Virtues of Abandon (eBook)

An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment

Charly Coleman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2014
416 Seiten
Stanford University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8047-9121-2 (ISBN)

Infos

The Virtues of Abandon explores how eighteenth-century debates over the self's relationship to property gave rise to a previously unexamined anti-individualist tradition of thought and action that informed the work of mystics, materialists, and radical political thinkers during the French Enlightenment and the Revolution.

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France in the eighteenth century glittered, but also seethed, with new goods and new ideas. In the halls of Versailles, the streets of Paris, and the soul of the Enlightenment itself, a vitriolic struggle was being waged over the question of ownership-of property, of position, even of personhood. Those who championed man's possession of material, spiritual, and existential goods faced the successive assaults of radical Christian mystics, philosophical materialists, and political revolutionaries. The Virtues of Abandon traces the aims and activities of these three seemingly disparate groups, and the current of anti-individualism that permeated theology, philosophy, and politics throughout the period.Fired by the desire to abandon the self, men and women sought new ways to relate to God, nature, and nation. They joined illicit mystic cults that engaged in rituals of physical mortification and sexual license, committed suicides in the throes of materialist fatalism, drank potions to induce consciousness-altering dreams, railed against the degrading effects of unfettered consumption, and ultimately renounced the feudal privileges that had for centuries defined their social existence. The explosive denouement was the French Revolution, during which God and king were toppled from their thrones.

Autor

Charly Coleman is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.7.2014
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Schlagworte: dispossession • dream-state • French Enlightenment • French Revolution • Luxury Consumption • Materialism • Mysticism • Republicanism • self • Self-ownership
• ISBN-10: 0-8047-9121-X / 080479121X
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8047-9121-2 / 9780804791212