This report explores and questions the history of human rights rhetoric through the 18th century anti-slave trade poem of Hannah More, Slavery, a poem. Hannah More used the term ‘human rights’ more than 150 years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nevertheless, when historians and political scientists track the history of human rights, it is frequently presented as “from Locke through Paine” as part of a narrative of the “coming of age” of democracy in a longer quest for rights stemming from 18th century revolutions and radicalism. This report looks instead at the episodic nature of human rights rhetoric through 18th century ideas of the human. As argued here, More’s use of the term ‘human rights’ indicates an attempt to reconcile the tension between Enlightenment and Christian discourses to promote the anti-slave trade cause. / text

<p>Carl Gustav von Brinkman was born in Nacka, Sweden 1764 but in his eleventh year he was sent away by his father to the Herrnhuter school in Niesky to become a missionary. Brinkman developed other plans. The experience of the school as a place that censured his thoughts and hindered his development, took an early start and grew stronger. He tried to convince his teachers in the congregation that they should allow him to attend the university in Halle, but they wanted his father to decide. His father then threatened to exclude him from the family if he went to Halle. Carl Gustav did so anyway and started his mental journey from a pietistic piety to enlightenment belief. Under the influence of a variety of contemporary philosophical ideas, he developed a belief based on the moral good and made God the head principle for this virtue. When Brinkman had reached this far in his development he then cut loose God from his thinking, and he then believed in the moral good without God as a reference to this system. He was now, using Friedrich Schleiermachers expression, a kind of secularised ’cultured despiser’.</p><p>The complete title of Schleiermachers astonishing work was On Religion; speeches to its cultured despisers. This book was an apologetic one, and its audience was the intelligentsia in Europe who had left the Christendom behind and developed other systems for their thinking. Brinkman were the ideal receiver of the message that Schleiermacher brought. They knew each other from the time in Halle and they both attended the Herrnhuter school in Niesky. Schleiermacher had also fought with his father and with the congregation to be allowed to leave for the university. They were both central members of the vivid saloon life in Berlin were artist, actors, philosophers and others from the intelligentsia were guests. When the book was published Brinkman just returned to Berlin from France and Sweden – were he did not feel comfortable and constantly missed the Berlin saloons and his friends – and everything that he loved in life were suddenly surrounding him again. He was very receptive to a new way of thinking and he allowed himself to be influenced by the book of his friend.</p><p>He now turned Christian again, but with a worldview different from the pietistic one and the one based upon enlightenment theology, but also from the strictly secularised ideology. He now saw religion as feeling; a feeling of absolute dependence on other people, on the world, on Universe and in the end of God. The dependence of the apologetic work of Schleiermacher was obvious in Brinkman’s book Filosophische Ansichten but some of the formulations were original and mirrored Brinkman’s own way of seeing things. This essay ends with some analyses of those formulations. It will also discus the fact that Brinkman’s book never were translated into Swedish and what that meant for the spreading of Schleiermachers theories to Sweden, and what that in turn led to considering the differences in thinking and piety between Sweden and Germany. The central issue in this essay however, is to try to describe Brinkman’s way of thinking and how that way of thinking developed over time and in relation to his context; the enlightenment and the romantic era in Germany and Sweden.</p><p>The words “Where are thou” are from Genesis 3:9. They are spoken from God and directed to Adam, who is hiding in the bush ashamed after he and Eva had been eating the apple and as a result of that, he now was aware of his nakedness.</p> / <p>Den rörelse som vi uppsatsen kan följa, är en rörelse som är unik för Carl Gustav von Brinkman, men den är också i mångt och mycket en rörelse eller utveckling som många i skarven mellan upplysningstid och romantik gjorde. Denna rörelse kan beskrivas som en rörelse mot frihet men bort ifrån den kristna tron. Moral eller dygd var tidens största ideal och inom upplysningsteologin var Gud dess grundprincip, men inom vissa frihetligt sinnade kretsar föll till slut även Gud bort. I samtiden kristalliserades två tydliga grupperingar; de som lutade sig mot de kristna doktrinerna eller det pietistiska fromhetslivet utgjorde det ena, och de som lutade sig mot den naturliga religionen – som var något av den minsta gemensamma nämnaren för alla religioner i hela världen – eller ingen alls, utgjorde den andra. När sedan Schleiermacher fick sin samtid att se människan och utifrån henne börja omformulera de centrala kristna dogmerna, så räddades den kristna tron på så sätt att den blev en levande tro ute i ”världen”(som motsättning till inom en församling sluten). Den kristna tron blev ett diskussionsämne för de intellektuella och inte en enskildhet för invigda och från ”världen” avskärmade.</p><p>Carl Gustav von Brinkman speglar denna utveckling med sitt liv. Det faktum att mycket av hans upplevelser är de samma som Schleiermachers gör honom också intressant att följa och Brinkman är inte på långa vägar färdiganalyserad som bärare och/eller gestaltare av tidens idéer.</p><p>Det som är en av denna uppsats slutsatser är dock att Carl Gustav von Brinkman hade en utveckling som inleddes med en uppväxt inom den herrnhutiska församlingen och att hans utvecklingsbana sedan beskrev en rörelse ifrån det pietistiska mot det upplysningsteologiska vars idé om dygden och dess grundprincip i Gud inlemmades i Brinkmans tankar bara för att kort senare resultera i en syn på dygden där Gud inte längre var dess grundprincip. Utifrån denna position tog han sedan till sig Friedrich Schleiermachers tankar om religion som känsla för självets medvetande om sig självt i en ömsesidig relation med andra, naturen, kosmos och – i slutändan - Gud. Det är vid denna punkt som uppsatsen lämnar honom och konstaterar att Brinkman nått en position där han kan bejaka naturvetenskapligt tänkande och samtidigt vara kristen. Han kan utifrån sin nya position vara kritisk gentemot traditionen eller Bibeln och ändå påstå sig ha en kristen livsförståelse. Han kan röra sig ute i världen och ända bevara sin identitet som kristen. Den kristna livsförståelsen begränsar honom inte utan öppnar upp för nya världar i t.ex. hermeneutikens namn där allt kan analyseras, tolkas och förstås.</p>

