History 511.

01-L01 University of Calgary

Dr. M. S. Staum Winter Session 2008
Office No.: SS 606 Telephone: 220-6424 or
Office Hours: MWF 2-3 6401 for messages
E-Mail: mstaum@ucalgary.ca

THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1685-1803

A small, but influential group of philosophers, scholars, and writers promoted

after 1685 the cultural movement of the Enlightenment, the critical spirit which
sought to apply the reasoning and experience so fruitful in the natural sciences to
understanding humans as individuals and in society. This critique of religious
traditions and philosophical authority became the most important component of
modern European secular (as contrasted to religious) culture. Indeed,
Enlightenment political ideals of human rights, the economic philosophies of
liberalism, and cultural practices of tolerance have triumphed in spectacular
fashion in the twentieth century.

Contemporaries who were religious or frightened by the French Revolution

already in the eighteenth century condemned the Enlightenment as morally
chaotic and politically subversive. Marxists brushed it off as "bourgeois
ideology." In the last twenty years, many historians and philosophers have
launched a full-scale attack on the Enlightenment from a "post-modernist"
perspective. They have condemned it for its Eurocentrism and universalism in a
world where the European model is no longer unquestioningly accepted, for its
insensitivity to feminine aspirations, for its naive belief in progress, and most
damagingly, for its steadfast belief in universal foundations of truth and in the
universal reliability of scientific method.

To appreciate both the enduring ideals and the undeniable shortcomings of

Enlightenment culture, we shall first set it off from the wider milieu of
eighteenth-century popular culture. Then, we shall consider the institutions of
Enlightenment, such as Masonic lodges and salons. Major topics will include the
challenge to religious orthodoxy, concepts of "natural" morality, the emergence
of the social sciences, with all their ambivalence for racism and imperialism, the
faith in progress and perfectibility, and the preparation of a program adopted by
revolutionary moderates in France.

The format will be a seminar rather than a series of lectures. There will be a high
degree of emphasis on student attendance, participation in discussions, and
preparation of reading assignments for discussion. Each student will prepare
one major oral report of approximately thirty minutes on a topic co-ordinated
with reading assignments. There will be weekly required reading assignments
for the whole class. In addition, each student will lead discussion of these or
supplementary assignments on a rotating basis with brief summaries and critical
comments.

The due date for the term essay will be one week before the final class meeting.
This essay (about 16 pages double-spaced or 4000 words) may be a revision of
the major oral report or may be on an entirely different subject. I strongly
recommend submission of an outline and bibliography in advance.

There will be a penalty for late papers without explicit permission for extension
of the deadline, and no papers will be accepted for credit after the last day of
classes. Both the essay and final exam are integral components of the course, and
a marginal grade average without an essay or final exam paper will not be
acceptable for credit. All essays are expected to be the original work of the
student and are to be submitted exclusively for this course.

Please consult the Blackboard site for announcements and discussion questions.
A guide to writing history term papers is at http://hist.ucalgary.ca at the Essay
Guide button.

The basis for evaluation in this course will be:

Mid-Term Test - Tuesday, March 11, 2008 15%

Seminar Oral Report and Discussion 20%
(roughly half for the major report)
Term Essay-Due April 8, 2008 40%
Final Examination-Scheduled by the Registrar 25%

Books to be Purchased at the Bookstore

Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation vol. 2 only The Science of Freedom
(1969). New York: Norton, 1996.
Outram, Dorinda, The Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2nd edition, 2005.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Basic Political Writings. ed. Donald Cress,
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.
Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999.

Books on Reserve
1. Baker, Keith. Inventing the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990.
2.Cranston, Maurice. Philosophers and Pamphleteers. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986. (on reserve for HTST 421.02)
3. Crocker, Lester ed. The Age of Enlightenment. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
4. Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
5. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1997.
6. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). New York:
Pantheon or Vintage paperback, 1977.
7. Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French
Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
8. Goodman, Dena and Kathleen Wellman, eds. The Enlightenment. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
9. Jacob, Margaret C. Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in
Eighteenth-Century Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
10. Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de. The Spirit of the Laws ed.
Cohler, Miller, and Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
11. Pagden, Anthony. European Encounters with the New World. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993.
12. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile: Selections. ed. W. Boyd. New York: Teachers
College Press, 1956.
13. Spencer, Samia. ed. French Women and the Age of Enlightenment. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984.
14. Staum, Martin. Minerva’s Message: Stabilizing the French Revolution. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s, 1996.
15. Wollheim, Richard, ed. Hume on Religion. London: Collins, 1963.

16. Voltaire, Candide and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Reference: John Yolton, ed. The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment, Oxford,
1991.
Alan Kors, ed. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003.
Another reader: Paul Hyland, ed. The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader
2003.

