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Catherine Diderot
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Book Synopsis Catherine & Diderot by : Robert Zaretsky
Download or read book Catherine & Diderot written by Robert Zaretsky and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-18 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a dual biography crafted around the famous encounter between the French philosopher who wrote about power and the Russian empress who wielded it with great aplomb, Robert Zaretsky invites us to reflect on the fraught relationship between politics and philosophy, and between a man of thought and a woman of action.
Book Synopsis Catherine & Diderot by : Robert Zaretsky
Download or read book Catherine & Diderot written by Robert Zaretsky and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-18 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a dual biography crafted around the famous encounter between the French philosopher who wrote about power and the Russian empress who wielded it with great aplomb, Robert Zaretsky invites us to reflect on the fraught relationship between politics and philosophy, and between a man of thought and a woman of action.
Book Synopsis Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely by : Andrew S. Curran
Download or read book Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely written by Andrew S. Curran and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Book of the Year – Kirkus Reviews A spirited biography of the prophetic and sympathetic philosopher who helped build the foundations of the modern world. Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world’s first comprehensive Encyclopédie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity–for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality. One of Diderot’s most attentive readers during his lifetime was Catherine the Great, who not only supported him financially, but invited him to St. Petersburg to talk about the possibility of democratizing the Russian empire. In this thematically organized biography, Andrew S. Curran vividly describes Diderot’s tormented relationship with Rousseau, his curious correspondence with Voltaire, his passionate affairs, and his often iconoclastic stands on art, theater, morality, politics, and religion. But what this book brings out most brilliantly is how the writer's personal turmoil was an essential part of his genius and his ability to flout taboos, dogma, and convention.
Book Synopsis Catherine & Diderot by : Robert Zaretsky
Download or read book Catherine & Diderot written by Robert Zaretsky and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Empires Collide is a history of the famous encounter between the French philosopher Denis Diderot and his patron, Empress Catherine II of Russia, in 1773. The book begins many years earlier and traces the life of Diderot and Catherine in alternating chapters, painting a vivid and complex portrait of eighteenth-century Europe where new Enlightenment thinking co-existed with old monarchical systems. Robert Zaretsky has written an intellectual and political history of the time by spotlighting the exchange of ideas between a philosopher who reflected on the nature of power and a ruler who excercised it. In the autumn of 1773, taking up residence in Saint Petersburg at Catherine's invitation, the two met every third day for Catherine's instruction in various philosophical and political subjects. Zaretsky describes the scene: "For each 'lesson,' he prepared a series of notes on a particular theme, from which he would read at the start of the session. Having thus introduced the theme, Diderot then engaged Catherine in conversation. This made for a stunning tableau: the conversations were freewheeling, free of the protocol that reigned elsewhere in the palace. Catherine frequently knitted or embroidered during these sessions, while Diderot, caught up in the excitement of an idea, would whirl his hands to emphasize points, often reaching out and grabbing Catherine's leg or arm. Zaretsky pieces together their conversations from letters to each other and to other correspondents, as well as from Diderot's (still untranslated) memoirs. The influence seems to run in both directions; however, as the author concludes, this extraordinary friendship reveals two individuals aware of the power of ideas, but who have very different understandings of the use of ideas.--
Book Synopsis Catherine the Great and the French Philosophers of the Enlightenment by : Inna Gorbatov
Download or read book Catherine the Great and the French Philosophers of the Enlightenment written by Inna Gorbatov and published by Academica Press,LLC. This book was released on 2006 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This research monograph is the result of many years of archival investigation in Russia, France and elsewhere into the nature of Catherine the Great's involvement with the French Enlightenment. Professor Gorbatov's conclusions go far beyond the consensus of philosophic and cultural interests masking an authoritarian and, at times, barbarous emerging European power and delves instead into Catherine's fascination with French political and social ideals. Catherine's thirty-four year reign was marked by a furious wholesale consumption of French arts and objets as well as a lavish patronage of French artists and philosophers. Even Rousseau, the self proclaimed "enemy of monarchs", was seriously studied (though detested) and debated by Catherine and her circle as the Czarina attempted to reform the educational system. It is this theme of reform and renewal, along with Europeanization, that provides the great impetus of interest and patronage towards the philosophes and their ideas. Professor Gorbatov also shows the effect of Catherine's interest on the higher aristocracy, writers, and emergent professional classes that was to reach a intellectual and political crisis upon the outbreak of the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon and her grandson's battles with the Decembrists.