This is a study of self and authority in the popular spiritual field. Since Heelas's The New Age Movement (1996), the notion of a common Self-spirituality in which seekers trust the authority of the Self has been familiar within academe. Yet, contrary to the direction of Heelas's earlier work on indigenous psychologies and self-religions, the different ways participants conceive terms like seeker and self has largely escaped analysis. This omission allows scholars to homogenise diverse activities and portray broad cultural trends. But, it also black boxes the self, side-lines how authority actually works, and obscures conflicts between participants. I address such gaps by examining four international enlightenment cultures, each with a guru (Andrew Cohen; Gangaji; Tony Parsons; and Steven Saunders of Holigral ). Research materials include field experiences, recorded events, and participants printed and online publications. Combining multi-site ethnography with sociological conversation and discourse analysis, and drawing upon science and technology studies throughout, my argument addresses three themes: seekers; gurus; and truths. Developing Heelas's earlier work, I show seekers are not pre-constituted but configured in interactional practices which draw upon various cultural idealisations of the self. An enlightened self is likewise configured differently in each culture. I show such mundane local practices constitute gurus as experiential experts through associating their personas with participants configured experiences of self. Different configurations of self are consequential, implying differing modes of engagement with wider society and figuring in credibility contests between different cultures. I provide a way of understanding enlightenment cultures which avoids homogenising them, considers their respective potentials to promote social change, and accounts for antagonisms between them. As tangential themes, through a literary Seeker Self voice, I address issues of distance and engagement in studying spirituality and the often transparent penetration of academic discourse by the discourse of spirituality, or its spiritual repertoire.

Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) was one of the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, an influential eighteenth-century moral and political philosopher, as well as a professor of ethics at the University of Edinburgh from 1764 to 1785. There has been a wealth of scholarship on Ferguson in which central themes include his role as a political theorist, sociologist, moral philosopher, and as an Enlightenment thinker. One of the most frequent topics addressed by scholars is his relationship to ancient philosophy, particularly Stoicism. The ease with which scholars identify Ferguson as a Stoic, however, is problematic because of the significant differences between Ferguson‟s ideas and those of the „schools‟ of classical antiquity, especially Stoicism. Some scholars interpret Ferguson‟s philosophy as a derivative, unsystematic „patchwork‟ because he drew on various ancient sources, but, it is argued, did not adhere to any particular system. The aim of my thesis is to suggest an alternative interpretation of Ferguson‟s relationship to ancient philosophy, particularly to Stoicism, by placing Ferguson in the context of the intellectual history of the eighteenth century. The first section of this thesis is an examination of Ferguson‟s response to the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, modern eclecticism and the experimental method to demonstrate how Ferguson‟s approach to and engagement with ancient philosophy is informed by these intellectual contexts. The second section is a close analysis of the role that ancient schools play in his discussion of the history of philosophy as well as the didactic purpose found in his lectures and published works thereby determining the function of ancient thought in his philosophy. The third section is a re-examination of Ferguson‟s concept of Stoicism and his engagement with Stoic ethics in his moral philosophy re-interpreting his relationship to the ancient school. With a combination of a new understanding of Ferguson‟s methodology and new assessment of his engagement with ancient thought, a new interpretation of Ferguson‟s moral philosophy demonstrates his unique contribution to eighteenth-century thought.

