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Concepts from the Enlightenment and the historical origins of modern social sciences are used to discuss how futures studies deserves recognition as a social science in its own right and as a needed component of the curricula of other disciplines as well, especially in public administration. In focus groups, undergraduate students who had just completed a course in futures studies identified what they would emphasize if they become teachers of our field. They would emphasize critical thinking, individual relevance and empowerment, interrelatedness, technology as a two-sided agent of change, a risk management approach to understanding crises and opportunities, past efforts to anticipate possible futures, developing scenarios using the Societal, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political framework, environmental scanning and backcasting, and especially the importance of Enlightenment values in framing preferred futures. As teachers, they would use technology extensively but were sharply divided on whether futures studies should be taught in an online only format.

It can be argued that a humanistic enlightenment approach to leadership emerged as a counter to the historical prevalence of totalitarian elitism where leaders were often autocratic and authoritarian, demanding obedience through command and control. Although beginning with the ancient Greeks, this kind of leadership has continued through classical periods from early medieval times up until the industrial revolution, and also into our modern era. Since the 18th century, philosophies of enlightened humanism have been the face of leadership thinking if not always what might be seen as its embodied practice. Beneath the surface, there lurks a controlling and demanding imposition of self-discipline that can be seen as equally if not more, repressive than the elitism it replaces. This article is concerned to challenge such repression by developing a neo-humanist enlightenment approach to leadership and its development. It departs from those studies that reflect and thereby reproduce individualized preoccupations with, and attachments to, identity on the part of leaders and the so-called followers. The focus, instead, is on an embodied leadership that encourages an ethical engagement with the community, institutions, organizations, and society.

Waste management is a key challenge the world currently faces. Solid waste imports (SWIs) are counteractive to the construction of ecological civilization. The comprehensive prohibition of “foreign waste” (FW) imports (FWIs) is an iconic measure to promote ecological civilization and ecological environment safety. Strengthening the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s supervision of SWI (SSWIs) is an important means of implementing the comprehensive prohibition of FWIs, while existing research has paid little attention to the behaviour of SSWIs. This paper firstly analyses the influential factors of the behaviour of SSWIs based on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), and five corresponding research hypotheses are put forward accordingly. Then, it uses 262 micro questionnaires regarding the behaviour of SSWIs in the Port of Waigaoqiao in Shanghai, PRC, and constructs a structural equation model based on the TPB to identify the influential factors and effects of the behaviour of SSWIs. Some interesting findings are observed in this research. Firstly, it indicates that attitude, subjective norms (SNs) and perceived behavioural control (PBC), all indirectly act upon supervision behaviour by influencing supervision intention. Secondly, PBC acts directly on the behaviour of SSWIs, which is consistent with the TPB. Thirdly, the direct effects on supervision intention from strongest to weakest are SNs, attitude, and PBC, respectively. The conclusion provides important policy enlightenment for the supervision optimization of the behaviour of SSWIs. The supervision intention can be motivated from various angles by strengthening the attitude, SNs and PBC of customs supervisors, subsequently strengthening their supervision intention and behaviour.

Unlike the unitary subject of Western enlightenment, the Dalit non-subject has no single operational social self. Limbale’s subjecthood or Autos in The Outcaste is not a sedimented ontological position but rather a process of negotiation between material and social conditions that affect one’s embodied and situated self. Unlike the other Mahar boys, Parshya, Harya or Mallya; the social cartographies of Limbale’s identity positions are splintered. In place of a stable Mahar being, Limbale has multiple and differentiated becomings. These uneven and dissymmetrical genealogical relations are mimicked by the asymmetricality of the narrative which is structurally splintered; The Outcaste is simultaneously an autobiography, a counter-hegemonic historiography and an ethnobiography.

Arup Maharatna, The Indian Metamorphosis: Essays on Its Enlightenment, Education and Society. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 226 pp., ₹5,381.

