Synopses & Reviews
The fledgling United States fought a war to achieve independence from Britain, but as John Adams said, the real revolution occurred andldquo;in the minds and hearts of the peopleandrdquo; before the armed conflict ever began. Putting the practices of communication at the center of this intellectual revolution, Protocols of Liberty shows how American patriotsandmdash;the Whigsandmdash;used new forms of communication to challenge British authority before any shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.and#160;To understand the triumph of the Whigs over the Brit-friendly Tories, William B. Warner argues that it is essential to understand the communication systems that shaped pre-Revolution events in the background. He explains the shift in power by tracing the invention of a new political agency, the Committee of Correspondence; the development of a new genre for political expression, the popular declaration; and the emergence of networks for collective political action, with the Continental Congress at its center. From the establishment of town meetings to the creation of a new postal system and, finally, the Declaration of Independence, Protocols of Liberty reveals that communication innovations contributed decisively to nation-building and continued to be key tools in later American political movements, like abolition and womenandrsquo;s suffrage, to oppose local custom and state law.
Review
“This book is a pleasure to read. Reed, a most distinguished scholar of German literature, brings to his subject a lifetime of learning as well as strong convictions and a refined literary sensibility. Reading like a prolonged conversation, it ably demonstrates the many sources of light in eighteenth century Germany and how they can still illuminate our present.”
Review
“With this book, one of the most respected scholars in the field has written a passionate vindication of a passionate age, arguing in engaging, vigorous prose for its relevance to modern concerns. The German Enlightenment comes alive in all its aspects, questioning social, political, religious, and scientific norms and pushing the limits of reason itself; Reed also gives its contradictions a full account. Light in Germany is not only a sophisticated introduction for students and general readers but also an array of insightful interpretations, born of a lifetime of reading and thinking that will delight seasoned scholars.”
Review
“Reed has done it again. With Light in Germany he has rendered invaluable service to all of those who cannot stop pondering the enigma of modern Germany. His wonderfully concrete and informed ‘scenes from an unknown Enlightenment’ compel us to reconsider the widespread disparagement of its philosophical, literary, and practical achievements by so many skeptics in the Anglophone world and in Germany itself. No small accomplishment!”
Review
andldquo;A meticulously written book. . . . Warner has offered an important and useful study of the communication innovations that made the American Revolution possible.andrdquo;
Review
and#160;and#8220;William B. Warnerand#8217;s profoundly learned and well-timed Protocols of Liberty provides readers with a distant mirror for our own moment, returning us to the conditions of communication that determined the course of and#8216;Whigand#8217; politics in the 1760s and 1770s and made the American Revolution possible. Built upon the close scrutiny of printed sources and making excellent use of generations of scholarship, Warnerand#8217;s book patiently reconstructs the political networks and nodes of revolutionary America. In doing so, he provides a pointed and much-needed synthesis, bringing together what we know about the various communicative practices of the period to tell a new story about the modernity of eighteenth-century politics.and#8221;
Review
and#160;andldquo;Protocols of Liberty is an immensely interesting and edifying account of the role of communications in British America during the political crisis of the 1770s. William B. Warner has done prodigious research and produced insightful and creative close readings of an impressive range of texts, and his emphasis on andlsquo;protocolsandrsquo; intervenes usefully in debates about American nation-building. Readers from a range of disciplines, political persuasions, and new media orientations will take notice of this book.andrdquo;
Review
“Set out in vigorous prose which combine incisiveness with nuance. Light in Germany is written with all the combative trenchancy which distinguished the author’s twenty-year editorship of this magazine. It is based on deep familiarity with the literature of the period, and it is intellectually exhilarating to read.”
Synopsis
Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed the question, and#8220;What is Enlightenment?and#8221; The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced hereand#8212;not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between.and#160;
With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associational practices and protocols, this volume establishes mediation as the condition of possibility for enlightenment. In so doing, it not only answers Kantand#8217;s query; it also poses its own broader question: how would foregrounding mediation change the kinds and areas of inquiry in our own epoch? This Is Enlightenment is a landmark volumewith the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the Enlightenment itself first configured.
Synopsis
Germany’s political and cultural past from ancient times through World War II has dimmed the legacy of its Enlightenment, which these days is far outshone by those of France and Scotland. In this book, T. J. Reed clears the dust away from eighteenth-century Germany, bringing the likes of Kant, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Gotthold Lessing into a coherent and focused beam that shines within European intellectual history and reasserts the important role of Germany’s Enlightenment.
