Enlightenment and the Challenge of Difference 2017: Family, History and Progress (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment)

Miller, Nicholas B.

ISBN 10: 0729411923 / ISBN 13: 9780729411929

Published by Voltaire Foundation, 2017

About this Item

pp. 256.

Seller Inventory # 26375205643

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Enlightenment and the Challenge of Difference 2017: Family, History and Progress (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment)
• Publisher: Voltaire Foundation
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0729411923
• ISBN 13: 9780729411929
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

During the long eighteenth century the moral and socio-political dimensions of family life and gender were hotly debated by intellectuals across Europe. John Millar, a Scottish law professor and philosopher, was a pioneer in making gendered and familial practice a critical parameter of cultural difference. His work was widely disseminated at home and abroad, translated into French and German and closely read by philosophers such as Denis Diderot and Johann Gottfried Herder. Taking Millar’s writings as his basis, Nicholas B. Miller explores the role of the family in Scottish Enlightenment political thought and traces its wider resonances across the Enlightenment world.

John Millar’s organisation of cultural, gendered and social difference into a progressive narrative of authority relations provided the first extended world history of the family. Over five chapters that address the historical and comparative models developed by the thinker, Nicholas B. Miller examines contemporary responses and Enlightenment-era debates on polygamy, matriarchy, the Amazon legend, changes in national character and the possible futures of the family in commercial society. He traces how Enlightenment thinkers developed new standards of evidence and crafted new understandings of historical time in order to tackle the global diversity of family life and gender practice. By reconstituting these theories and discussions, Nicholas B. Miller uncovers hitherto unexplored aspects of the Scottish contribution to European debates on the role of the family in history, society and politics.

Review

"Nicholas B. Miller's book goes well beyond that debate by using eighteenth-century discussions of the history and diversity of family forms and gender relationships as a means of providing an alternative perspective on Scottish Enlightenment histories of civilization, narratives of European progress, and the Scottish 'science of man'. The result will be of interest not only to specialists in the Scottish Enlightenment but also to scholars interested in the place of gender in Enlightenment approaches to 'World History'"
Iain McDaniel, Journal of Modern History