This study uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to study the understanding of China’s university teachers (hereinafter referred to as teachers) on the preparation period of entrepreneurship. Through questionnaire survey, factor analysis and fuzzy evaluation, we get the classification of the factors of entrepreneurship by teachers, including education factors, social factors, and policy factors.Teachers believe that the most important primary influencing factors of entrepreneurship formation is founders’ fundamentals, the most important secondary influencing factors is social factors. In addition, the main impact of teacher entrepreneurship awareness on entrepreneurship education is as follows: in the competition and practice of entrepreneurial projects, on-campus entrepreneurial teachers mainly participate as assistants and they are quite passive. It may be because that their participation motivation is departed from the purpose of entrepreneurship. Off-campus entrepreneurship tutors focus more on the ability of the social entrepreneurial team to marketize the products or services.

The fierce debate about the reality of spirits and the “Invisible World” which flared up in the 1690’s helped define the early Enlightenment. All sides in this debate—from Spinoza and Balthasar Bekker to John Beaumont and Cotton Mather—refashioned familiar metaphors of light and darkness and connected them with the world beyond Europe in surprising new ways. This article shows how this key controversy of the early Enlightenment was built upon references to darkness, light, and the benighted pagan peoples of the world. As new street lighting and improved domestic lighting nocturnalized daily life in the Netherlands, London, and Paris, the old denizens of the night - ghosts, spirits, and witches—were increasingly relegated to the extra-European world and used to articulate new categories of human difference based on civility, reason, and skin color. These new categories of human difference—new ways of seeing and ordering the world—were essential to the formation of early modern whiteness and the Enlightenment.

The world is changing, but political and educational institutions appears to be stuck in the 19th century. Modern policy and education are both premised on an Enlightenment assumption of the human, rational, individual subject. Increasingly, elements of these philosophical premises are being interrogated. The critique emerges from the environmental interest in collapsing the dualism between subject and object, and reintegrating the human with/in our ecological context. Indigenous philosophy is important for rethinking the integration of the dualism between humanity and ecology. Maori philosophy is a vital counterpoint to the anthropomorphic position of modern policy and education. Taking Maori concepts to inform contemporary philosophy generates a substantive shift in world view that does not lose sight of the solipsist, phenomenological parameters of human sense making, but enables us to make deeper ethical decisions, and transform the basis of education and policy.

Akhundzade is one of the greatest Iranian modern intellectuals. Addressing nationalism, literary criticism, and alphabet reform in the Muslim world, and, most importantly, provoking trenchant criticism of the Islamic religion, he initiated a persistent controversy among the Iranian intellectuals. It is often argued that he approached the European thought through the lens of self-orientalism and grounded a so-called will to imitation. Drawing on his method of Qirītīkā (criticism), particularly in Maktūbāt (1865), I argue that he confronted the Western ideas instrumentally and was aware of the historical and social context of Iran. Furthermore, despite his apparent secular approach, which is labelled usually as garbzade (West-struck), he articulated an ensemble of elements that can be traced back to pre-Islamic Iran, India, and the West. His intellectual works not only stand as the figureheads of regional studies but also represent a pathbreaking approach to the problem of backwardness in Muslim societies.

Niels Klim’s Underground Travels (1741) was the European breakthrough for the Norwegian Enlightenment polymath Ludvig Holberg. The emerging novel format inspired Holberg to trust his readers to use their own rationality to decide on the contentious issues of their era. The intellectual contrarian had always been sceptical of his contemporaries’ ability to reason, but he died content that his writings had made a positive impact. Over two centuries later, a Danish TV adaptation of Niels Klim casts a more misanthropic verdict. The mini-series concludes that humanity lacks reason and is an environmentally disastrous mistake. This article compares narrative and thematic argument in these two works to explore the evolution of Western views on rationality, nationality, gender, and environmentalism. If it is the case that, as the TV adaptation and many modern critics suggest, human reason is unlikely to solve the twenty-first-century’s existential threats, what is the alternative for humanity?

