Abstract
As noted in chapter 1, recent scholarship has introduced a great deal of nuance into our understanding of the overall character of Robertson’s achievement, recontextualizing it within the mainstream of eighteenth-century historical studies, which were inspired by narrative as well as political, religious, and educational agendas. However, these valuable correctives to the received image of Robertson as an avant-garde structuralist historian do not seriously affect the status of his admittedly most experimental text on which this image has been largely based (together with Book Four and other portions of the History of America and passages from his other works). The View of the Progress of Society was written by Robertson as a volume-length introduction to the History of Charles V, in an attempt to explore the forces of causality underlying long-term historical processes which led, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, to the rise of states capable of sustaining large-scale and long-standing military efforts. It has been suggested that in his writings Robertson moves rather flexibly between the patterns of “Enlightenment” history (where progress takes place, or at least may take place, as a result of conscious choice, even intervention) and “stadial” or conjectural history (which is dominated by a theory of spontaneous order emerging from a natural succession of various stages in people’s mode of subsistence).1 This is an important distinction in accounting for the variability of perspective within the oeuvre as a whole, but less helpful in approaching the specific case of A View of the Progress of Society.
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Notes
Karen O’Brien, “Between Enlightenment and Stadial History: William Robertson on the History of Europe,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 16/1 (1993): 53–64.
William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V. With a View of the progress of society in Europe, from the subversion of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the sixteenth century (Routledge/Thoemmes Press: London, 1996), I: 13–14.
Cf. Quentin Skinner, “Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual Change,” in Visions of Politics, vol. I: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 180. Skinner distinguishes between three kinds of meaning: (1) that of the words or sentences in a text, (2) what the text means to “me,” that is, the reader, and (3) what a writer means by what is said in a text.
For an application of these distinctions to translation processes, see Kontler, “Translation and Comparison II: A Methodological Inquiry into Reception in the History of Ideas,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 4/1 (2008); 31 ff.
For a particularly perceptive analysis of how politeness, progress, and patriotism were part and parcel of one and the same program in Robertson’s immediate environment, that of the “moderate literati” in Edinburgh, see Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
In Smith’s account, the magnetism of luxury articles offered at the market by greedy merchants tamed the lust for domination of noblemen into mere vanity and drained their wealth; and thus, as a result of two selfish social actors who in fact neglected the public good, urban liberties, the core privileges of later safety under the law, arose in the high Middle Ages. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Roy H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), I: 422
cf. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 420. Cf. also endnote 34 in chapter 1 for charges on Robertson’s unacknowledged reliance on Smith in the View of the Progress of Society.
On Nicolay’s life, career, and European contacts, see Edmund Heier, L. H. Nicolay (1737–1820) and His Contemporaries (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965).
The following biographical sketches of Mittelstedt and Remer are mainly based on Johann Georg Meusel, Lexikon der vom Jahr 1750 bis 1800 verstorbenen teutschen Schriftsteller, 15 vols. (Leipzig, 1802–1816, repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1967), IX: 190–2
Georg Christoph Hamberger and Johann Georg Meusel, Das gelehrte Teutschland oder Lexikon der jetzt lebenden teutschen Schriftsteller, 23 vols. (Lemgo, 1796–1834, repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), VI: 305–8; Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. XXVIII (Leipzig, 1889), 198–200.
On Pütter in general, see Wilhelm Ebel, Der göttinger Professor Johann Stephan Pütter aus Iserlohn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975)
Christoph Link, “Johann Stephan Pütter (1725–1807). Staatsrecht am Ende des alten Reiches,” in Rechtswissenschaft in Göttingen. Göttinger Juristen aus 250 Jahren, ed. Fritz Loos (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 75–99.
See Horst Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution, 1770–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 57–8.
See Bernhard Fabian, “English Books and their Eighteenth Century German Readers,” in The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in Eighteenth Century Europe, ed. Paul Korshin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 117–96
and especially Kenneth E. Carpenter, Dialogue in Political Economy: Translations from and into German in the Eighteenth Century (Boston: Kress Library Publications, 1977), ch. 1.
Isaiah Berlin, “Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), 162–87; Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, ch. 6.
See, e.g., Maurice M. Goldsmith, “Liberty, Luxury and the Pursuit of Happiness,” in The Languages of Political Theory, ed. Pagden, 225–51; John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), esp. ch. 2
Istvan Hont, “The Early Enlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 2008), 379–418.
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 195.
From the extensive literature on the early modern German theory and concept of Polizey, I have used Maier, Die ältere deutsche Staats- und Verwaltungslehre, pt. 3; Jutta Brückner, Staatswissenschaften, Kameralismus und Naturrecht. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Wissenschaft im Deutschland des späten 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1976); Franz-Ludwig Knemeyer, “Polizei,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck, IV: 875–98
Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland. Erster Band: Reichspublizistik und Policeywissenschaft 1600–1800 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), ch. 8.
Cf. László Kontler, “Translation and Comparison: Early-Modern and Current Perspectives,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 3/1 (2007): 74, and the literature cited there.
Moses Mendelssohn, “Über die Frage: was heißt aufklären?,” [Berlinische Monatsschrift, 1784], in Was ist Aufklärung? Thesen und Definitionen, ed. Ehrhard Bahr (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974), 4.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. VIII: The French Revolution 1790–1794, ed. Leslie Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 130.
See J. G. A. Pocock, “The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution,” The Historical Journal 25 (1982): 331–49, repr. in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 198–9.
See Christoph Meiners, Geschichte der Ungleichheit der Stände unter den vornehmsten Europäischen Staaten, vol. II (Hannover: Helwing, 1792), chs. 5 and 7. Meiners’ preoccupation with race as a decisive factor in history had been well known since the publication of his Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit (Lemgo: Meyer, 1785). On Meiners, see Friedrich Lotter, “Christoph Meiners und die Lehre von der unterschiedlichen Wertigkeit der Menschenrassen,” in Geschichtswissenschaft in Göttingen, ed. Hartmut Boockmann and Hermann Wellenreuther (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 30–75.
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Kontler, L. (2014). A Different View of the Progress of Society in Europe. In: Translations, Histories, Enlightenments. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137371720_4
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