The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
Their job is to gatekeep the reception and accepted nomenclature of the papers economists churn with contents that social scientists wouldn't touch with a 12ft pole, and they instead write with the utmost confidence. They produce all the "schools" of economics we talk about here which mean nothing.
Blaming enlightenment to the failures of the last imperialism is the accepted speak today.
To wit: “ Hume and his acolytes had not counted on the translation of superstition and intolerance from religion into politics. Just as soon as people stopped being willing to kill and die for their religion, they started killing and dying for their country.”
One point to formalize this split would be 1806, rather early in the Napoleonic Wars.
Overall so, you are right. The Asutria-Hungary I talked about existed only between the Napoleonic Wars and the end of WW1.
At least from what I remember being taught, Prussia definitely did start to rise in power before the Napoleonic Wars, and the Holy Roman Empire was certainly not a very unified entity (Voltaire's quote always sticks in my mind as well, although I honestly had forgotten who had said it). I think the textbook we used often would talk specifically about the Habsburg dynasty and their sphere of influence in order to be more precise about what was under a more centralized authority versus more independent, and it's arguable that centralized rule over the Holy Roman Empire was already proven infeasible by the Thirty Years War. My impression was that the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire as a unified entity was more or less inevitable, but where exactly all the pieces would end up was much less clear. Prussia obviously ended up a large winner, but their influence was contested in places; they fought wars against Denmark and France later in the century in addition to Austria-Hungary in the process of unifying a larger German state, and even those claims didn't necessarily last (e.g. France taking back Alsace and Lorraine after WWI). The Napoleonic Wars kind of just eliminated any remaining pretense of Austrian control over the lands that they hadn't really had much authority over for some time beforehand, which made the path Prussia to expand and consolidate easier than ever before.
It's an indictment of the idea that reason is able to get us to transcend our nature.
What we did see, plenty, is the effect of highly religious societies, and it ain't pretty when religion and politics aren't seperated. And we see the first nascent examples of religious nationalism in India, which isn't pretty neither.
I find that sad.
It is historically correct that romanticism was a reaction to the Enlightenment. The thinkers of the day said as much. As I said elsewhere, you can't blame a thesis for its antithesis.
The Enlightenment emphasized universality, and pluralism as the means to coexist given our pre-existing differences. Romanticism celebrates the particular and the local. Many but not all Romantic thinkers extended this to include basically chauvinism for their own particular kind of culture.
The Enlightenment emphasized reason, evidence, and dispassionate analysis. Romanticism emphasized emotion, the inner life, and passion.
They could not be more different, given that Romanticism was conceived as a reaction to the Enlightenment and so its thinkers staked out opposing positions.
If you were actually taught that romanticism was not opposed to the Enlightenment I feel your education has done you a disservice.
The book isn't out yet, but the synopsis here seems like the author is projecting his bias onto history (claiming "the pursuit of happiness" is just about consuming luxury goods is moronic).
Arguing that the decline of religion lead to a rise in nationalism might be true, but that doesn't mean the previous religious structures didn't deserve to be corrected.
It's been on-trend for a very long time: this review even mentions that the author's critique is based on his "Carlyle Lectures". So it seems that we're supposed to take our criticisms of the Enlightenment from Thomas Carlyle, a well-known racist and a supporter of slavery who famously decried economics as "the dismal science" merely because it advocated for the moral equality of all human beings as a basis for policy. And academia is now endorsing these perspectives? Come on, even Curtis Yarvin is not nearly as bad as this.
It seemed like the book was trying to bring back some nuance, that 'reason' didn't solve everything like the thinkers of the time thought it would.
So it is valuable to look back and see how the rise of 'reason' still leaves some gaps that humans can't seem to get over. And is pretty relevant to todays rise of nationalism and corporate wars (US government supporting dictators for business gains, is not unlike British Colonies draining resources). Like, we are repeating some history here, so lets go back and see how that worked out.
I think religion comes out of the need for humans to organize in large numbers, and without it, perhaps civilization would have never occurred. The Enlightenment was correct in redefining this foundation on reason instead of mythology, and to the extent people have substituted their zealotry of a god with the zealotry of their political party, it is a failure of their reasoning... since as the article implies, that is part of our primitive nature, and therefore something that requires reasoning to break out from. So if more people actually used their reasoning skills more instead of instinctually following the herd, then we would solve political problems faster.
So, people don't want to be miserable ?
This book promotion piece spends so much time dancing around the ideas that:
- people have priorities, and food and shelter is high on the list
- no idealogy is uncorruptible nor safe from being radicalized
Not when ideals were supposed to get us to transcend our nature. Don't people still think that way about human rights?
Quoting: So, people don't want to be miserable ?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2d/%2...
A bunch of murder-monkeys with nukes, choose some kind of authoritarianism whether religious or nationalism. Just natural for the species to get behind some framework to provide a 'us-them'. Not fighting is too uncomfortable.
A big part of the 'us-them' divide is 'I want to keep my money, screw those guys'.
The ouroboros rolls on…
It was the rediscovery of Aristotle along with the newly formed universities giving him an audience. Everything else fell out of that.