The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Historians
It has been perhaps half a century since an historian could make a reputation by solemnly affirming, against the established nineteenth-century belief, the congeniality of history to eighteenth-century thinking. Hence the familiar, unrevised approach to eighteenth-century historiography is not the a...
Main Author: | |
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Format: | Electronic Article |
Language: | English |
Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
1978
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In: |
Church history
Year: 1978, Volume: 47, Issue: 3, Pages: 279-297 |
Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
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Summary: | It has been perhaps half a century since an historian could make a reputation by solemnly affirming, against the established nineteenth-century belief, the congeniality of history to eighteenth-century thinking. Hence the familiar, unrevised approach to eighteenth-century historiography is not the archaic notion of its essentially anti-historical character but rather the subsequent scheme, popularized by Carl Becker in the early 1930s, which acknowledged the importance of “the new history” in the philosophes' “heavenly city.” According to this scheme, “the new history” was an integral production of the philosophes' intellectual enterprise because it was “philosophy teaching by example”—because, that is, it was associated with the philosophes' own religiosity, which was negatively related to the traditional doctrine of a Christian dispensation. |
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ISSN: | 1755-2613 |
Contains: | Enthalten in: Church history
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Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/3164505 |