Charles James Fox, in applauding the fall of the Bastille (see Fox, Memorials and Correspondence ed. Lord John Russell, 4 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1853–1857), vol. 2, p. 361). As Tocqueville was later to remark, “Comme [la Révolution française] avait l’air de tendre à la régénération du genre humain plus encore qu’à la réforme de la France, elle a allumé une passion que, jusque-là, les révolutions politiques les plus violentes n’avaient jamais pu produire” (see L’Ancien régime et la révolution, I. vol. 3 in Tocqueville’s Oeuvres complètes, ed. J. P. Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1951–), vol. 2, p. 89). The French Revolutionaries’ determination to embark upon a new course of history, unencumbered by the past, is well illustrated by Lynn Hunt in her Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), for instance. But I have in mind less the innovative character of that break than the leading Revolutionaries’ conceptual disengagement even from Enlightenment programmes of reform, which were themselves put forward in order to transform a political system deemed to be in comprehensive need of change.
See, for instance, Robert Hahn, Kant’s Newtonian Revolution in Philosophy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988)
Christopher Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)
Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)
and John Rundell, The Origins of Modern Social Theory from Kant to Hegel to Marx (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).
In his Tanner Lectures on Human Values delivered at Stanford University in 1979, Foucault maintained that “since Kant, the role of philosophy has been to prevent reason from going beyond the limits of what is given in experience” and “to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality.” Yet his occasional, and limited, defence of Kant’s critical philosophy never inspired him to interpret the Enlightenment as a whole in such sympathetic terms, since, as he remarks in the same lectures, it was “one of the Enlightenment’s tasks…to multiply reason’s political powers” (see ed. Lawrence Kritzman, Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture (London: Routledge, 1988, p. 58).
Foucault addressed the philosophy of Kant on several occasions after translating and editing Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht as the thèse complémentaire he submitted for his doctorate in 1960, and later, in Les Mots et les choses, locating Kant’s work at the nexus of the period which he identified as marking the advent of les sciences humaines. See especially his lecture delivered to the Société française de philosophie in 1978, published as “Qu’est ce que la critique?,” cited in note 6 above; a second lecture he delivered at the Collège de France in 1983, of which a revised fragment was published as “Un cours inédit,” Magazine littéraire (1984), ccvii. 35–39, with a subsequent translation by Colin Gordon, under the title “Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” Economy and Society (1986), xv. 88–96; and the essay he wrote not long before his death, first published in an English translation by Catherine Porter, as “What is Enlightenment?,” in ed. Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, pp. 32–50. For notable accounts of Foucault’s changing perceptions of Kant and the Enlightenment, see Norris, “Foucault on Kant,” in The Truth about Postmodernism, pp. 29–99
James Schmidt and Thomas Wartenberg, “Foucault’s Enlightenment: Critique, Revolution and the Fashion of the Self,” in ed. Michael Kelly, Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambrige, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 283–314, and Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, “Critique and Enlightenment: Michel Foucault on ‘Was ist Aufklärung?,” forthcoming in eds. Norman Geras and Robert Wokler, The Enlightenment and Modernity.
I have commented at greater length on this distinction between democracy and representation, and on the part it has played in the development of twentieth-century political science, in “Democracy’s mythical ordeals: the Procrustean and Promethean paths to popular self-rule,” in eds. Geraint Parry and Michael Moran, Democracy and Democratization (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 23–46. With respect to ideas of representation in eighteenth-century French political thought and their articulation in the course of the Revolution in particular, see especially Baker, “Representation,” in The Political Culture of the Old Regime, pp. 469–492, and Jean Roels, Le Concept de représentation politique au dix-huitième siècle français (Louvain: Editions Nauwelaerts, 1969).
For more comprehensive discussions of notions of representation in modem political thought, see especially Jaume, Hobbes et l’état représentatif moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986)
and Hannah Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
Among the most notable contributions to the vast literature on modern theories of democracy, see David Held, Models of Democracy (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987)
Parry, Political Elites (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969)
and John Plamenatz, Democracy and Illusion (London: Longmans, 1973).
See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951, 2nd ed. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958), pp. 230–231. Arendt here comments on what she terms “the secret conflict between state and nation,” arising with the very birth of the nation-state on account of its conjunction of the rights of man with the demand for national sovereignty. Her reflections on this subject have occasioned extensive commentary.
See, for instance, Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Fayard, 1988), pp. 220–229, and Hont, “The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind,” pp. 206–209.
The phrasing of the third article of the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen, which begins, “Le principe de toute souveraineté réside essentiellement dans la Nation,” is owed principally to Lafayette. For the fullest histories of the sources and drafting of the whole document, and of the deliberations leading to its endorsement by the Assemblée nationale on 26 August 1789, see Stéphane Rials’ commentary on La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Paris: Hachette, 1988)
and Marcel Gauchet’s La Révolution des droits de l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
In stressing that this identification of the rights of man with the rights of the citizen exposed to injustice all persons who were not duly accredited citizens of nation-states, I do not ignore the exclusion of women from citizenship which the declaration of the rights of man came to legitimize as well. In the modern world, women have in a sense been exposed to a double peril, in so far as they have been deemed unfit for citizenship even when meeting various states’ criteria for nationality. But since the French Revolution, they have at least progressively gained a civic identity in fundamental respects undifferentiated from that of men, whereas whole peoples which do not constitute nation-states have, in living and indeed recent memory, faced mass extermination and today still risk extinction in diverse ways. On the subject of the French Revolution and the rights of women, see especially Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, and eds. Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine, Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
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Wokler, R. (1998). The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity. In: Heilbron, J., Magnusson, L., Wittrock, B. (eds) The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity. Sociology of the Sciences, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5528-1_2
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Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-0254-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-5528-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive