Sociability and Cosmopolitanism
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Sociability and Cosmopolitanism

Social Bonds on the Fringes of the Enlightenment

David Burrow, Scott Brueninger, David Burrow, Scott Brueninger

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eBook - ePub

Sociability and Cosmopolitanism

Social Bonds on the Fringes of the Enlightenment

David Burrow, Scott Brueninger, David Burrow, Scott Brueninger

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This collection of essays expands the focus of Enlightenment studies to include countries outside the core nations of France, Germany and Britain. Notions of sociability and cosmopolitanism are explored as ways in which people sought to improve society.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2015
ISBN
9781317321668
Topic
History
Edition
1
1 INTRODUCTION
Scott Breuninger
The Enlightenment Revisited
The traditional view of the Enlightenment forged in the aftermath of Kant’s famous essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, tended to focus upon the French philosophes and their supposed valorization of reason as a tool to challenge the church and extol the virtues of liberty, humanity and toleration. While this interpretation was never truly reflective of the European thought during the long eighteenth century, it provided a simplified version of events that could be used to either laud the advance of freedom and equality, or more darkly could be cited as the root cause of the modern horrors of Nazi totalitarianism, Western imperialism and Soviet communism.1 Some historians of philosophy followed Ernst Cassirer’s influential interpretation and extended the reach of the Enlightenment as far as Konigsberg, on the grounds that it reached its apogee with Kant, but this reading still viewed it as a movement founded in an appreciation for the role of rationality in contributing to an ideal of progress.2 During the 1960s, these assessments formed the backdrop to Peter Gay’s influential argument that there was ‘only one Enlightenment’, characterized by ‘secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom’. While ‘the variety of political experience produced an Enlightenment with distinct branches’, these differences were relatively minor and thus Enlightenment thinkers as a whole could be seen as composing a single ‘family’.3 Although acknowledging that the seventeenth century exerted some influence upon the Enlightenment, Gay saw the Enlightenment as being bounded by the English and French Revolutions, which fit nicely with his geographic focus on northwestern Europe.4
While influential, Gay’s analysis may be seen in retrospect as the dying gasp of the traditional reading of a unitary Enlightenment. During the late 1960s, scholars such as Robert Darnton quickly took Gay to task for neglecting the social dimension of the Enlightenment and further called for the study of the low life of ‘Grub Street’ journalism to compliment the ‘High Enlightenment’.5 Other historians, such as Daniel Roche, focused their attention upon the publishing history of Enlightenment texts, seeking to illustrate the extensive social reach of these ideas.6 Interest in the social aspect of the Enlightenment also drew upon Jurgen Habermas’s contention that a ‘public sphere’ emerged during the early eighteenth century that ushered in a new era of sociability, which in turn could help explain the nature of the Enlightenment.7
These insights into the social thought of the Enlightenment have been complemented by a renewed interest in the role of religion. Rather than seeing matters of faith as inimical to Enlightenment values, some scholars have contended that ‘religion and religious controversy acted as the chrysalis as well as a casualty of the modern political world’.8 In a similar manner, David Sorkin has suggested that that ‘the Enlightenment was not only compatible with religious belief but conducive to it’. According to Sorkin, ‘religious enlighteners attempted to renew and rearticulate their faith, using the new science and philosophy to promote a tolerant, irenic understanding of belief that could serve a shared morality and politics’.9 Finally, J. G. A. Pocock argues that the Enlightenment (or Enlightenments) was ‘a product of religious debate and not merely a rebellion against it’.10 While the particular details of these interpretations differ, they share an assumption that a close consideration of national contexts is essential for understanding the relationship between confessional belief and Enlightenment values. For instance, the political circumstances and religious beliefs that led the English deists to embrace ‘public discussion of ideas’ along the way to a ‘rational theology’ varied even within England itself.11 Taken together, these studies have shown some of the difficulties inherent in constructing a single narrative of Enlightenment thought, a problem that may also be seen in the flurry of scholarship devoted to the Scottish Enlightenment.