Reed looks closely at the arguments, achievements, conflicts, and controversies of these major thinkers and how their development of a lucid and active liberal thinking matured in the late eighteenth century into an imaginative branching that ran through philosophy, theology, literature, historiography, science, and politics. He traces the various pathways of their thought and how one engendered another, from the principle of thinking for oneself to the development of a critical epistemology; from literature’s assessment of the past to the formulation of a poetic ideal of human development. Ultimately, Reed shows how the ideas of the German Enlightenment have proven their value in modern secular democracies and are still of great relevance—despite their frequent dismissal—to us in the twenty-first century.
Synopsis
The German Enlightenment is often held in disregard by those who see it as driven by an outdated theory of knowledge, an unrealistic idealist-utopian vision, and even an evil proto-totalitarian motivation. The present book by T. J. Jim Reed presents a very different picture by focusing on relatively disregarded or unknown” aspects of the German Enlightenment. The text is mindful throughout of the twenty-first century relevance, not to say twenty-first century moral” of the specific themes and works it addresses. The book is significant far beyond the important concerns of other monographs on the Enlightenment for it takes into account the writers (such as Kant, Schiller, Goethe, and Lessing), and on occasion the rulers (such as Frederick the Great), who realized its ideas and values in philosophy, art, and politics. Light, for Reed, only dawns fully in their writing. This book is not a description of the Enlightenment narrowly defined as a movement in abstract thought, much less a catalogue of every last minor participant, but an account of the spread of light that is, of lucid and active liberal thinking wherever it can be found in German eighteenth-century culture. The emphasis is indeed on the last third of the century, what is commonly called the late Enlightenment,” not as a separate phase, but as a maturing of the branches of a single tree with its imaginative harvest. In short, this book brings to life the most significant episodes and arguments of the German Enlightenment, and shows them as scenes in a larger drama at any moment, there is related action going on in another part of the field.
About the Author
and#160;William B. Warner is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of three books, most recently,and#160;Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeareandrsquo;s andquot;Hamletandquot;, and coeditor of This is Enlightenment, published by the University of Chicago Press. He lives in Goleta, CA.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
This Is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument
Clifford Siskin and William Warner
Mediation:and#160;A Concept in History
Enlightening Mediation
John GuilloryWhere Were the Media before the Media? Mediating the World at the Time of Condillac and Linnaeus
Knut Eliassen and Yngve Sandhei Jacobsen
Mediation and the Division of Labor
Peter de Bolla
Transmitting Liberty: The Boston Committee of Correspondenceand#8217;s Revolutionary Experiments in Enlightenment Mediation
William Warner
Modes and Codes: Samuel F.B. Morse and the Question of Electronic Writing
Lisa Gitelman
Enlightenment: Evidence and Events
Mediating Information, 1450and#8211;18
Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass
Mediated Enlightenment: The System of the World
Clifford Siskin
Romanticism, Enlightenment, and Mediation: The Case of the Inner Stranger
Robert Miles
The Present of Enlightenment: Temporality and Mediation in Kant, Foucault, and Jean Paul
Helge Jordheim
The Strange Light of Postcolonial Enlightenment: Mediatic Form and Publicity in India
Arvind Rajagopal
Proliferation: Mediation and Print
Mediating Media Past and Present: Toward a Genealogy of and#8220;Print Cultureand#8221; and and#8220;Oral Traditionand#8221;
Paula Mcdowell
Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, 1760and#8211;1830: The Invention of Oral Tradition, or, Close-Reading before Coleridge
Maureen Mclane
Mediating le philosophe: Diderotand#8217;s Strategic Self-Representations
Anne Fastrup
Novel Knowledge: Judgment, Experience, Experiment
John Bender
The Piratical Enlightenment
Adrian Johns
Effects: Emergent Practices
Financing Enlightenment, Part One: Money Matters
Mary Poovey
Financing Enlightenment, Part Two: Extraordinary Expenditure
Ian Baucom
and#8220;The Horrifying Ties, from which the Public Order Originatesand#8221;: The Police in Schiller and Mercier
Bernhard Siegert
The Preacherand#8217;s Footing
Michael Warner
Mediation as Primal Word: The Arts, the Sciences, and the Origins of the Aesthetic
Michael Mckeon
Notes
References
List of ContributorsIndex