This study explores how religious adherents construct their ideas regarding gender in Buddhist faith communities. Two temples, one in China and the other in the United States, both affiliated with the same international Buddhist headquarters, are situated in national contexts that endorse different macro-level gender norms. While leaders of both temples teach similar religious gender norms—specifically, that gender is unimportant for spiritual advancement—adherents do articulate gender differences in other respects. Buddhists at the temple in China believe that men and women differ but should be treated equally, with neither holding dominance over the other; meanwhile, U.S. practitioners also believe that everyone should be treated equally irrespective of gender, but they view men and women as essentially the same. A close analysis reveals that Buddhists at both temples recognize the distinctions between their religious and societal macro-level gender norms and navigate between these norms when constructing their own understandings of gender. This study highlights the influence of national context on the relationship between gender and religion, thereby contributing to and deepening our understanding of the subject.

This article analyses and assesses the arguments opposing capital punishment put forward by Ján Kollár (1793–1852), a representative of Central European Evangelical/Lutheran Enlightenment rationalism, using the definition of criminal practice in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century as the basis. Consequently, the author pays attention to the movement for reform in criminal law and practices, initiated in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century by Cesare Beccaria, including his argumentation against capital punishment. In this context, the author presents and investigates 13 arguments against capital punishment defined by Kollár in his 1815 diary. The author came to the conclusion that Kollár, in his arguments against capital punishment, followed, to a certain extent, the views of Beccaria and eighteenth -century adherents of the French Enlightenment; however, Kollár’s actual argumentation is rationalistically based on ethical values of humanity and justice with significant space also dedicated to utilitarian aspects of rejecting capital punishment adopted from reformists of criminal law.

This article discusses two different attitudes toward elections and democracy among the early Chinese communists. It argues that apart from some communist leaders in Shanghai who saw nothing of value in participating in elections, there were members of the party who favored social democracy. Two Cantonese Marxists, Chen Gongbo and Tan Pingshan, heavily influenced by German social democrats, especially Karl Kautsky, attached great importance to elections and “the enlightenment of the masses” on the road to communism. This led them to oppose their comrades in Shanghai, and to support the federalist self-government movement advocated by Chen Jiongming. After 1922, this rift between communists in Guangzhou and Shanghai grew into a serious intra-party conflict. Eventually, the Cantonese social democratic approach was politically discredited and largely forgotten. Exploring this Cantonese approach will clarify the connection and tension between democracy, enlightenment, and socialism in May Fourth China.

Decolonial perspectives challenge the notion that standard knowledge in hegemonic psychology is productive of progress and enlightenment. They instead emphasise its association with the colonial violence that constitutes the darker underside of modern development. Our contribution to the special issue applies a decolonial perspective to theory and research on obligation to an elderly parent. Thinking from the standpoint of West African epistemic locations not only illuminates the culture-bound character of standard models but also reveals their foundations in modern individualist selfways. Although modern individualist selfways can liberate well-endowed people to pursue fulfilling relationships and avoid unsatisfying connections with burdensome obligations, these ways of being pose risks of abandonment for people—like many elders—whose requirements for care might constitute a constraint on others’ satisfaction. In contrast, the cultural ecologies of embedded interdependence that inform everyday life in many West African settings afford selfways that emphasise careful maintenance of existing connections. Although these selfways may place constraints on the self-expansive pursuit of satisfying relationships, they provide elders and other vulnerable people with some assurance of support.

The case of Angelo Soliman − a black man raised in the royal courts of eighteenth-century Vienna who appeared during his lifetime to have attained significant social status and acceptance into bourgeois society, only to have his body stuffed and exhibited after death in a natural history museum − is discussed in the context of Enlightenment race theories at the core of a then-new ‘scientific racism’. This article explores his representation in its wider discursive and historical context, and critically reflects on predominant narratives and typologies associated with him. The piece then reflects on contemporary attempts to retell his story – via museum exhibitions, literature and film – some of which started to critically reflect on age-old European stereotypes of blackness used in earlier representations of Soliman. The piece promotes a discussion of Soliman’s life from a more critical, historically reflexive, de-colonialising and anti-racist position that questions white normativity and the scientific racism of the European Enlightenment and colonialism, the foundations of modern racism.

This article discusses continuities between the discourse of caste in ancient India, the racialization constitutive of the Enlightenment, and a similarly exclusionary, overdetermined conception of worthlessness—the lazy, immoral, deviant minorities—evident in contemporary racism as much as in the abandonment of a global underclass. We argue that the negative marking of a social condition or group as inferior and subhuman (on all kinds of grounds, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual) has been constitutive of the paradigms in which these societies subsist. The practices and project of all that is good is shadowed by this negative, its infectious, abominable presence. Analytically bringing together the politics of the homo sacer with the social psychology of abjection, we argue that such exclusion is as vested in politics and economic interests as in their psychic correspondences.

I cannot endorse Donleavy’s conclusion that “ fair value” accounting is derived from the eighteen-century economic thinkers: Anne Robert Turgot; Richard Cantillon; and Adam Smith. In his well-written study, Donleavy seems to misperceive fair value accounting as the reporting of accounting items by their market values. However, fair value accounting also advocates a theoretical explanation of how market prices would be formed and why they would be fair values. It is important to clarify this point, because it leads to two subsequent conclusions. First, that the price/value theory in fair value accounting is quite distinct from Turgot, Cantillon and Smith’s theories on the same matter. For instance, Cantillon and Smith suggested cost-based theories of value, where labor was the key element. Second, it is possible to distinguish fair value accounting from periods where the case for reporting accounting rubrics by market values was promoted based on other theoretical motivations.

The Age of Reason is first and foremost an age of public reasoning. Equipped with a fresh and indeed unprecedented consciousness of feasibility and responsibility, educated citizens start to participate actively – and in many cases by taking personal risks – in discourses on political, religious and philosophical issues. In this article, I will highlight two core issues of the late eighteenth century – the dispute about the legitimacy of the French Revolution as well as its underlying philosophical conceptions and the rising human rights idea – and thereby revisit the interventions of three women who, though rediscovered in various fields of research, still have to gain their due recognition as pre-eminent political philosophers of their time.

Drawing on 49 oral-history interviews with Scottish family business owner-managers, six key-informant interviews, and secondary sources, this interdisciplinary study analyses the decline of kinship-based connections and the emergence of new kinds of elite networks around the 1980s. As the socioeconomic context changed rapidly during this time, cooperation built primarily around literal family ties could not survive unaltered. Instead of finding unity through bio-legal family connections, elite networks now came to redefine their ‘family businesses’ in terms of affectively loaded ‘family values’ such as loyalty, care, commitment, and even ‘love’. Consciously nurturing ‘as-if-family’ emotional and ethical connections arose as a psychologically effective way to bring together network members who did not necessarily share pre-existing connections of bio-legal kinship. The social-psychological processes involved in this extension of the ‘family’ can be understood using theories of the moral sentiments first developed in the Scottish Enlightenment. These theories suggest that, when the context is amenable, family-like emotional bonds can be extended via sympathy to those to whom one is not literally related. As a result of this ‘progress of sentiments’, one now earns his/her place in a Scottish family business, not by inheriting or marrying into it, but by performing family-like behaviours motivated by shared ethics and affects.