Since the 1960s, there has been a dramatic growth of interest in the Scottish Enlightenment, a field that had previously been barely acknowledged. As historians explored the Scottish dimension of Adam Smith and David Hume, they soon elevated their contemporaries such as Adam Ferguson, William Robertson and Thomas Reid to the pantheon of Enlightenment thinkers. These interpretations are important in light of recent scholarship concerning the roles of ‘improvement’ during the Enlightenment, since the study of sociability and cosmopolitanism fits well within this growing field.
Drawing upon his work on the Scottish Enlightenment, John Robertson argues that due to the political loss of independence caused by the 1707 Act of Union, Scottish thinkers sought to fashion a new sense of identity in the commercial field. Robertson identifies three related areas of inquiry as central to Enlightenment thought. According to this interpretation, Enlightenment explorations of human nature, political economy and the civilizing process ‘converged upon the concept of “sociability” … to establish the material and moral conditions and mechanisms of sociability, the better to clear the path for human betterment, and to assess the prospects of its realization’.12
Robertson’s argument for a reassessment of the content of Enlightenment thought stresses that this cosmopolitan aspiration and commitment to the goal of improving the lives of humans ran across national borders and confessional divides. By highlighting how these strands of thought combined in the notion of sociability, Robertson shows areas of commonality between earlier studies of the ‘high’ Enlightenment and more recent studies of ‘Grub Street’ removed from the airy realms of philosophy. This emphasis on the notion of sociability also provides an important vantage point from which to view the social and political dimensions of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, the study of sociability has not been limited to Scotland.13 In his study of French thought, Daniel Gordon suggests that the concept of sociability provided a way for individuals living in absolutist states to address changes in the public sphere, particularly in a context where power and authority was strictly rationed. For Gordon, the related ideas of sociability and cosmopolitanism act as ‘tools’ to study the institutional dynamics of absolutist monarchies. Gordon distinguishes between advocates of a ‘latent’ (or ‘innate’) form of sociability and those who argued that social relations were the result of rational consideration of natural laws. In both cases, Gordon contends that during this period the study of ‘society’ came to occupy a privileged place among French and Scottish thinkers.14
In addition to these reassessments of the content of the Enlightenment, some historians followed the path of Franco Venturi and examined how Enlightenment thought developed within a variety of national contexts. In his influential study, Venturi argued that, ‘the Enlightenment was born and organized in those places where the contact between a backward world and a modern one was chronologically more abrupt and geographically closer’.15 This stance formed the foundation of an important collection of essays edited by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich that helped to spark interest in oft-overlooked national traditions of thought. This collection of essays played a key role in undermining the notion of a unitary ‘Enlightenment’, in favor of a number a distinct ‘Enlightenments’. This volume was predicated upon a desire to address the ‘geographical, social and political location’ of Enlightenment thought, thus highlighting the need for scholars to consider how various national traditions fit within this movement.16 The essays included by Porter and Teich accepted a ‘certain common identity in the Enlightenment’, primarily associated with the social history of culture, but located these issues within thirteen national contexts. Collectively these pieces provide a broader sense of the ways Enlightenment thought was deployed during this period, but the nations chosen for inclusion are predominantly located in western or central Europe and thus fail to address the intellectual fervor on the ‘fringes’ of Europe, much less the Atlantic world.17 Additionally, the broad nature of these essays results in a correspondingly disjointed analysis that often neglects to identify particular ideas (such as sociability and cosmopolitanism) whose influence crossed national borders and could thematically unify these otherwise excellent contributions.