In this dissertation I claim that Michel Foucault is a pro-enlightenment philosopher. I argue that his critical history of thought cultivates a state of being autonomous in thought and action which is indicative of a kantian notion of maturity. In addition, I contend that, because he follows a nietzschean path to enlightenment, Foucault’s elaboration of freedom proceeds from his critique of who we are, which includes a rejection of humanism’s experiential limits. At the same time, and perhaps most importantly, I also suggest that Foucault articulates a posthumanist conception of finitude and being. To begin with, I show that on humanism’s path to edghtenment, which is established by Rousseau, Kant and Hegel and currently advocated by Rawls and Taylor, a philosophy of the autonomous subject who desires self-actualisation through recogrution precedes the epistemologcal and political critiques which generate humanism’s objective, normative and subjective axes of experience. On the basis of Foucault’s archzological, genealogical and, when they operate together, critical historical critiques of these conditions of possibility for autonomy and recogrution, I maintain that humanism fails to teach us how to think or act freelythat is, as critical thought that delivers enhghtenment-and that humanism’s knowledge of the world and its justice in politics necessitate the confined exclusion of those who are different and the submission of subjectivity of those who are normal. In response to the immaturity that is at the heart of humanism, I illustrate that Foucault deploys archeology, genealogy and critical history to excavate his posthumanist, enlightenment alternatives of savoir, pouvoir and ethico-morality. After he relocates an explanation of cause and effect in the human sciences from savioir to the relations between savoir and pouvoir, I explicate how Foucault reconceives, firstly, the way pouvoir is exercised by productive mechanisms, which discipline the body and regulate the citizen, and, secondly, the nature of pouvoir, which he characterises as governmentality, or one’s action upon the actions of others. He then retlunks freedom as the vis-a-vis of pouvoir/savoir, and I demonstrate how critical history reveals that, prior to the hermeneutic relation to self wluch is at the centre of humanism’s conception of moral identity, ethical subjectivity in antiquity is formed through an ascetic, agonistic freedom that is based on a practical relation to self. Foucault uses this as a blueprint for the present, in which an ethico-political state of being autonomous in thought and action is constituted over against our limits of pouvoir/savoir. I thus claim that Foucault’s portrayal as an anti-enlightenment philosopher, who proffers nothing but anormative critique and amoral freedom, represents the perspective of those for whom to be anti-humanism is akin to being antienlightenment. These criticisms are exposed as misguided by the thesis that I verify in this dissertation, which is that critical history qua critique, thence an ontology, namely, Foucault’s critical ontology, brings about maturity and endorses an ehghtenment that is both contra- and post-humanism.

The dissertation examines how economic matters were depicted between 1770 and 1820 in two European kingdoms. Britain and Sweden are studied during this Age of Revolutions from the state’s perspective; state-managed newspapers are examined, one from Britain, the London Gazette, and two from Sweden, Stockholms Post-Tidningar and Inrikes Tidningar. These were stable types of media that transformed slowly alongside the changing popular press. State-managed newspapers were produced both to inform and manage the loyalty of populations. Aside from the continued development of the centralized state, this was also the time when Enlightenment ideals were spreading, the public sphere was transforming, notions of the nation and nationalism were developing, and communication strategies were changing; these concepts are the basis for the model of the development of modernity used in this study. Economic matters are seen as existing in a value-realm model that gradually disintegrated over time, expressing the birth of the modern world. This model included political, social-cultural, and technological values, in addition to economic matters. This disintegration involved a sense of uniformity. In both Britain and Sweden, economic objects, practices, ideas, and discourses received similar treatments over time. This process was, however, non-linear and not complete by the dawn of industrial transformation.   The first two chapters discuss the theory and methodological approaches. The form, order, and content of the newspapers are analyzed to show how economic matters became separate or unembedded to varying degrees over a fifty-year time span. British and Swedish descriptions are compared, as well as how the other state was portrayed in the opposing newspapers. These observations are described in three empirical chapters, relating events and analyses from 1770 to 1775, 1790 to 1795, and 1815 to 1820. The results of this dissertation show how early modern economic matters can be viewed beyond quantitative contents as an expression of becoming modern, offering complimentary context. Advances in thinking about data generated modern numerical indicators, also reflected by form and order qualities. The unembeddedness of economic matters was an ongoing and non-linear process that was expressed by increased abstractness, separation, and emphasis.