This paper examines the impact of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking – that of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman in particular – on contemporary political debates manifest in ‘architectures of exit’. We specifically focus on Urbit, as an NRx digital architecture that captures how post-neoliberal politics imagines notions of freedom and sovereignty through a micro-fracturing of nation-states into ‘gov-corps’. We trace the development of NRx philosophy – and situate this within contemporary political and technological change to theorize the significance of exit manifest within the notion of ‘dynamic geographies’. While technological programmes such as Urbit may never ultimately succeed, we argue that these, and other speculative investments such as ‘seasteading’, reflect broader post-neoliberal NRx imaginaries that were, perhaps, prefigured a quarter of a century ago in The Sovereign Individual.

This article describes a pneumatological methodology of Christian mission in solidarity with the poor, which is exhibited by African Pentecostal-Charismatics in ministry in Tanzania and West Africa today. The methodology is drawn from the experiences of dreams and visions as they fund an approach rooted in two pneumatological essentials for mission praxis: (1) “poverty of spirit” as an epistemological requisite and (2) the power of Spirit for mission in an oppressive spirit-filled world. The thesis argued here is that this methodological approach to missions is evidence of the “creative tension” between mission and eschatology that missiologist David Bosch called for. As well, this en-Spirited missions motif critiques the rationalist neglect of experience Bosch lamented and satisfies as an example of what he envisioned as an “emerging ecumenical missionary paradigm.”

Michel Foucault remains one of the most influential intellectuals in the early twenty-first century world. This paper examines the origins and impact of his first major work, Folie et déraison, on the history of psychiatry, particularly though not exclusively in the world of Anglo-American scholarship. The impact and limits of Foucault’s work on the author’s own contributions to the history of psychiatry are examined, as is the larger influence of Madness and Civilization (as it is known to most Anglophones) on the nascent social history of psychiatry. The paper concludes with an assessment of the sources of the appeal of Foucault’s work among some scholars, and notes his declining influence on contemporary scholars working on the history of psychiatry.

The doctrine of the Trinity was fiercely contested in the English Enlightenment. This debate is of interest not simply because of the doctrinal articulations of the belligerents or their various approaches to the Scriptural text, but because it led to the consolidation of a precise understanding of the relationship between the sensus literalis and doctrine for Trinitarians and Antitrinitarians both. Antitrinitarians of the English Enlightenment came to agree that the sensus literalis could be isolated by identifying the singular referent of each Scriptural word, but Trinitarians came to insist, to the contrary, that Scriptural words always refer within a larger canonical framework.

This essay argues that despite a tonal shift in his post-conciliar writings, Balthasar’s Church-world construal remains consistent. This relationship is characterized by a dialectical pairing of themes which receive relative emphasis at different stages. The constellation of similar images which Balthasar employs to depict the missionary nature of the Church—yeast, leaven, salt, light, sacrament—highlights this dual-dynamic. The Church is tasked with transforming culture from within. To perform this properly, she must be open to the world yet unique within it—in solidarity without dissolving her distinct message or institutional mediation. Earlier in his career, the solidarity/openness pole merited emphasis because of the Church’s anti-modernist tendencies. Later, he became wary of the encroachment of Enlightenment rationalism—which tended to relativize the Church’s unique identity and contribution—into the Catholic Church. According to Balthasar, the Church is called to leaven the world without such a loss.

This article discusses Édouard Glissant’s theory of Relation as a minor philosophy of world that breaks from the spatialization of time and the anthropological cosmopolitanism of Enlightenment thought and Cold War area studies. The first part connects two dominant Cold War area studies discourses—modernization theory and cultural anthropology—to Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology and Michel Foucault’s reading of it, showing how area studies discourses participate in an old Enlightenment problem of what Foucault calls the “anthropological illusion.” The article then connects Glissant’s criticism of generalization and his idea of the “world” to the critique of area studies, showing how the spatiotemporality of Glissant’s Relation disarticulates the area studies framework and its mode of racializing the poetics of world history, world literature, and world culture.