Considerations of Enlightenment thought outside the traditional core countries has also been the subject of a collection edited by Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies and Gabriel Espinosa entitled Peripheries of the Enlightenment. This collection of essays explores how the Enlightenment was perceived and interpreted in a variety of national contexts away from its supposed epicentre of France. By incorporating recent scholarship on the Enlightenment, this volume represents an important addition to Porter and Teich’s work. Still, while these contributions help illuminate the variety of thought in circulation during the Enlightenment, their topics remain heavily indebted to the traditional Francophilia that has often characterized intellectual histories of this era. Of the thirteen essays included in this text, eight of them focus on French, English or German developments, thus belying its editors’ claim to represent the ‘peripheries’ of the Enlightenment.18 While these essays include keen insights into the nature of Enlightenment across national borders, no broader themes are used to unite these otherwise disparate analyses and consequently the volume lacks a greater sense of coherence.
While these books contain useful surveys of intellectual developments across national borders, they do not provide a thematic analysis of issues at play in these countries; rather, they present piecemeal analyses that lack a larger sense of unity. Furthermore, despite their claims to the contrary, these works also display the traditional focus on north-western Europe. Our volume aims to expand the study of the Enlightenment in a geographic sense, while also being guided by the assessment of the roles of sociability and cosmopolitanism advanced by Robertson and Gordon. The essays that follow are devoted to exploring how aspects of sociability and cosmopolitanism were central to the formation of Enlightenment thought outside the Paris–Edinburgh axis. While the methods and foci of these essays differ, they share a belief that sociability and cosmopolitanism were crucial themes during the Enlightenment. As a result, this collection illustrates the wide range of approaches and attitudes toward sociability and cosmopolitanism in areas typically seen as peripheral to the Enlightenment proper.
Sociability and the Fringes of the Enlightenment
The essays in this volume explore how the key Enlightenment notions of sociability and cosmopolitanism were articulated in a number of national contexts that have typically been seen as being on the fringes of eighteenth-century thought. The essays are divided into three geographic sections, although there is significant overlap between each of them. The first section focuses upon areas of Europe that are rarely mentioned in discussions of the Enlightenment: Ireland, Spain and Italy. Each of these pieces share a conviction that notions of sociability and cosmopolitanism were central to Enlightenment thought, whether espoused by philosophers such as George Berkeley and Francis Hutcheson, embodied in the curriculum of schools for the deaf, or displayed by the interaction of British and Italian women. The second section moves east to the borders of Europe, analysing how Europeans such as Montesquieu viewed Persia and issues of sociability in Russian court society. Taken together, these essays show both vibrant cultures engaged with Enlightenment debates and how local traditions of thought shaped the expression of these ideas. The third section of this volume turns to the Atlantic world, showing the global reach of these concepts. The first essay in this section explores how Benjamin Vaughan’s trans-Atlantic vision of international relations was built upon notions of sociability and cosmopolitanism. This essay sets the stage for two closer studies of how sociability was expressed in colonial Pennsylvania, the first looking at the Pittsburgh Enlightenment and the second considering the Philadelphia thinker Benjamin Rush and his influence upon rural farmers.
In the first essay, ‘Science, Religion, and Sociability in Early Eighteenth-Century Irish Thought’, Scott Breuninger contextually examines the contributions of two key Irish thinkers, George Berkeley and Francis Hutcheson, to early eighteenth-century debates concerning human sociability. In an important essay in The Guardian, Berkeley outlined his theory of social ‘gravity’, claiming that a divinely inspired force acted to hold humans together, just as gravity attracted heavenly bodies to each other. Berkeley’s application of Newton’s celestial insights to society marked an important moment in the history of social thought that shows the growing convergence of scientific and moral theories. Hutcheson echoed this use of scientific rhetoric to explain sociability in his Dublin writings during the 1720s, providing an avenue for the dissemination of these ideas in Scotland. In both cases, these thinkers drew upon the Stoic notion of oikeiosis to indicate that the rational ‘elevation’ of individuals was part of a divine plan for the common good of humanity. Breuninger argues that this melding of scientific and classical thought provided an important contribution to more ‘mainstream’ Enlightenment conceptualizations of sociability.
