Society, Nature, Emancipation

This chapter is predominantly concerned with the thought tendencies grouped under the heading ‘the Enlightenment’, with regulation caveats about variations in character, national and otherwise, of the intellectual traditions denoted by the term: the French, Scottish, and German cases are each given separate attention. The governing concern is with the most theoretically self-conscious attempts to establish the utility of History as a way of understanding the human experience in light of influential concepts like Volksgeist, circonstance, esprit général, represéntations, and even ‘relations of production’, that elucidated human diversity across time and place. When explaining the broad sweep of human history providential accounts were replaced by secular ones, though in some instances the latter were structurally similar to the former and so had some of the character of History as Speculative Philosophy. On the whole the scholarship under examination evinced a liberal spirit as regards confessional and national differences, though it was frequently marked by a partiality to occidental civilization. Overall, we see a shift away from the study of religious and political institutions and towards—or back towards, insofar as there was some crossover with the French ‘new History’ of the sixteenth century—civic morals, culture, and the structural conditions of social life. History expanded further from being an instruction in statecraft for public men to proffering more rounded edification in the form of vicarious experience of different spheres of life.