Book Synopsis Diderot: Political Writings by : Denis Diderot
Download or read book Diderot: Political Writings written by Denis Diderot and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-05-28 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was one of the most significant figures of the French enlightenment. His political writings cover the period from the first volume of the Encyclopedie (1751), of which he was principal editor, to the third edition of Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes (1780), one of the most widely read books of the pre-revolutionary period. This volume contains the most important of Diderot's articles for the Encyclopedie, a substantial number of his contributions to the Histoire, the complete texts of his Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville, one of his most visionary works, and his Observations sur le Nakaz, a precise and detailed political work translated here into English for the first time. The editors' introduction sets these works in their context and shows the underlying coherence of Diderot's thought. A chronology of events and a bibliography are included as further aids to the reader.
Book Synopsis The Party of Humanity by : Peter Gay
Download or read book The Party of Humanity written by Peter Gay and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE ENLIGHTENMENT has long been the victim of uninformed or hostile criticisms. Even so respected a source as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines the Enlightenment as “shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition,” thus collecting in one sentence most of our current prejudices. In this provocative book—at once a scholarly study and a vigorous polemic—Peter Gay sets out to shatter old myths, to sort out illusion from reality, and to restore the men of the Enlightenment—Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot—to the esteem they deserve. The nine related essays in The Party of Humanity fall into three divisions: three are on Voltaire, presenting the great philosophe as a tough-minded, realistic man of letters who tried to reshape his world, rather than as merely brittle and shallow wit. Then, three essays characterize the French Enlightenment as a whole, and seek for the unity underlying the diversity of tempers and attitudes among its leaders. The last three, which include Mr. Gay’s well-known critique of Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, are polemics against widely accepted views of the Enlightenment. The longest chapter here is a detailed examination of Rousseau, the philosopher, and of his reputation among his interpreters. What all nine essays have in common, apart from their portrayal of the philosophes as serious and engage partisans of humanity, is that they are all essays in the “social history of ideas”; they all treat ideas as inseparable from the specific social and cultural setting from which they emerge and which they affect.
Book Synopsis The Business of Enlightenment by : Robert DARNTON
Download or read book The Business of Enlightenment written by Robert DARNTON and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great book about an even greater book is a rare event in publishing. Darnton's history of the Encyclopedie is such an occasion. The author explores some fascinating territory in the French genre of histoire du livre, and at the same time he tracks the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. He is concerned with the form of the thought of the great philosophes as it materialized into books and with the way books were made and distributed in the business of publishing. This is cultural history on a broad scale, a history of the process of civilization. In tracing the publishing story of Diderot's Encyclopedie, Darnton uses new sources--the papers of eighteenth-century publishers--that allow him to respond firmly to a set of problems long vexing historians. He shows how the material basis of literature and the technology of its production affected the substance and diffusion of ideas. He fully explores the workings of the literary market place, including the roles of publishers, book dealers, traveling salesmen, and other intermediaries in cultural communication. How publishing functioned as a business, and how it fit into the political as well as the economic systems of prerevolutionary Europe are set forth. The making of books touched on this vast range of activities because books were products of artisanal labor, objects of economic exchange, vehicles of ideas, and elements in political and religious conflict. The ways ideas traveled in early modern Europe, the level of penetration of Enlightenment ideas in the society of the Old Regime, and the connections between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution are brilliantly treated by Darnton. In doing so he unearths a double paradox. It was the upper orders in society rather than the industrial bourgeoisie or the lower classes that first shook off archaic beliefs and took up Enlightenment ideas. And the state, which initially had suppressed those ideas, ultimately came to favor them. Yet at this high point in the diffusion and legitimation of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution erupted, destroying the social and political order in which the Enlightenment had flourished. Never again will the contours of the Enlightenment be drawn without reference to this work. Darnton has written an indispensable book for historians of modern Europe.