Rousseau’s passionate attack on inequalities political, social, and economic, his critique of reigning governments in the name of democracy, and his questioning of the authority of science or philosophy in defense of moral virtue shook the century of Enlightenment and the aftershocks are still felt today. We examine a neglected but important writing in which he first brings together his diverse but interrelated preoccupations: the Observations, his lengthiest defense of the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts. We analyze the argument in the Observations regarding the causes of moral corruption, taking our cue in part from several structural anomalies. These textual anomalies reveal two causal arguments: first, a political argument identifying inequality as the first cause of corruption, and, second, an argument about the corrupting effects of philosophy on religious faith and popular morality related to the first argument through a common concern with pride and inequality.

This article investigates the close relationship between geographical knowledge and imperial politics in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through an analysis of an anonymous portolan chart from 1652 and geographical accounts of Katip Çelebi, Ebu Bekir b. Behram el-Dimaşki and Osman b. Abdülmennan, it examines the circulation of ‘geography’ and ‘geographical knowledge’ in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In doing so, it aims to integrate the Ottoman Empire into the recently developing historical treatment of Enlightenment as a response to cross-border interaction and global integration. According to the traditional understanding, Ottoman involvement with modern science and technology did not begin until the nineteenth century when the Ottoman state enacted a series of reforms in education, economy, and military. This article aims to challenge this traditional understanding and argues that Ottoman ruling elites and scholars did indeed participate in intellectual discussions and political developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The knowledge exchange between the Ottoman geographers and their European contemporaries during this period laid the foundations of what I call ‘the Ottoman Enlightenment.’ The works discussed in this article informed the Ottoman imperial court and literate urbanites of the changes in the spatial understanding of the world and of the universe while also helping them to reevaluate the role of the Ottoman Empire globally during a period typically regarded as the beginning of Ottoman decline.

Advances in health care mean that we can now treat diseases that once cut lives short. However, the increase in life expectancy has not been matched by improvements in quality of life. The World Health Organization warns us that all countries should prepare to meet the challenges of an aging population and this is integral to the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This may require a shift in attitude toward aging. We aimed to use meta-ethnography to explore the experience of adults living beyond the age of 80. Our conceptual model illuminates the phenomenon of connection in older age and reflects on the paradox of time: ephemeral, yet interminable. Our findings encourage us to reflect on the influence of enlightenment philosophies that underpin the desire for autonomy at all costs. Our study challenges the stereotypes of old age and has the potential to influence people’s perspectives toward aging.

My argument follows geographer Gunnar Olsson when he asks, “What is geography if it is not the drawing and interpreting of a line? And what is the drawing of a line if it is not also the creation of new objects?” Using Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon ( MD), about the drawing of the Mason-Dixon line, I explore how the mapmaker’s productive power is never merely reflective, but generative too, constructing a world as much as representing one. I question the consequent relation between “above and below,” drawing on Farinelli’s insight that critique of such constructions must recognize an antagonistic humor in the production of maps and territories. Pynchon’s novel, I argue, is exemplary in the wit with which it pits the anomalous, strange, and contingent phenomena of the below against the homogenizing, categorizing power of above. His approach helps us understand the dark heart of Enlightenment cartography and society.

This article is concerned with the relationship between British colonization and the intellectual underpinnings of natural history writing between the 17th and the early 19th centuries. During this period, I argue, a significant discursive shift reframed both natural history and the concept of humanity. In the early modern period, compiling natural histories was often conceived as an endeavour to understand God’s creation. Many of the natural historians involved in the early Royal Society of London were driven by a theological conviction that the New World contained the natural knowledge once possessed by Adam, but lost in the Fall from Eden. By the early 19th century, however, this theological framework for natural history had been superseded by an avowedly progressive vision of the relationship between humanity and nature. No longer ontologically distinct from the rest of creation, the human became a subject of natural history writing in a new way. Encounters between colonizers and colonized thus became a touchstone for tensions between divine and natural historical knowledge. The resolution of these tensions lay in the emergence of a concept of savagery that imbibed both a rational account of historical progress towards civilization and a religious conviction that savage humanity needed rescue from its animal nature.

