Knut Ove Eliassen

Det orientalske despotis afvikling i Montesquieus Lettres persanes

Montesquieu’s Dismantlement of Oriental Despotism in Persian Letters. Montesquieu’s epistolary novel, Persian Letters , is often presented as a satire of the mores of the French under the reign of Louis XIV, and an early example of what became a well-established literary trope: the de-familiarizing perspective of the foreign visitor. Others have emphasized that the novel’s political horizon is best understood by taking into account Montesquieu’s later work, the Spirit of the Laws , and that the Persian letters anticipates insights that were to be more broadly developed in the author’s chef-d’oeuvre. While acknowledging the relevance and productivity of the latter perspective, the claim of the present work is that it is neither the particularities of France under the absolutist regime of Louis the XIV nor the despotism of the sultans and the shahs of the Orient that make up the novel’s central concern, but rather the demonstration of how despotism, by erasing the crucial political distinction between the domestic and public spaces, not only has nefarious consequences for the freedom and liberty of the citizens, but that it, in the final analysis, has a dramatic demographic impact that undermine the wealth and the power of the very nations in which it is the dominant political form.

Drømmen om Sydhavet: Biopolitik og seksualitet i Denis Diderots Supplément au voyage de Bougainville

The Dream of the Pacific: Bio-Politics and Sexuality in Denis Diderot’s Supplement au voyage de Bougainville An important issue in the economic debates of the eighteenth century was the concern that the advanced Europeans nations were facing a decline in population. It was assumed that this would have considerable consequences for the economic and military strength of countries like France and England. The idea that the decline was an effect of the European countries’ advanced state of civilisation was widespread; accordingly, explorers like James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville were eager to examine the ways in which the societies and cultures they encountered organised sexual reproduction. Informed by the travelers’ accounts, and recognising the possible insights these offered for the challenges France was facing, Denis Diderot’s Supplement au voyage de Bougainville analyses and discusses the sexual mores of the inhabitants of Tahiti. Taking as its starting point the oblique and slightly idiosyncratic way in which the French philosopher addresses the issue — in the form of an apocryphal “supplement” to Bougainville’s account supposedly written by the explorer himself — this essay analyses the way in which Diderot transforms an ethnographic reflection on Polynesian culture into an analysis of the pathologies of his contemporary France from the double perspective of economy and ethics.