Seminar Topics and Reading Assignments

I. January 15. Introduction

 Only required introductory reading--Dorinda Outram, The
Enlightenment
Recommended for interpreting the Enlightenment--
The Frankfurt School - Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere trans.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989
For two recent volumes on the general significance of the Enlightenment,
see Daniel Gordon, ed. Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New
Perspectives on Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History New York:
Routledge, 2001 and
Keith Baker and Peter Reill, eds. What’s Left of Enlightenment? A
Postmodern Question Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Critique of Habermas and Reinhart Koselleck in Anthony J. La Vopa,

"Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe,"
Journal of Modern History 64(1992): 79-116

Recommended: Roy Porter, The Enlightenment. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.:

Humanities Press International, 1990
For a brief introduction and documents, Margaret C. Jacob, ed. The
Enlightenment: a Brief History with Documents Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
2001.

II. January 22. Popular Culture - Differentiation from Elite Culture?

Choice of Seminar Report Topics by this week

Reading: Robert Darnton, "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of
Mother Goose," in The Great Cat Massacre, 9-72
Darnton, "The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin," in The Great
Cat Massacre, 75-107

Background: Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe ,

London, 1978.
Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1982.
Memoirs of Jacques Ménétra, ed. Daniel Roche
Roger Chartier,The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France
Princeton, 1987
A Test Case of the Paris Theater: Michele Root-Bernstein, Boulevard
Theater and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Ann Arbor, 1984
 Robert Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in
Eighteenth-Century Paris, Oxford, 1986
Thomas Munck, The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History 1721-1794
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

III. January 29. Formation of the Public Sphere--Masonic Lodges and Salons

Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment (on Freemasons), 3-23,

87-95, 203-224
Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters, 1-52, 73-135

Background: Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists,

Freemasons, and Republicans, London, 1981
François Furet on Cochin--interpretation that
"philosophical societies" such as the Masons created spirit of
Jacobinism-in Interpreting the French Revolution, Cambridge,
1981
Recommended: Ulrich Im Hof, The Enlightenment on groups and
societies
See also Munck (week above)
James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1998.

IV. February 5. Women and the Enlightenment

Samia Spencer, ed. French Women and the Age of Enlightenment,

Memorialists and Epistolières, 212-231
Philosophes (Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot) on Women, 272-
317

Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) if not

previously read

Condorcet on Women in Keith Baker, ed. Condorcet: Selected Writings (not

in library) – “Admission of Women to Rights of Citizenship”
Recommended: Rousseau, Emile, Book V-Emile meets Sophie
Recommended: Jordanova, L. J., Sexual Visions: Images of Gender
in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and the
Twentieth Centuries London and New York, 1989.
 Background also in: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Women and the
Enlightenment" in Renate Bridenthal et. al. eds. Becoming
Visible: Women in European History, 251-277
Karen Offen, “Reclaiming the Enlightenment for Feminism,” from
European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000.
For a dim view of the Enlightenment and women, see works by Joan
Landes and Joan Wallach Scott
See also Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern
Science (1993) and Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex

V. February 12. The Attack on Religious Orthodoxy: Skepticism, Deism and

Materialism

Gay, The Enlightenment, 2: 126-167

Hume on Religion, ed. Wollheim, 31-99 (Natural History of

Religion), 205-229 (Of Miracles)

Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation and Micromégas in Candide

and Other Stories

Lester Crocker samples of materialism, ed. The Age of Enlightenment,

Buffon, La Mettrie, Diderot, 97-120

Recommended: Cranston on Voltaire, 98-139

See Jacob, ed. The Enlightenment for excerpts of essay on Three Impostors

Other material for discussion from Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical
Dictionary, ed. Popkin, articles, "David," "Leucippus," "Pyrrho"
Elisabeth Labrousse, Bayle Oxford, 1983.
Peter Gay, ed. Deism: An Anthology 1968 (in lib.)
For a new view of Spinoza’s influence, see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical
Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001.

Recommended on Diderot: Peter France, Diderot Oxford: 1983.

Daniel Brewer, The Discourse of Enlightenment
in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art
of Philosophizing Cambridge,1993

Diderot an ideal report subject for this week or next week

 For the conservative enemies of the attack on religious orthodoxy, see
Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment - The French Counter-
Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001.

VI. February 26. The Human Situation and the Emergence of Sciences of
Psychology and Aspirations to Moral Science
Gay, 2: 167-216 on psychology
Crocker on the human situation, 31-72; 120-177 on morals from Bayle
to the Marquis de Sade

Recommended: Diderot's Rameau's Nephew

Kant, Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals
Richard Olson, The Emergence of the Social Sciences
1642-179 New York: Twayne, 1993, 1-117.

VII. March 4. Political Sociology and Economics

Cranston, 9-35 on Montesquieu

Gay 2:319-368 (includes Physiocrats and Adam Smith)
Excerpts from Montesquieu, ed. Cohler, pp. xliii-xlv, 3-30, 91-92, 104-
105, 110-115. 124-126. 156-167, 231-245, 308-322, 459-478

Other editions of Montesquieu-- Part I, bks. 1, 2, 3, bk. 6, ch. 16,

bk. 8, chs. 1, 2, 3, 16, 17, bk. 11

Report on Edinburgh and Scottish Enlightenment centered around

David Hume and Adam Smith possible this week

Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds. The Enlightenment in

National Context Cambridge, 1981

Recommended: Olson, 118-196

VIII. March 11. Progress and The Encounter with the Other: Universalism versus
many cultures?

MID-TERM TEST TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2008

Cranston on Condorcet, 140-156
Gay on progress, 2:98-125
Recommended: Keith Baker, ed. Condorcet: Selected Writings
(Excerpt from Historical Sketch of a Portrait of the Progress of the
Human Mind)
 Kant, The Idea of History from a Cosmopolitan Viewpoint

IX. March 18. Reaction to Science and Civilization; Encounter with the Other:
Universalism or Many Cultures?

Rousseau, First and Second Discourses in Basic Political Writings

Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World, 1-15, 117-188;
also Anthony Pagden, Lords of All The World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain,
Britain, and France c. 1500-c. 1800(New Haven: Yale, 1995), esp. 142-200

Background:J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, ed. F. M.

