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This article reconstructs the influence of Jesuit missionary writings focusing on China on the emergence of a distinctive conception of toleration. The article highlights the often neglected contributions of Pierre Bayle. After a brief reconstruction of key elements of the Sino‐European encounter, such as the Kangxi Emperor's edict of toleration, the paper describes how Bayle's interpretation of the China Mission contributed to a critique of religious persecution in France and enabled him to develop a defense of a rationalist approach to toleration. The article demonstrates that Bayle's knowledge of China and his methodology of intercultural changes in perspective contributed to the development of an original conception of reciprocal toleration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the significance of engaging in intercultural reversals of perspectives by reconstructing Voltaire's reflections on the relationship between China and Europe. It highlights the ensuing ethics of universal religious tolerance in this civilizational comparison. Voltaire employed China as a heuristic model primarily to criticize the intolerance and fanaticism of French Catholics. He also used the methodology of intercultural reversals of perspectives to articulate his arguments for universal religious toleration. This paper's focus on the philosophical reception of China reveals the emergence of what we call "intercultural self‐critique" and an important conception of religious toleration during the European Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nils von Rosenstein's Försök til en afhandling om uplysningen, til dess beskaffenhet, nytta och nödvändighet för samhället (An Attempt at a Dissertation on the Enlightenment, its Character, Usefulness and Necessity for Society), published in 1793, presents an unusually comprehensive theory of 'the Enlightenment' (Upplysningen) from a contemporary of the period. This article explores the impact of Enlightenment ideas in late eighteenth-century Sweden through the case study of Rosenstein and his remarkable text. While deepening our understanding of the Enlightenment in Sweden, it also expands our knowledge of the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment abroad, the scholarship on which has been mainly focused on Germany. Sweden is further shown to be a fruitful case study for considering the politicization of the late Enlightenment independently of the French Revolution. The French Revolution formed a key part of the political backdrop to the publication of the Dissertation, but its intellectual content was more indebted to the Scottish Enlightenment. Rosenstein's pragmatic and contextual approach to politics is often explained away by the precarious climate after Gustav III's assassination. Instead, this article shows that it is better understood as a style of thought which Rosenstein had in common with the leading thinkers of eighteenth-century Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyze the complex construction of sexual difference in Spain during the eighteenth and at the turn of the nineteenth century. Accordingly, a combined analysis is performed on the religious discourse of traditionalist Catholicism and that of the country's Enlightenment currents, plus their evolution, for they were the main perspectives from which the models of femininity and masculinity were constructed at the time. The intention is to demonstrate that the conceptualization of sexual difference in the transition to modernity was a convoluted process in which, notwithstanding the fact that they involved a key change in the way of understanding the body, gender and the relationship between the sexes, the Enlightenment's visions did not replace anti-modern religious discourses. Quite to the contrary, it is contended here that those models coexisted precariously in the protracted dissolution of the old, absolutist regime, which requires examining them under a relational prism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voltaire's writings advance an emblematic understanding of reason in the French Enlightenment, envisaged as a divine gift that makes it possible for humans to put anything into question – except reason itself. Through a reading of various philosophical and literary texts by Voltaire, this article problematizes the sovereignty of Voltairean reason – the totalitarian reason that is at once immune to the very critique it founds and, as such, injurious towards the Other, who is seen as necessarily lacking the capacity to think. Bringing Derrida to bear on Voltaire, the article builds on the former's view of reason as divisible and antinomic – that is, a reason constituted according to an aporia that admits both a teleological and conditional reason and a circular and unconditional one. As such, reason must then allow itself to be reasoned. The conclusion thus argues for a reconceptualization of reason that welcomes a critique of both sovereign judgement and teleological thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Folklore Studies / Tautosakos Darbai is the property of Institute of Lithuanian Literature & Folklore and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This review article considers new books by Karen Green on Catharine Macaulay (1731-91) alongside Rachel Hammersley's introduction to the longue durée history of republicanism. The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay allows us to understand the historian and political writer in her own terms as opposed to a representative of a supposedly coherent commonwealth or republican tradition, as she has often been viewed since the work of Caroline Robbins and J. G. A. Pocock. Green's intellectual biography emphasises the religious nature of Macaulay's understanding of both republicanism and the Enlightenment. These publications can be beneficially read together with Hammersley's new book, which contends that republicanism has been a multifarious and contested concept from antiquity to the present day. The