Description
Book SynopsisIn the late 1770s, as a wave of revolution and republican unrest swept across Europe, scholars looked with urgency on the progress of European civilization. Carhart examines their approaches to understanding human development by investigating the invention of a new analytic category, culture.
Trade ReviewWith enormous erudition, Carhart examines the innovations in the human sciences taking place in and around Göttingen in the eighteenth century but set in a larger European context. He does us the service of shedding light on such figures as Christian Gottlob Heyne, Johann David Michaelis, and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn in a synoptic treatment that is both new and important. This is a work of revisionism that brings forward neglected materials, challenges settled views, and proposes yet another 'rival enlightenment.' -- John H. Zammito, Rice University
Michael Carhart's ambitious contribution to our knowledge of the German Enlightenment should appeal to Enlightenment specialists of any national focus, as it situates German figures in conversation with other European figures. The author provides a well-informed analysis of many illuminating but often little-known episodes in intellectual history of the eighteenth century, from the discussions of feral children to that of Tahitian natives, from expeditions to Yemen and Syria to scholarly ones into the philological past. -- Ann Blair, Harvard University
Table of ContentsList of Maps and Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Words and Things 1. Orientalism and Reform 2. Culture and the Origin of Language 3. The Search for the Historical Plato 4. The Search for the Historical Homer 5. The Search for the Historical Moses 6. The Sociology of Ancient History 7. Three Anthropologies 8. A Scientific Revolution Conclusion: Enlightenment Social Science Notes Index
