James Schmidt

Civility, Enlightenment, and Society: Conceptual Confusions and Kantian Remedies

Originally published in American Political Science Review, http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=PSR. Copyright American Political Science Association.

Misunderstanding the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’: Venturi, Habermas, and Foucault

In his 1969 Trevelyan Lectures, Franco Venturi argued that Kants response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” has tended to promote a “philosophical interpretation” of the Enlightenment that leads scholars away from the political questions that were central to its concerns. But while Kants response is well known, it has been often misunderstood by scholars who see it as offering a definition of an historical period, rather than an attempt at characterizing a process that had a significant implications. This article seeks (1) to clarify, briefly, the particular question that Kant was answering, (2) to examine – using Jürgen Habermas’ work as a case in point – the tension between readings that use Kants answer as a way of discussing the Enlightenment as a discrete historical period and those readings that see it as offering a broad outline of an “Enlightenment Project” that continues into the present, and (3) to explore how Michel Foucault, in a series of discussions of Kants response, sketched an approach to Kants text that offers a way of reframing Venturis distinction between “philosophical” and “political” interpretations of the Enlightenment. ☆ Thanks to an invitation from Karlis Racevskis, an earlier version of this article was delivered as the George R. Havens Lecture at Ohio State University in May 2007. I have also benefitted from discussions at a workshop arranged by Kenneth Baynes at Syracuse University in November 2009.

The Eclipse of Reason and the End of the Frankfurt School in America

Originally published in New German Critique: http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?viewby=journal&productid=45622. Copyright Duke University Press.

What Enlightenment Was, What It Still Might Be, and Why Kant May Have Been Right After All

Debates about “the end(s) of Enlightenment” tend to confuse the Enlightenment (the historical period) with enlightenment (an activity whose nature and ends were the subject of much debate during the 18th century). This article explores the history of discussions of “enlightenment” and “the Enlightenment,” paying particular attention to the uncertainties the 18th century had about just what the former implied and the different ways in which the 19th and 20th centuries understood the latter.

The Legacy of the Enlightenment

If the Enlightenment did not exist, postmodernists would have had to invent it. It performs the same function, Daniel Gordon argues in his introduction to Postmodernism and the Enlightenment, that the Ancien Regime did for the French revolutionaries: as the “other of postmodernism,” it represents “the modern that postmodernism revolts against” (P&E, p. 1). Indeed, the image of the Enlightenment that emerges from the postmodern critique does seem, in large part, to be an invention. As Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill suggest in the introduction to their collection What’s Left of Enlightenment? the various strands of thought commonly grouped under the label postmodernism “have at least one thing in common”: “they all depend upon a stereotyped, even caricatural, account of the Enlightenment” which sees the Enlightenment as the point of origin for the “rationalism, instrumentalism, scientism, logocentrism, universalism, abstract rights, eurocentrism, individualism, humanism, masculinism, etc.” that

Liberalism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany

This is a preprint (authors original) version of the article published in Critical Review 13(1-2):31-53. The final version of the article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08913819908443521 (login required to access content). The version made available in Digital Common was supplied by the author.

Recent Hegel Literature: The Jena Period and the Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel arrived injena early in 1801, freed from his tutorial duties by the inheritance he received upon the death of his father. There he aided Schelling in the editing of the Critical Journal of Philosophy, won a post at the university, published a series of long articles in the Journal and accumulated a pile of lecture notes which have seen the light of day only in our century. He departed from the town rather hastily in 1807 leaving behind a university closed as a result of Napoleons victory over the forces of the Holy Roman Empire and a book, the Phenomenology of Spirit, finished on the eve of the battle. It would seem easier to make sense out of Hegels activities in this period than to come to grips with his writings from the Berne and Frankfurt periods.

The Concrete Totality and Lukács' Concept of Proletarian Bildung

A truly critical Marxian analysis of society does not appear full blown in the thunderclap of a coupure epistémologique, leaving all previous efforts at critical reflection on the far side of the “ideology”-“science” opposition. Rather, as a determinate, historical negation of the self-understanding achieved at those moments of bourgeois social theorys most incisive insights into the limits of its society, it reaches its “new continent of thought” at least in part by vehicles from the old world. It should not be surprising then that those Marxists who have clearly perceived the specificity of Marxs achievement have also often been equally sensitive towards this exploration of the limits of bourgeois thought which has taken place in the finest products of classical liberal social theory.

Mediation, Genealogy, and (the) Enlightenment/s

This is a preprint (authors original) version of the article published in Eighteenth Century Studies 45(1):127-39. The final version of the article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2011.0042 (login required to access content). The version made available in Digital Common was supplied by the author.

Projects and Projections: A Response to Christian Delacampagne

This is a preprint (authors original) version of the article published in Political Theory 29(1):86-90. The final version of the article can be found at http://www.jstor.org/stable/3072545 (login required to access content). The version made available in Digital Common was supplied by the author.