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Posts Tagged ‘Civilization’

Chapter on J. St. Mill’s ‘The Spirit of the Age’ (1831)

Posted in Publications, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 18, 2024| Leave a Comment »

A new German-language handbook on John Stuart Mill has just been published by J.B. Metzler Verlag under the title J. St. Mill-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung.

In it, I have written a contribution on a text that Mill published as a series of newspaper articles in 1831, titled The Spirit of the Age. By placing this essay in the context of Mill’s own intellectual development, of the contemporary political situation in Britain and France, and of current debates in Mill-scholarship, I try to provide some entry points for a better understanding of a text that is no easy read but very worthwhile.

While Mill himself was quite harsh on this early publication later in life, it encompasses some fascinating reflections on the relation between authority and freedom, on the development of civilization, and on the social role of intellectuals.

Mill’s original text is available in the Online Library of Liberty through this link. It comes highly recommended.

My chapter is available here.

Many thanks to the editor Frauke Höntzsch for the compilation of what looks to be a great research compendium on one of the most intriguing intellectual figures of the Victorian era.

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Article on the Dialogue between Discourses of Decadence and Progress

Posted in Publications, tagged , , , , , on October 14, 2021| Leave a Comment »

After a long gestation period, I’ve finally published my very first article in my native tongue, Dutch. Many thanks for Floris Meens for his thorough editing. After 15 years abroad, I needed some help getting my grammar back up to par.

My contribution

Een tweestrijd om de tijd? Cultuurkritiek en beschavingsapologie in dialoog

(A Conflict over the Times? Cultural Critique and the Apology of Civilization in Dialogue)

considers the interaction between the discourses of decadence and progress. Building on French debates of the late eighteenth century as a case study, I argue for a new, dialogical understanding of discursive change. Focusing on the question of how positions crystallize and develop in interaction with each other opens new perspectives on polemics as a dynamics of discursive development.

The essay is published in the volume Ten strijde tegen het verval. Cultuurkritiek in diachroon en internationaal perspectief, which is available from Amsterdam University Press.

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Conference “Declines and Falls” – Budapest, May 15 – 17

Posted in Conference, Presentation, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 24, 2013| Leave a Comment »

On May 15th to 17th of next year, I will be attending a conference titled “Declines and Falls: Perspectives in European History and Historiography” organized at the Central European University in Budapest.

My presentation – which draws upon my dissertation research – will address the complex interrelations between the concepts of progress and decadence in the long eighteenth century. Often, these two concepts are understood as mutually exclusive counter-concepts, epitomizing a forward-looking ‘Enlightenment theory of progress’ on the one hand and the backward and ultimately futile ‘complaints’ of conservatives and reactionaries on the other.

A closer look at the semantic structure of debates about the development of civilization in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reveals, however, that to contemporaries, these concepts were not usually counter-concepts at all. Rather, they were regularly understood as linked, or even interdependent. To understand this paradox, my paper addresses the various ways in which ‘the culture/civilization as a whole’ was conceptualized in these discourses.

Joining the analysis of the semantic structure of contemporary narratives of cultural decline with their pragmatic interpretation as speech acts in public interaction, I identify three different types of interpretation of the ‘whole’ in which ostensibly monistic claims about civilization in toto were linked to a differentiated understanding of its plural nature. In this way, the common view of narratives of progress and decadence as mutually exclusive discourses – at worst resulting in a general narrative of modern intellectual history as an eternal struggle between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment – may make way for a more detailed understanding of the complexities of the debates about the character and development of civilization that have been so very important to public discourses of self-reflection in the modern age.

Update: a conference report has been published on the CEU website.

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