To what extent did the debate on the orangutan contribute to the global Enlightenment? This article focuses on the first 150 years of the introduction, dissection, and public exposition of the so-called ‘orangutan’ in Europe, between the 1630s, when the first specimens arrived in the Netherlands, and the 1770s, when the British debate about slavery and abolitionism reframed the boundaries between the human and animal kingdoms. Physicians, natural historians, antiquarians, philosophers, geographers, lawyers, and merchants all contributed to the knowledge of the orangutan, while also reshaping the boundaries of humanity: when the human/animal divide narrowed, the divide between ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ peoples crystallized, becoming wider than in any previous period.

How was ‘savagery’ constituted as a field of colonial knowledge? As Europe’s empires expanded, their reach was marked not only by the colonisation of new territories but by the colonisation of knowledge. Path-breaking scholarship since the 1990s has shown how European knowledge of colonised territories and peoples developed from diverse travel writings, missionary texts, and exploration narratives from the 16th century onwards (Abulafia, 2008; Armitage, 2000; De Campos Françozo, 2017; Pratt, 1992). Of prime importance in this work has been the investigation of the pre-positioning of colonised peoples within categories derived from European traditions of historical, religious, legal, and political thought as either ‘savages’ or ‘barbarians’ (Richardson, 2018; Sebastiani, 2013).

Michael Booth's essays and books on Victorian theatre provided a formative and comprehensive set of scholarly works examining the origins of realism on the Victorian stage. Using Booth's arguments about the evolution of theatrical realism, this essay probes the notion of virtual reality and its impact on the spectator to examine the Eidophusikon – an invention of the artist, scene designer and engineer, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. This essay examines this phenomenon in terms of how the urban spectacle plays out within it, the fundamental role of technology and science in its success, and the paradoxical play of realism and imagination in how his work was received by audiences experiencing its immersive effects in the age of panoramas and post-Newtonian ideas of light, sight and viewing.

© The Author(s) 2019. The British Broadcasting Corporation occupies what is often considered to be a unique position within UK culture as both a respected national institution that is a pillar of enlightenment values and, increasingly, an agile, entrepreneurial business that has to deliver ‘value-for-money’. This study will contribute to the existing body of literature examining the impact of a neoliberal marketisation discourse on BBC policy by focusing specifically on the provision of arts programming as a key indicator of how the logic of the marketplace has permeated the BBC’s commissioning culture. In doing so, it argues that the loss of the topical arts magazine and discussion formats from BBC television, in contrast to radio, is symptomatic of the ways in which arts broadcasting has been reimagined both in the corporation’s internal production culture and in its public pronouncements as a product for consumers rather than a service for citizens.

This essay is a discussion of three anonymous novels about happiness from the long eighteenth century – The Vale of Felicity (1791), Benignity (1818) and Edward (1820) – all of which seem to be written by the same author, as they exhibit striking similarities not only in subject matter but also in their aristocratic perspective on happiness, one wholly dependent upon pecuniary means. What is more, they exhibit the same artistic deficiencies, particularly in wooden characters and the rather poor handling of pacing, plotting, obtrusive didacticism and complication. The opening discussion situates the novels in the context of the abundant eighteenth-century literature on happiness, while the body of the essay is a critical analysis of the three narratives in terms of their various genres (epistolary, sentimental, didactic, Bildungsroman, circular journey, identikit, picaresque) and eighteenth-century ideas on Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Christian charity. The peroration and conclusion are a reflection upon the notion of happiness itself and how it has been ill-received in literary studies. The essay represents the first analysis of its kind, since there is no extant, substantial criticism on any of these novels.