Book Synopsis Catherine the Great by : Henri Troyat
Download or read book Catherine the Great written by Henri Troyat and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-04-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By delving into the life of Catherine the Great, this acclaimed biographer reveals the rich tapestry of Russia’s past, giving insight into the paradoxical character of its people and their stunning evolution from feudalism to communism to their present-day struggle for a free-market democracy. This is history as it is rarely written today—elegant, witty, dramatic, and with an intimate knowledge of its characters. And what better subject for a biography than one of history's most powerful women, the German-born Russian empress whose adopted language and culture were French, and whose most loyal correspondents were Voltaire and Diderot? Troyat details the various lives of Catherine II: the ambitious child, the acquiescent yet firm grand duchess, the forceful politician and patron of the arts, the belligerent war maker, and the doting grandparent. “A remarkable woman . . . A riveting book.”—Mary Renault “Brilliantly captures one of the most colorful figures of all time.”—Doubleday Book Club News
Book Synopsis The Atheist's Bible: Diderot's 'Éléments de physiologie' by : Caroline Warman
Download or read book The Atheist's Bible: Diderot's 'Éléments de physiologie' written by Caroline Warman and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2020-11-16 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Love is harder to explain than hunger, for a piece of fruit does not feel the desire to be eaten’: Denis Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie presents a world in flux, turning on the relationship between man, matter and mind. In this late work, Diderot delves playfully into the relationship between bodily sensation, emotion and perception, and asks his readers what it means to be human in the absence of a soul. The Atheist’s Bible challenges prevailing scholarly views on Diderot’s Éléments, asserting its contemporary philosophical importance, and prompting its readers to inspect more closely this little-known and little-studied work. In this timely volume, Warman establishes the place of Diderot’s Éléments in the trajectory of materialist theories of nature and the mind stretching back to Epicurus and Lucretius, and explores the fascinating reasons behind scholarly neglect of this seminal work. In turn, Warman outlines the hitherto unacknowledged dissemination and reception of Diderot’s Éléments, demonstrating how Diderot’s Éléments was circulated in manuscript-form as early as the 1790s, thus showing how the text came to influence the next generations of materialist thinkers. This book is accompanied by a digital edition of Jacques-André Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot (1823), a work which, Warman argues, represents the first publication of Diderot’s Éléments, long before its official publication date of 1875. The Atheist’s Bible constitutes a major contribution to the field of Diderot studies, and will be of further interest to scholars and students of materialist natural philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment and beyond.
Book Synopsis Old Hatreds and Young Hopes by : Alan Barrie Spitzer
Download or read book Old Hatreds and Young Hopes written by Alan Barrie Spitzer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1971 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In showing why the Carbonari conspiracy developed and how it was handled, the author has illuminated the workings of the political system of the Restoration--the structure and organization of its administration and political police and the operation of political justice in its courts.