seventeenth-century commonwealth canon was constructed and made coherent by John Toland half a century after the English Revolution, and by Macaulay's friend Thomas Hollis in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. As Green's work reminds us, meanwhile, the natural law tradition of John Locke and Christian eudaimonism were as important as John Milton and James Harrington for Macaulay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper offers an overview of French organizational leadership by looking at its power sources (inputs), consequences (outcomes), and a triad model. We found that having connections with powerful entities such as top management and the Grandes écoles is the main source of French leadership as these connections confer strong legitimacy, which is an important notion in the French leadership process. Hierarchical, honour-based, and ends-over-means styles of leadership are proposed as a triad model for French leadership. While French leadership focuses heavily on results as outcomes, French management can be either participative or closed, depending on the role of the leader. Enlightenment ideology since the time of the French Revolution may explain the overall characteristics of French leadership from a historical and cultural context. The overview of French leadership in our paper is developed from 31 in-depth interviews with mid- to high-level (ex-) managers who shared their perspectives and experience both as leaders and as followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the "messy side" of Enlightenment, treating periodicals as a major index of this messy side. While periodicals have been relegated to ancillary role in understanding autonomous aesthetics, canonical literature and the public sphere, I examine them from a different angle. By working with the database Zeitschriften der Aufklärung, digital humanities and conventional reading methods, I relate "translation" and "review" to one another, and to questions about original authorship, as well as small or domineering genres of literature. The article shows that, by looking beyond causal relationships and instead paying attention to the traces that translators and reviewers left behind in periodicals, we can gain new insights into the broad, and messy, contours of reading and the Enlightenment public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of MEMLEKET: Politics & Administration / Siyaset Yönetim is the property of Local Governments Research, Assistance & Education Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Between 1790 and 1794, Spanish and English expeditions to Nootka Bay reported two very different accounts of cannibalistic activities among the Nuu-cha-nulth. The British vividly described cannibalistic practices, whereas the Spanish observers claimed that the Nootka no longer practiced cannibalism. Many historians and anthropologists use these reports to debate the existence or absence of cannibalism among native peoples in the Pacific Northwest. This article argues that the differences reveal more about European concepts of race, culture, and society than whether cannibalism existed on the Northwest Coast. These differences capture the transition from past interpretations to Enlightenment ideals juxtaposed with national interests, highlighting how Spain and England saw their role in shaping the history of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critical response to Amy Allen's The End of Progress: Decolonising the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. We take up her book's call for a "problematizing" history which challenges "taken-for-granted" preconceptions in order to contest Allen's own representation of the thought of the enlightenment. Allen accepts that all the enlighteners agreed upon a stadial, progressive account of history, which she critiques epistemically and normatively (Part 1). But we show in Part 2, drawing on the work of Henri Vyverberg and other historians of eighteenth century ideas, that a cyclical, rise and fall account of historical succession was more prominent than the progressive narrative in leading enlighteners such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert, Condillac, Jancourt, Grimm, and Raynal, all of whom Allen does not mention. In Part 3, we show that not all thinkers of the enlightenment were pro-colonial or pro-imperialist, as Allen also presupposes in The End of Progress. By examining Abbé Raynal's History of The Two Indies in Part 3, and notably its Diderotian interpolations, we show that many enlighteners propounded fierce criticisms of European colonialism and the slave trade, even calling directly for armed resistance against European infractions. In critical theorists' search for chastened normative foundations, our concluding remarks contend, there is a need to develop more accurate, balanced, post-postmodern reckonings of the enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the research is to identify the suppositions and factors that form the base of the enlightenment model of the leisure activities. Methodology of the research lies in the usage of a set of systemic, historical and chronological and hermeneutical methods. Scientific novelty of the research is grounded with the origin of the pragmatic approach to the assessment of the leisure activities and leisure practices in the period of Enlightenment. Conclusions. It is proved that the formation of the Enlightenment model of the leisure activities was influenced by such tendencies as the acknowledgement of the leading role of science among other kinds of cognitive activity and the cult of Mind, absolutization of education that formed the belief in the possibility of solving social problems, provided the appropriate conditions for this; deism and secularization of worldview, which led to the denial of religious fanaticism and blind faith in to Church dogmas; social stratification of society. That's why there were dominated such leisure practices that were aimed at the objective cognition of the reality and were based onto the