Barnard 1969 - a plea for multi-culturalism?
Recommended:
Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage
Joseph-Marie Degérando, On the Observation of Savage Peoples
Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et Histoire au siècle des lumières(1971) ed.
Blanckaert, 1995

Related Topic: Education

Gay, 2:497-555
Rousseau, Emile: Selections ed. Boyd

X. March 25. Political Theory

Cranston on Rousseau, 62-97
Gay, 2:448-497
Rousseau, On the Social Contract in Basic Political Writings
Related Subjects: Guy Dodge pamphlet on Rousseau
scholarship, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Authoritarian or
Libertarian?

Recommended:

John Lough, The Philosophes and Post-Revolutionary France,

chapters on government, 8-56
Frank Manuel and Fritzie Manuel, French Utopias, 91-116
(Morelly and Mably)
Lester Crocker, "Interpreting the Enlightenment: A Political
Approach" Journal of the History of Ideas
46(1985): 211-230
Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty (on the idea of
sociability in the eighteenth century, with attention to
Suard and Morellet)
XI. April 1. Crusade for Reform: Criminal Law, Anti-Slavery Thought;
Anthropology and Racism; Foucault's Critique of Humane
Punishment

Gay, 2:396-447(Toleration, Abolitionism, Justice)

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 3-135, 195-231

Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader,

1-37, 79-90

Recommended: Pierre Boulle, "In Defense of Slavery: Eighteenth-

Century Opposition to Abolition and the Origins of a Racist
Ideology in France," in Frederick Krantz, ed. History from Below:
Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George
Rudé , Montreal: Concordia University, 1985, 221-41

Background: David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western

Culture 1966

D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of

Revolution, 1770-1823 Ithaca, 1975

William B. Cohen,The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to

Blacks, 1530-1880, Bloomington, 1980

George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European

Racism Madison, 1978

Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to Morals and Legislation;

Panopticon

XII. April 8. Enlightenment-Revolution Relationships

TERM ESSAYS DUE IN CLASS APRIL 8--Please do not slide essays

under office door. Use the History Department Red Box if instructor is
not available.

Keith Baker, "On the Problems of the Ideological Origins of the

French Revolution"(1982) reprinted in Inventing the French
Revolution, 12-27

Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters, 233-304

 Recommended: Roger Chartier,The Cultural Origins of the French
Revolution

Recommended: Darnton, "The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life

of Literature," in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime
1-40

Related: Thomas Kaiser, "This Strange Offspring of Philosophie: Recent

Historical Problems in Relating the Enlightenment to the French
Revolution," French Historical Studies 15(1988):549-562

Related Problems: Edmund Burke vs. Thomas Paine; see William

Church,ed. Influence of the Enlightenment

Fun: Peter Gay, The Bridge of Criticism, fictional conversation

among Lucian, Erasmus, Voltaire on significance of the
Enlightenment

XIII. April 15. The Sunset of the Enlightenment: The Idéologue Circle in the
Thermidorian, Directory, and Napoleonic Eras of the French Revolution-The
Continuing Search for Sciences of Psychology, Moral Science, Political Science,
Economics, Human Geography, and History

Staum, Cabanis (Princeton, 1980), chapters 5 and 10,122-146, 266-297

Staum, Minerva’s Message (Montreal, 1996), 3-32, 95-117, 172-210 on the

French National Institute and the emerging social sciences

Recommended: Brian Head, Ideology and Social Science: Destutt

de Tracy and French Liberalism, Dordrecht, 1985
1-24, 109-148, 163-205

Cheryl Welch, Liberty and Utility, New York, 1984.

Emmet Kennedy, The Culture of the French Revolution,

New Haven, 1989
Martin Staum, "The Class of Moral and Political
Sciences, 1795-1803." French Historical Studies
11(1980): 371-397.
. John C. O'Neal The Authority of Experience: Sensationist
Theory in the French Enlightenment University Park:
Penn State Press, 1996.
Martin Staum, "The Enlightenment Transformed: The
Institute Prize Contests."Eighteenth-Century
Studies 19(1986): 153-179

P.-J.-G. Cabanis, The Relations Between the Physical and

Moral Man , ed. George Mora, Baltimore, 1981.

Destutt de Tracy, A Treatise of Political Economy

(Georgetown, 1817) ed. New York, 1970.
McDonald, Lynn. The Women Founders of the Social
Sciences. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994