Lynn Hunt

Beyond the cultural turn: new directions in the study of society and culture

Книга посвящена рассмотрению значения и последствий культурного (или лингвистического) поворота, культурализма и постмодернизма для истории и социологии. В ней также намечаются новые направления развития теории и практики исторических исследований. Различные культурные теории, их сильные и слабые стороны анализируются как с исторической, так и с историко-социологической точек зрения. Дается общая оценка тенденции укрепления позиций культурализма, рассматриваются ключевые проблемы, стоящие перед исторической и социологической наукой в свете изменений, вызванных культурным поворотом и с учетом результатов последних эмпирических исследований социальных практик, нарративов, человеческого тела и самости как критических точек пересечения социального и культурного.

Beyond Roles, Beyond Spheres: Thinking about Gender in the Early Republic

This discussion of issues relating to the historical study of gender was presented as a symposium on December 4, i987, at the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Pew Memorial Trust. Michael Zuckerman of the University of Pennsylvania organized the panel. The text has been edited and revised for publication; several comments or questions from the floor have been omitted; footnotes have been added. Linda K. Kerber, who chaired the panel, has supplied a new conclusion. The editors hope that Forum will continue to attract collective contributions on topics of general and timely interest.

Human Rights and Revolutions

Introduction: Human Rights and Revolutions Part I: Two Opening Perspectives Chapter 1: The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights Chapter 2: The Chinese Revolution and Contemporary Paradoxes Part II: The English, American, and Russian Revolutions Chapter 3: Tradition, Human Rights, and the English Revolution Chapter 4: Natural Rights in the American Revolution: The American Amalgam Chapter 5: A European Experience: Human Rights and Citizenship in Revolutionary Russia Part III: Asian and African Case Studies Chapter 6: An Enlightenment of Outcasts: Some Vietnamese Stories Chapter 7: India, Human Rights, and Asian Values Chapter 8: What Absence Is Made Of: Human Rights in Africa Part IV: A Human Rights Revolution? Chapter 9: (Homo)sexuality, Human Rights, and Revolution in Latin America Chapter 10: Ethics and the Rearmament of Imperialism: The French Case Chapter 11: The Strange Career of Radical Islam Part V: A Concluding Perspective Chapter 12: Human Rights and Empires Embrace: A Latin American Counterpoint

The 18th-Century Body and the Origins of Human Rights

Recent historical work on changing perceptions of the human body has been influenced by Michel Foucault’s contention that the self of western individualism was created by new regimes of disciplining the body. A different approach is taken here, one that focuses on how individual bodies came to be viewed as separate and inviolable, that is, as autonomous. The separateness and inviolability of bodies can be traced in the histories of bodily practices as different as portraiture and legal torture. After 1750, regular public exhibitions, themselves a new feature of the social landscape, showed increasing numbers of portraits in London and Paris. The proliferation of individual likenesses encouraged the view that each person was an individual, that is, single, separate, distinctive and original. At the same time, the tide turned against judicially sanctioned torture and cruel punishment. Long-held notions of sacrificial punishment and truth through pain withered under the pressure of new experiences of the body that in turn facilitated the emergence of new conceptions of rights of individuals.

Forgetting and Remembering: The French Revolution Then and Now

FOR ALL THEIR PROFESSIONAL ATTENTION TO THE PAST, historians are a remarkably forgetful lot when it comes to the efforts of their predecessors. In the hundred or so years that have passed since the initial professionalization of the discipline of history, the span of historiography considered relevant in any given field has steadily contracted as the sheer amount of writing about the past has increased. This process of foreshortening is most apparent in those fields with a dense historiographical tradition, such as the French Revolution. Students of the revolution may have heard of Michelet, for example, but few read him; and, other than Tocqueville, few read any of the other nineteenth or even early twentiethcentury historians of the event. The reasons for this neglect are obvious yet, nonetheless, paradoxical. We act like scientists, who fully expect their work to be superseded, and sooner rather than later, even though we are not sure that history is a science. To do something innovative in the scientific scheme of things is to do something different from, yet building on, the work of ones predecessors, usually defined as ones immediate predecessors. Thus the study of historians who published their findings in the preceding years or decades is essential; if one is not up-to-date, making a new move is by definition impossible. At the beginning of their careers, in particular, historians are very much like scientists in their worry about competitors. What dissertation student does not lie awake at night worrying about some unknown and as yet unidentified scholar working away on the same archives, however narrowly defined? I know that I did: I imagined my potential competitor going to the local archives in Troyes or Reims on the days I went to the library in Paris or eagerly writing away in some French, American, British, or other university while I was still anxiously trying to figure out which archives to consult. However outlandish such fears may seem in retrospect-and there are enough true stories to make them seem anything but-they tell us something about the way we construct our very presentist discipline in practice. The imagined relevance of the historiography of any field now precipitously declines after twenty or thirty years, reaching near zero after forty or fifty years at the latest. Who among us can claim to have read the bulk of historical writing in our fields before the 1940s? This systematic forgetfulness characterizes everyone in the profession except those, of course, who professionally study the writing of history; for them, however, history writing in the past provides knowledge of the