Download or read book Diderot written by P. N. Furbank and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2008-05 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author of that inexhaustibly strange masterpiece Rameau's Nephew, Denis Diderot (1713-84) was also a dramatist, a speculative philosopher, the founder of modern art criticism and a tireless correspondent; he has also been called the most talkative man of his generation. His genius was profoundly subversive, and he spent much of his working life under the threat of exile. The son of a cutler, Diderot had an empathy with trades, tools and machinery that flowered magnificently in some of his contributions to the great Encyclopedie, which he edited with d'Alembert and published over a period of some twenty years. Diderot's range of contacts was prodigious: a close friend of Rousseau, Grimm and d'Alembert, a familiar figure in the literary salons of Paris, he also met and corresponded with Hume, Garrick and Laurence Sterne. It was the support of Catherine the Great (as her agent, Diderot in effect laid the foundations of the Hermitage collection) that led to the most extraordinary episode in an astonishing life: at the age of sixty Diderot travelled to St Petersburg where he drew up outline plans for the conversion of Russia into an ideal republic. P. N. Furbank's sympathetic and probing analysis of Diderot's work and influence was first published in 1992 and won a Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
Download or read book Denaturalized written by Claire Zalc and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A CounterPunch Best Book of the Year A Lone Star Policy Institute Recommended Book “A critically important exploration of the political dynamics that have made us one of the most punitive societies in human history. A must-read by one of our most thoughtful scholars of crime and punishment.” —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy “A cogent and provocative argument about how to achieve true institutional reform and fix our broken system.” —Emily Bazelon, author of Charged “If you care, as I do, about disrupting the perverse politics of criminal justice, there is no better place to start than Prisoners of Politics.” —James Forman, Jr., Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Locking Up Our Own The United States has the world’s highest rate of incarceration in the world. As awful as that truth is, its social consequences—recycling offenders through an overwhelmed criminal justice system, ever-mounting costs, and a growing class of permanently criminalized citizens—are even more devastating. With the authority of a prominent legal scholar and the practical insights gained through her work on criminal justice reform, Rachel Barkow reveals how dangerous it is to base criminal justice policy on the whims of the electorate and argues for a transformative shift toward data and expertise.
Book Synopsis Life in Renaissance France by : Lucien Febvre
Download or read book Life in Renaissance France written by Lucien Febvre and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1977 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In writing about sixteenth-century France, Lucien Febvre looked for those changes in human consciousness that explain the process of civilization--the most specific and tangible examples of men's experience, the most vivid details of their daily lives. These essays, written at the height of Febvre's powers and sensitively edited and translated by Marian Rothstein, are the most lucid, evocative, and accessible examples of his art.
Book Synopsis The Empress of Art by : Susan Jaques
Download or read book The Empress of Art written by Susan Jaques and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A German princess who married a decadent and lazy Russian prince, Catherine mobilized support amongst the Russian nobles, playing off of her husband's increasing corruption and abuse of power. She then staged a coup that ended with him being strangled with his own scarf in the halls of the palace, and herself crowned the Empress of Russia. Intelligent and determined, Catherine modeled herself off of her grandfather in-law, Peter the Great, and sought to further modernize and westernize Russia. She believed that the best way to do this was through a ravenous acquisition of art, which Catherine often used as a form of diplomacy with other powers throughout Europe. She was a self-proclaimed "glutton for art" and she would be responsible for the creation of the Hermitage, one of the largest museums in the world, second only to the Louvre. Catherine also spearheaded the further expansion of St. Petersburg, and the magnificent architectural wonder the city became is largely her doing. There are few women in history more fascinating than Catherine the Great, and for the first time, Susan Jaques brings her to life through the prism of art.
Book Synopsis Sisters of Liberty by : Louis M. Greenberg
Download or read book Sisters of Liberty written by Louis M. Greenberg and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1971 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1971, this book offers an exploration of the insurrection as part of the nationwide struggle for municipal and departmental liberties, bringing to the fore the Commune's relationship to the broader historical problem of the consolidation and future character of the Third Republic, especially in the provinces.
Book Synopsis The White Terror and the Political Reaction After Waterloo by : Daniel Philip Resnick
Download or read book The White Terror and the Political Reaction After Waterloo written by Daniel Philip Resnick and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1966 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first monograph on the White Terror since Ernest Daudet wrote on the subject in 1878, Daniel Resnick presents the only documented account of the magnitude of the political reaction of 1815-16 in France. By means of a statistical record of police arrests and judicial convictions, he demonstrates the nature, extent, and impact on French political history of the widespread repression that grew out of the royalist crusade to extirpate any trace of Napoleonic influences. The calculated policy of intimidation pursued by the royalists, the author argues, engendered the political reflexes that were to prove fatal to the House of Bourbon.
