The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760

ISBN-13: 9780521847872 / Angielski / Twarda / 2005 / 476 str.

John Robertson

Opis

Challenging the recent tendency to fragment the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe into multiple Enlightenments, John Robertson demonstrates the extent to which thinkers in two societies at the opposite ends of Europe shared common intellectual preoccupations. Before 1700, Scotland and Naples faced a bleak future as backward, provincial kingdoms in a Europe of aggressive commercial states. Yet by 1760, Scottish and Neapolitan thinkers were in the van of those advocating the cause of Enlightenment by means of political economy. Robertson pays particular attention to the greatest thinkers in each country, David Hume and Giambattista Vico.

Recenzje

'John Robertson's excellent new book presents a sustained comparison of intellectual life in Naples and Scotland … in order - among other things - to argue against Israel's revisionist periodisation.' The Philosophers' Magazine

Spis treści

Preface; 1. The case for the Enlightenment; 2. Scotland and Naples in 1700; 3. The intellectual worlds of Naples and Scotland 1680–c.1725; 4. The predicament of 'kingdoms governed as provinces'; 5. Vico, after Bayle; 6. Hume, after Bayle and Mandeville; 7. The advent of Enlightenment: political economy in Naples and Scotland 1730–1760; Conclusion: the Enlightenment vindicated?; Bibliography; Index.