In the second essay, ‘Visualizing Spain’s Enlightenment: The Marginal Universality of Deafness’, Benjamin Fraser examines work on deafness by Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro and other Spaniards during the eighteenth century (including the century’s leading philosophical figure Benito Jerónimo de Feijóo y Montenegro – who is often seen as the Spanish counterpart to Kant). Fraser argues that their work was an attempt not merely to argue for the socialization and inclusion of a marginalized and misunderstood group but simultaneously an attempt to grapple with questions of language, sociability and the essential unity of all human beings. The instruction of the deaf, which was discussed in great detail by both Hervás and Feijóo went beyond purely national concerns and was itself implicitly a call for a cosmopolitan approach to history. Grounded in contemporary debates on deafness, this essay reconciles a close reading of texts by Hervás (1795) and Feijóo (1752) with a much wider assessment of the cultural history of deafness. The approach to deafness in eighteenth-century Spain appealed to the rhetoric of ‘universal benevolence’, ‘sympathy’ and ‘compassion’ in attempting to uproot long-standing misunderstandings of deaf people. In so doing, Fraser shows how Enlightenment thinkers such as Hervás ultimately staked out a radical position that is still greatly relevant to the struggles faced by deaf people in and outside of Spain today.
The third essay, by Marianna D’Ezio, turns to issues of gender in Italy. In this piece, ‘Sociability and Cosmopolitanism in Eighteenth-Century Venice: European Travellers and Venetian Women’s Casinos’, D’Ezio explores how women travellers to Venice reported their experiences of the Carnival season. Through a close reading of how urban ‘spaces’ were described, D’Ezio looks at intellectual British women travellers to the continent and investigates their relationship and interaction with the Italian women writers they encountered on the Grand Tour. This allows for an examination of the Italian tradition of sociability and cosmopolitanism in eighteenth-century city salons that explores the link established between British and Italian intellectual women, thus tracing possible literary influences on their works from both directions and perspectives.
The second section of this volume turns to the east and begins with Mark Nixon’s ‘At Home in the World of Fictions: Commercial Sociability in Montequieu’s Persian Letters’. This essay develops a reappraisal of Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes that challenges both traditional historical and more recent feminist interpretations of this famous text. It proceeds by situating the novel against the background of domestic socio-political debates produced by the emergence of commercial society in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By telescoping the world of Regency France with an imaginary oriental world, Montesquieu explored the links between a commercial economy based on new forms of mobile property and the French-centred culture of politeness that spread across Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nixon’s analysis examines how these forces created the possibility of a cosmopolitan public sphere in which questions of truth and reality were displaced in favour of a more contingent and flexible mode of organizing social relations through self-fashioning and performance.
In the second essay of this section, ‘Prince M. M. Shcherbatov’s Critique of the “Open Table” and the Dynamics of Russian Sociability’, David Burrow analyses how cultural critic Prince Mikhail M. Shcherbatov employed his reading of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and the concepts of the doux commerce cycle to criticize the state of the Russian empire in the late eighteenth century. Shcherbatov focused much of his wrath on the substantive changes to Russian sociability brought by Emperor Peter the Great through the institution of noble Assemblies (legislated in 1718) and by bringing ‘new men’ – those from outside the ranks of the Muscovite noble families – into the elite of court and service. One of these ‘new men’, Peter’s favourite, Alexander Menshikov, began the practice of the ‘open table’ that flourished under Empress Catherine the Great. Shcherbatov criticized the open table for its ubiquity and ostentatious display, claiming it was a vehicle for corruption. Others, such as Admiral Nikolai S. Mordvinov, employed the ‘open table’ as a vehicle for socializing junior officers under their command. This essay examines for the first time Shcherbatov’s use of the language of commerce and modern prudence. By viewing Shcherbatov through the lens of Enlightenment models of sociability, this essay argues that Russian Imperial identity was challenged by its expansion into the Western European cultural world and examines the tensions associated with this process.
The third section of this volume focuses upon the Atlantic world. In the first essay, ‘Benjamin Vaughan on Commerce and International Harmony in the Eighteenth Century’, Andrew Hamilton contends that writers on political economy in eighteenth-century Europe were dee...

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