Democracy was in the margins both as an idea and as a political force in the eighteenth century. Even in the 1790s, ‘democracy’ was hardly the defining notion of the revolutionaries’ political visions. The small states as much as the large states perceived democracy as an outmoded legacy of antiquity leading to anarchy and despotism, inapplicable not least because it was undesirable in the modern world in which commerce was a rising force. This article tells the story of how this changed, how the understanding of ‘democracy’ was transformed during the French Revolution to represent a viable transition mechanism to a state of widespread and durable liberty. To avoid a teleological approach in the process of this analysis, this article examines the works of Condorcet on modern democracy in the context of the predicaments of the eighteenth century and the French revolutionary decade: how to avert at the same time despotism, military government and popular anarchy; and how to establish a free and stable state on the basis of modern commercial society? The history of the French Revolution is hereby placed in dialogue with that of eighteenth-century political and intellectual history. The effect is that a fresh picture of the entirety of Condorcet’s political vision emerges as his idea of democracy is studied from the viewpoint of his historical sensitivity, political economy, constitutional theory and international thoughts. In the end, Condorcet was the thinker who most significantly and prominently contributed to the post-1789 emergence of the concept of ‘democracy’ – which had thitherto been considered as the political form inevitably leading to destructive anarchy and despotic Caesarism – as a viable pathway to stability and prosperity.

This article aims to change the terms of the conversation about the ecological crisis. We argue that the human–nature dualism, a product of Enlightenment thought and primarily responsible for the ecological crisis, cannot be the basis for any meaningful solutions. We show how more recent Western imaginaries like the Anthropocene and Gaia proposed to overcome the separation of nature from culture are also based on exclusions that reflect Enlightenment rationality and legacies of colonialism. In sharp contrast, we show that Indigenous philosophies that preceded the Enlightenment by thousands of years have developed systems of knowledge based on a relational ontology that reflects profound connections between humans and nature. We demonstrate that such forms of knowledge have been systematically subjugated by Western scholarship based on arguments inspired by Enlightenment ideals of rationality and empiricism. A decolonial imagination will be able to generate new insights into understanding and addressing the ecological crisis. We therefore call for organization and management scholars to challenge the anthropomorphic biases and the economism that dominates our field through a respectful engagement with Indigenous worldviews.

This article historicizes “rigor,” discipline,” and “systematic” as inventions of a certain rational spirit of Enlightenment that was radicalized during the 19th century. These terms acquired temporary value in a transition during the 19th century when a culture of research was established within a modern episteme. Beginning in the 20th century, this development was perceived as problematic, triggering criticism from philosophy and the arts, and even within the sciences. “Discipline,” “rigor,” and “systematic” have changed meanings over time, and recent contributions from digital humanities are promising for a renewed critical debate about rigor in research. Both digital humanities and quantitative research deal with big data sets aimed at providing a large-scale analysis. However, unlike most quantitative research, digital humanities explore uncertainties as their main focus. Attention to the human-machine collaboration has led to more expansive thinking in scientific research. Digital humanities go further by advancing a metaperspective that deals with the material hermeneutics of data accumulation itself.

The modern problem caused by the Enlightenment of reducing human beings to cadavers seriously affects the image medical professionals have of their art. The world of the spirit and therefore the place of the spiritual soul should be taken into consideration even in problems of physical healings because the human being is a combination of body and spirit. The teachings of faith can contribute to this. Because of the unique attitude of Christianity to the problem of physical and spiritual healing, Christ is a special model and teacher in this.

The article aims first to elucidate the role of the Enlightenment in the creation of the notion of fair value. The courts were already defending free market prices by 1750, before the main economic thinkers, Turgot, Cantillon, and Smith formulated their views as to why public welfare was best served by freely made private bargains. It is shown that the attachment of the word “fair” to market value is attributable to Smith’s own understanding of what constitutes distributive justice. A second puzzle addressed in the article is the delay, lasting longer than a century, between the commercial and judicial acceptance of fair value and the later acceptance of it by the standard setters of the accounting profession as the primary way to value business assets and liabilities.