1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910822087803321

Autore

Armenteros Carolina

Titolo

The French idea of history : Joseph de Maistre and his heirs, 1794-1854 / / Carolina Armenteros

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, : Cornell University Press, 2011

ISBN

0-8014-6260-6

0-8014-6259-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (375 p.)

Disciplina

907.2/044

Soggetti

HISTORY / Europe / France

France Historiography

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

pt. 1. Joseph de Maistre and the idea of history, 1794-1820: The statistical beginnings of historical thought : Joseph de Maistre against Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1794-96 ; Maistrian epistemology and pedagogy in historical perspective ; A Europeanist theory of history : Du pape ; Redemption by suffering : social violence and historical development in the Éclaircissement sur les sacrifices ; Returning the universe to God : time, will, and reason in Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg -- pt. 2. Historical thought in France, 1798-1845: The new truth of historical knowledge : liberty, order, and the rise of the social fact, 1797-1848 ; Historical progress and the logic of sacrifice, 1822-54 ; The metapolitics of history : socialism, positivism, and tradition, 1820-48.

Sommario/riassunto

"A fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat . . . the champion of the hardest, narrowest, and most inflexible dogmatism . . . part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner." Thus did Émile Faguet describe Joseph-Marie de Maistre (1753-1821) in his 1899 history of nineteenth-century thought. This view of the influential thinker as a reactionary has, with little variation, held sway ever since. In The French Idea of History, Carolina Armenteros recovers a very different figure, one with a far more subtle understanding of, and response to, the events of his day.Maistre emerges from this deeply learned book as the crucial bridge between the Enlightenment and the historicized thought of the



nineteenth century. Armenteros demonstrates that Maistre inaugurated a specifically French way of thinking about past, present, and future that held sway not only among conservative political theorists but also among intellectuals generally considered to belong to the left, particularly the Utopian Socialists.