Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford Historical Monographs) - Hardcover

Oz-Salzberger, Fania

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198205198 ISBN 13: 9780198205197

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1995

Synopsis

This is a study of how political ideas travel across languages and cultures. It examines the reception in Germany of the civic theories of the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Ferguson, and shows how German intellectuals misread his work, but in a way which opened up many fruitful insights.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

This is a study of the transmission of political ideas across languages and cultures. It focuses on a notably fruitful encounter between two eighteenth-century political cultures: the reception of Scottish civic ideas, voiced most powerfully in the works of the Edinburgh historian-philosopher Adam Ferguson, by German thinkers in the era of Enlightenment, and early Romanticism. Fania Oz-Salzberger's detailed and challenging analysis places Ferguson in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, and highlights the affinities and differences between his milieu and that of his German readers. She traces the German reception of Ferguson's thought, pointing at conceptual stumbling-blocks and linguistic tensions. Dr Oz-Salzberger describes a complex, often unintended shift of Scottish civic language into a German vocabulary of spiritual perfection and inner life. This process, she argues, was far from futile: the reading and misreading of Ferguson and other Scottish authors enriched German intellectual life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

About the Author:

Fania Oz-Salzberger is a lecturer in history at the University of Haifa.

About this edition

• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0198205198
• ISBN 13: 9780198205197
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368