David Hume argues that reflections upon public utility explain the psychological foundations of justice and the moral feelings attendant on it. Adam Smith objects that Hume’s theory of justice is psychologically implausible. A just punishment attracts the approval of every citizen on Hume’s alleged view. Not every citizen can consider the abstract public interest every time, Smith observes, so Hume can’t have explained all of justice. I argue, in response, that Smith’s objection has not accounted for all of the causal processes that Hume draws upon in support of reflections upon public utility. Conventions establish the very possibility of public interest, and socializing processes lend the public interest its moral salience. Human nature includes a species-general passion for acquiring property for the sake of family. The motivational centrality and universal scope of this passion, coupled with the dramatic psychological power of sympathy, generates the first moral feelings. Social conditioning develops those feelings into attitudes about reward and punishment. Hume’s theory of justice, with his conjectures about sociocultural processes, is both psychologically plausible and more complex than commentators tend to appreciate.

This study explores the development of a discourse of global civility in English travel writing in the period 1636-1863. It argues that global civility is at the heart of cross-cultural exchanges in both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and that its evolution can best be traced by comparing accounts by travellers to the already familiar Ottoman Empire with writings of those who ventured into the largely unknown worlds of the South Pacific. In analysing these accounts, this study examines how their contexts were informed by Enlightenment philosophy, global interconnections and even-handed exchanges across cultural divides. In so doing, it demonstrates that intercultural encounters from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries were much more complex and multi-layered than one-sided Eurocentric histories often suggest. The first case study analyses the inception of global civility in Henry Blount’s Voyage into the Levant (1636). In his account, Blount frequently admires Ottoman imperial achievements at the same time as he represents the powerful Islamic empire as a model that lends itself to emulation for the emerging global reach of the English nation. The next chapter explores the practice of global civility in George Keate’s Account of the Pelew Islands (1788), which tells a story of shipwreck, salvage and return. Captain Wilson and his men lost their vessel off the Palau archipelago, established mutually improving relations with the natives and after their return familiarised English readers with the Palauan world in contemporary idioms of sentiment and sensibility. Chapter four examines comparable instances of civility by discussing Henry Abbott’s A Trip…Across the Grand Desart of Arabia (1789). Abbott is convinced that the desert Arabs are civil subjects in their own right and frequently challenges both received wisdom and deeply entrenched stereotypes by describing Arabic cultural practices in great detail. The fifth chapter follows the famous pickpocket George Barrington and the housewife Mary Ann Parker, respectively, to the newly established penal colonies in Australia in the first half of the 1790s. Their accounts present a new turn on global civility by virtue of registering the presence of convicts, natives and slaves in increasingly ambivalent terms, thus illustrating how inclusive discourses start to crack under the pressures of trafficking in human lives. The next chapter explores similar discursive fractures in Charles Colville Frankland’s Travels to and from Constantinople (1829). Frankland is at once sensitive to life in the Islamic world and aggressively biased when some of its practices and traditions seem to be incommensurate with his English identity. The final case study establishes the ways in which representational ambivalences give way to a discourse of colonialism in the course of the nineteenth century by analysing F. E. Maning’s (fictional) autobiography Old New Zealand (1863). After spending his early life in the Antipodes among the Maori, Maning changes sides after the death of his native wife and becomes judge of the Native Land Court. This transition, as well as Maning’s mocking representation of the Maori, mirrors the ease with which colonisers manage their subject peoples in the age of empire and at the same time marks the evaporation of global civility’s inclusiveness. By tracing the development of global civility from its inception over its emphatic practice to its decline, the present study emphasises the improvisational complexities of cross-cultural encounters. The spaces in which they are transacted – both the sea and the beach on the one hand; and the desert on the other – encourage mutuality and reciprocity because European travellers needed local knowledge in order to be able to brave, cross or map them. The locals, in turn, acted as hosts, guides or interpreters, facilitating commercial and cultural traffic in areas whose social fabrics, environmental conditions and intertwined histories often differed decisively from the familiar realms of Europe in the long eighteenth century.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine evidences of dramatic technique in Diderot's three major fictional works, "La Reliieuse," "Le Neveu de Rameau," and "Jaccues le fataliste." The management of dialogue, setting, and gesture is of particular concern, along with style and structure and the recurrent theme of the actor. The conclusion reached is that the influence of dramatic technique is everywhere present in the three works under consideration. Diderot enlists the reader's visual and auditory participation by the use of fast-paced dialogue, striking gestures, and dynamic settings. He also borrows certain stylistic and structural devices from the theater and enhances the dramatic impression by presenting many of his main characters as actors playing their own special roles.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.