The Political Geography of Revolutionary France

The Political Geography of Revolutionary France The persistence of regional differences in France has intrigued scholars and tourists alike, but opinion is far from unanimous on the causes and origins of these differences. Electoral sociologists have traced enduring patterns of political geography back to the Third Republic, and historians have tried to apply similar techniques to the elections of 1849 and even to those of the Napoleonic and Restoration periods. Hardly any national studies of political differences during the Revolution of I789 have been undertaken, however, despite the obvious importance of the Revolutionary experience in establishing traditions of radicalism and counterrevolution.

O romance e as origens dos Direitos Humanos: interseções entre história, psicologia e literatura

From their appearance in the middle of the eighteenth century to the present time, when they have become ubiquitous in national political discourses, Human Rights were the target of countless controversies about their definition. In general, these debates ended up by returning to the conception, present at their emergence, of being such evident rights in themselves with no need to be justify them, beyond the conviction of men about their truth. The belief in their self-evident nature, and in their basic features (equality, naturalness, and universality) has its intellectual basis in the notion of the moral autonomy of individuals, dear to the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nevertheless, this study intends to show that, along with the transformations in thought, the emergence of the idea of Human Rights evolved also from two subtle changes in the notions of body and identity: the enlarging of the idea of the individuality of the body, which made each man the holder of rights about himself; and the possibility of there being an imagined empathy between psyches, which, although distinct, are perceived as a part of the same humanity. Proposing a pscychocultural model for the historical study of the emergence of Human Rights, this essay analyzes how a literary genre, the epistolary novels of the eighteenth century, could have contributed to the formation of these rights. By promoting a passionate involvement of the readers in the fate of the characters, this type of reading furnished the emotional and psychological processes necessary to the rise of Human Rights and the conviction of their self-evidence.

Religious Knowledge And The Origins Of Modernity

The link between secularization and modernity has long been debated, but only someone with the acuity and deep learning of Jan Bremmer could succeed in making us look with fresh eyes at this crucial issue. There would be no secularization without religion in first place, and religion itself has become a highly contested concept. Do all cultures have religion, or is religion a concept that only has meaning in the now secularized Christian world? That is to say, does religion exist as a distinct phenomenon only where church and state are separated as they are in the West? In the spirit of contributing to the genealogy of the concept religion and its relationship to Modernity, this chapter looks in depth at one of the earliest European works Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde , that offered a comparative analysis of religious ceremonies and customs throughout the world. Keywords: Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde ; Christian; church; religion; religious ceremonies

The Problem of Politics in the French Revolution

Reminiscing about her encounters with Zhang Zhilian, who was a professor at Peking University and a specialist in the French Revolution and French history, Hunt offers her thoughtful reflections on the issue of politics in modern times. She states that during revolutionary times, such as the French Revolution, one becomes more aware of the multilayered meaning and processes of politics. It is also during revolutionary times that the intricate and intrinsic relationship between politics and society is displayed in its fullest sense, and its revelation demands an interdisciplinary as well as a comparative perspective.

Daniel Roche and History's Movable Feast

Daniel Roche writes a lot. Every time you turn your head, he has produced another big book full of new ideas, based on documents previously ignored, and proposing novel approaches that immediately seem self-evident. We all now routinely turn to Jacques-Louis Ménétra for the ordinary man’s perspective on life in the eighteenth century.We all lecture our students on the fine points of the history of clothing, especially underclothes. We all know that ‘‘l’histoire des choses banales’’ is anything but banal in Roche’s hands. Even students in the history of Western civilization learn about the role of provincial academies in the French Enlightenment, though it goes without saying that in my lectures, at least, I give a greatly reduced version of Roche’s 900 pages, 47 tables, 23 graphs, and 61 maps in Le siècle des Lumières en province.1 But though Roche’s works are numerous and offer a large amount of quantitative data, what is involved here is not simply quantity. The essence of Roche’s contribution lies elsewhere. But where? I want to focus on his methods of research (rather than on his findings) and on the larger ethical framework that inspires them. InHistoire des choses banales Roche begins with a well-worn question: ‘‘This book aims to contribute to the understanding of those transformations from what we call, lacking a better term, traditional society, whichmoves little by little from amoral economy of community welfare and scarcity to an economy aspiring to happiness in this world, relative