В статье характеризуется процесс появления в социальном познании идей общественного договора, впервые выдвинутых и обоснованных мыслителями эпохи Просвещения. Ими были сформулированы представления о ...его сути и содержании, которые трактовались как социальный контракт между народом и государством, причем основное внимание уделялось решающему, но неявному характеру этого процесса. Значительное место уделено анализу теорий общественного договора, их особенностей на опыте рассмотрения вариантов его толкования и осуществления в современном мире. Особое внимание обращено на осмысление общественного договора как ноумена (умопостигаемой сущности), что потребовало выявления его основных характеристик, его смысловой сущности как единства целей участников, ориентированных на соблюдение взаимного доверия, согласование интересов, постоянное использование обратной связи. Дано изложение попыток предложить варианты объяснения практик его реализации в современной общественно-политической жизни. Подчеркивается, что общественный договор как ноумен содержит не только очевидные, но и латентные критерии, выражая постоянно меняющееся качественное состояние общества и требуя регулярно настраиваемого взаимодействия народа и государства.
The most arresting aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment is its conception of commercial society as a distinct and distinctive social formation. Christopher Berry explains why Enlightenment thinkers ...considered commercial society to be wealthier and freer than earlier forms, and charts the contemporary debates and tensions between Enlightenment thinkers that this idea raised. The book analyses the full range of literature on the subject, from key works like Adam Smith's ‘Wealth of Nations’, David Hume's ‘Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects’ and Adam Ferguson's ‘Essay on the History of Civil Society’ to lesser-known works such as Robert Wallace’s ‘Dissertation on Numbers of Mankind’.
This book examines the daily details of slave work routines and plantation agriculture in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, focusing on case studies of large plantations in Barbados, Jamaica ...and Virginia. Work was the most important factor in the slaves' experience of the institution. Slaves' day-to-day work routines were shaped by plantation management strategies that drew on broader pan-Atlantic intellectual and cultural principles. Although scholars often associate the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment with the rise of notions of liberty and human rights and the dismantling of slavery, this book explores the dark side of the Enlightenment for plantation slaves. Many planters increased their slaves' workloads and employed supervisory technologies to increase labor discipline in ways that were consistent with the process of industrialization in Europe. British planters offered alternative visions of progress by embracing restrictions on freedom and seeing increasing labor discipline as central to the project of moral and economic improvement.
A major new history of how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday lives
The Secular Enlightenmentis a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in ...the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers.
Margaret Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of the Enlightenment, reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions, their failures as the result of blind economic forces.
A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history,The Secular Enlightenmentdemonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come.
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