pragmatic ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Among various approaches to intellectual processes in history we can find some space for new aspects of the history of visuality, including emblem studies.The visual part of the emblem depends on the conceptual description, and its artistic value or the quality of its image is not as important as its textual part. We can compare this with the calligraphic status of handwriting, or the particular configuration and style of a typeface. They are not important for the content of the text, although we can include them in our consideration. Paradoxically, the textual part of the emblem usually contains visual descriptions as explanations and can completely replace the image. The sustained connection between an image and a description of an emblem allows us to give it the status of a concept. In this paper, I use examples from the Russian emblematic discourse of the Enlightenment to contextualise an illustrated edition of the poetry of Gavriil Derzhavin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Enlightenment is a period that could be described as a time of phenomena and process that appeared in Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century. What the eighteenth century brought about in Poland was an intensification of social prestige in such areas as science and education. These changes were mainly affected by the then-ruling King Stanislaw August, whose initiatives resulted in keeping active contacts with the artistic and scientific environments from other countries. Hundreds of translations of the most outstanding works by foreign authors began appearing in Poland and became highly popular. Based on an analysis of 17 works by Western European authors translated between 1740 and 1830, these Enlightenment texts penetrated Polish pedagogical theories and impacted the development of modern physical education. The texts reveal the role and importance of physical education as presented by European philosophers in Polish-language publications at the time, and chronicle those European countries from which the most significant information on intellectual trends in the field of modern physical education flowed into Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the manifestations of sentimentalism and triviality and with the problem of the preromanticism in the German literature of the late Enlightenment. Traditionally, such problems are analyzed in the literary studies apart from "high" literature. It is important to comprehend the nature of preromanticism as a distinct and remarkable phenomenon of the eighteenth-century literature (and not as an early stage of romanticism), the existence of which during several decades proved its vitality and uniqueness. Triviality, in its turn, existed as a part of the culture in G.E. Lessing's time, that is, to a great extent before Goethe. It should be marked that triviality had been manifested in literature long before the Enlightenment. Traditional and repeated themes and plots may be the markers of triviality as a cultural phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two hundred and twenty years after the French Revolution, the problem of defining the concept of the Enlightenment still persists. Considering the lack of agreement over the defining features of this movement or epoch, our aim is to show that it has never been fully and clearly defined and understood. The author therefore suggests making a distinction between enlightenment (enlightening) and the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment as a period linked to 18th century Europe, can be understood as part of a broader process of enlightenment or enlightening. The Enlightenment should not be viewed as a homogenous whole, an integral process, but as a (still living) tissue, that still exerts considerable influence on Western thought and culture. The author argues, however, that the accusations of projecting or inventing the Enlightenment have not proved very useful, because they interfere with our understanding of this complex phenomenon and important movement in European history.

In this article problem of the Enlightenment is analyzed through the contest among the historical-descriptive and the philosophical-normative approach to the Enlightenment, that has essentially practical-polemical sense in author’s opinion. The author reconstructs this contest in the following way. Until the half of 20th century, the philosophical-normative concept of the Enlightenment, which was constructed by critics and enemies of the Enlightenment under the decisive influence of Hegel’s philosophy, was dominate. Since the Enlightenment is essentially disqualified by this approach, an attempt of its defense is directed at the historical study of the Enlightenment intending to be shown that the philosophical normative conception of the Enlightenment is construct of its critics which don’t correspond to historical facts. The author emphasizes that a rejection of the philosophical-normative approach, which reconstruct the Enlightenment through a certain synthetic principle, and an examination of the Enlightenment as historical phenomenon, result in a destruction of the very concept of the Enlightenment and a risk of the loss of meaning. The author considers that the failure of the historical-descriptive approach to the Enlightenment is evident because it reaffirms a constructivistic approach, that was the fundamental objection to the philosophical-normative approach. In the concluding part of the article, the author proposes a solution of the conceptual problem of the Enlightenment through the conceptual distinguishing of the Enlightenment, as a historical phenomenon, and enlightenment, as a intellectual activity and process. In that case, the Enlightenment would represent only a part of the more comprehensive problem of enlightenment in that the Enlightenment’s and the Counter-Enlightenment’s conceptions of enlightenment are moments no more in the "dialectic of the Enlightenment", but in the "dialectic of enlightenment".

Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article analyses the cultural state of mind characteristic of historical periods at some kind of endpoint: the end of a world or even of the world or, most hypothetically, of the universe. This is the idea of Last Days. In order to contextualize it, it is necessary to consider varying conceptions of temporality: a hunter-gatherer model, models of cyclical time and of linear time. At least in the West, this last may be understood as a product of Judaeo-Christian thinking, of which the article gives an account focussed on the motifs of eschatology, apocalypse and messianism. Finally the article proposes that the present moment in history, characterized as "Post-Modernity", may readily be read as a time of endings, perhaps even of a conclusive end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay presents a postcolonial, ecocritical reading of Australian author David Malouf's celebrated novel,An imaginary life(1978). By now an important name in contemporary postcolonial literature, Malouf has yet to be discussed as an author who attempts to explode both colonialandhuman-centred myths and tropes in a manner that promotes a linguistically sensitive, body- and nature-centred vision. As this essay will argue, Malouf's writing, in its critique of Enlightenment values that have led to the racial classification of humans and modernity's dismissal of the importance of the environment, advances a unique postcolonial and ecological aesthetic. One way in whichAn imaginary lifeinterrogates Enlightenment values is through its interest in the figure of the “feral child”, a “discovery” or construction of the Enlightenment era itself. The term “feral child” derives from Linnaeus's category “Homo ferus”, appearing in the tenth edition of hisSystema naturae(The system of nature). Classified alongside Linnaeus's racial human categories (likeHomo AferandHomo Europaeus),Homo ferusemerges concurrently with the colonial obsession with racial “otherness”. For Malouf, however, the feral human eludes the categorisation of taxonomy specifically and language in general: blurring the “human” and “nature”, it undermines the scientific classification of humankind, and without language, it embodies the possibility of human being-in-nature beyond the influence of symbolic enculturation. InAn imaginary life, the wordless immersion of the feral child in the environment allegorises the novel's intention – to produce another form of language, a poetic, allusive language transcending classification and chronology, and enacting the unification of the “human” and the “natural”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: This article on the autobiographies by two Somali feminist activists, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Waris Dirie, argues that the experience of some post-colonial Muslim women in western diaspora redefines women's autobiography, modernity, Muslim femininity and feminist critique in surprising new ways. Informed by theories of women's and post-colonial autobiography, alternative modernities and cosmopolitanism, this study proposes that for some African Muslim women who have never been modern, Enlightenment notions of selfhood might be at least as useful as postmodernity and feminism, offering them a crucial opportunity to reconstruct themselves as free, rational and autonomous subjects after their emigration to the western world. It is further argued that these authors redefine the Enlightenment understanding of selfhood in line with feminism and postmodernism, proposing a new vision of the female subject of the developing world rising towards modernity that has been denied to her, through engagement with the ideas of the free, rational subject as well as the irrational and libidinal. The authors' gestures of reaching for the foreign narratives of the west are associated with radical cosmopolitanism, in opposition to their culture, which refuses to accept otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The different opinions on prejudice and judgment lead to the long-standing dispute between the Enlighteners and the Romanticists. Gadamer carrys on the pre-prejudiced theory of German romanticism, and endows it with a legal position. Gadamer's transcendence of German romanticism lies in adopting the ontological hermeneutics of existentialism and considering the issue of prejudice from a historical perspective. Based on his non-critical pre-comprehension, Gadamer criticizes the Enlightenment and the theory of judgment. His critical attitude towards the two brings about a logical paradox. Only by reexamining the epistemic rationality on the basis of practice, can people obtain the dialectical plan to resolve this paradox, the real cognition and the better way to exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article deals with the issue of The Transylvanian School, including it in the European movement of the Enlightenment. It starts with its general characteristics and continues with those of Romanian culture, especially those of Transylvania. The importance of The Transylvanian School had an impact on several domains, the evolution of Romanian culture and literature in a most decisive way, promoting the idea of emancipation among the Romanian people and recognition of its rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay attempts to identify and illuminate one of the religious bases of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers assumed that the secular world was governed by rational laws and rules, which could be understood by the use of reason. They sought to identify the laws of the physical and moral world through experience and reason. However, this empiricism alone does not logically need to lead to another assumption, that is, the idea of the rationality of the world. The latter assumption has many origins. Here, I would like to concentrate on one of them, that is, the transformation of deism. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries deists assumed that the world was rational, an aspect that the Enlightenment thinkers agreed with. In addition, the deists were very eager to prove the existence of God, a goal that the Enlightenment thinkers did not, by and large, agree with. Thus, the Enlightenment thinkers presupposed an agnostic-rational view of the world that depended greatly on the ideas of deism but with which the deists themselves could not agree. For this situation to arise, it seems that the Enlightenment must have necessarily been preceded by the transformation of deism, or some part of it, into an agnostic philosophy. I will consider this aspect with reference to the work of Bolingbroke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Structuralism is considered as a milestone in the critics of the enlightenment. Mohammed Abid al-Cabiri considers structuralism a proper method in order to analyze Arab/Islamic culture. He speaks of a homogenous cultural unity by this method. This unity consists of three main components, beyan, irfan and burhan. In his opinion Arab/Islamic culture is currently in a crisis in consequence of forming these three components by ideological concerns in conflictive and syncretic manner. He considers irrationality the main factor of this crisis. He uses structuralism with a strategic purpose to expose how the system of epistemological paradigms of these components was build and to go to deconstruct it. By this way he tries to reveal how the rationalism is left out of the system in Arab/Islamic culture. Cabiri aims to realize a modern revision of Arab/Islamic culture by forming relationship between enlightenmental rationalism and the tradition. However he doesn't debate dilemmas of the enlightenment and ignores critiques of the enlightenment by the means of structuralism and deconstruction. He has great expectations on the ideals of the enlightenment and modernism. In this meaning one can say him an enlightenmentalist. The unquestionable meaning that he ascribed reason means a reproduction of western conception of the reason and history and a legitimation of orientalist discourse by a person who lives in a non-western culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In several lectures, interviews and essays from the early 1980s, Michel Foucault startlingly argues that he is engaged in a kind of critical work that is similar to that of Immanuel Kant. Given Foucault's criticisms of Kantian and Enlightenment emphases on universal truths and values, his declaration that his work is Kantian seems paradoxical. I agree with some commentators who argue that this is a way for Foucault to publicly acknowledge to his critics that he is not, as some of them charge, attempting a total critique of Enlightenment beliefs and values, but is instead attempting to transform them from within. I argue further that Foucault's self-professed Kantianism can also productively be read as a means of encouraging change in his intellectual audience, a call to courage to take up the thread of Enlightenment thought that Foucault finds in Kant's essay, 'What is Enlightenment?': that of directing one's philosophical efforts towards questioning and transforming one's own present in its historical specificity, for the sake of promoting the values of freedom and autonomy therein. Though much of Kant's philosophical work is focused on that which lies outside of history, Foucault locates in some of it a concern for what is happening here and now that, I argue, he encourages his audience to take up for themselves through tracing his own intellectual lineage to Kant. In so doing, he encourages contemporary philosophers to consider the value and effects of their work on the present social and political contexts in which they live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Knowledge of God for persons with intellectual disabilities: an impossible oxymoron? This paper proposes to further the work of disability theology by engaging with the doctrine of revelation-the Christian doctrine that describes matters regarding knowledge of God. Karl Barth's concept of co-humanity is considered alongside Michael Polanyi' s understanding of tacit knowledge so as to begin to conceive of ways forward for persons with intellectual disabilities, away from Enlightenment-informed theories of knowledge, towards a theologically informed conception of knowledge of God. Further, this paper suggests that the use of the imagination and the arts may act as a hermeneutic of sorts for communication with persons with intellectual disabilities. The theology and epistemology of Barth and Polanyi, combined with more creative forms of communication, result in a theory of knowledge of God that is truly inclusive for the whole Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates sixty-three patriotic societies established in the Danish conglomerate state during the Age of Enlightenment, since they can throw light on the pre-national collective identities. It explains how the patriotic societies had both an external function in regard to society and an internal function among their members. It analyses how the members comprehended patriotism and how they propagated ideas of solidarity and good citizenship to a wider audience. The patriotism of the eighteenth century is also compared with the nationalism of the nineteenth century, and the way they reflect two different understandings of core concepts such as state, language and folk culture is explained. However, both ideologies correlate to modernity, since they reflect the same dialectic tension in the relationship between the individual, the social community and the modern state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of this article addresses some of the semantic and conceptual problems that plague the terms the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment to tidy up their use and clarify their meaning. The second part assesses some of the most common and important criticisms that have been made of the Enlightenment by its enemies since the 18th century. It concludes that although the portraits of the Enlightenment that have been sketched by its enemies during the course of the centuries are often crude caricatures or grotesque distortions, they have scored some palpable hits against it, making it very hard for us to swallow the Enlightenment whole now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scottish enlightened culture originated in an awareness of various educational prejudices, including religious, patriotic, and linguistic ones. Overcoming them placed Scottish writers ahead of European philosophy in the central decades of the eighteenth century. Through their involvement in the contemporary debate on sensibility, the Scots set about recovering the fragments left of the Scottish past. However, this interest eventually involved a dissociation of the national past from the idea of progress, which in the nineteenth century led to a separation of the country's history and literature from notions of scientific and academic success. Therefore, Scotland's historical culture, which formerly had been an essential ingredient of the Enlightenment, was regarded as legendary, gendered as "feminine," and relegated to the sphere of fancy. Religion regained control of Scottish universities and Scotland became a land of romance, rather than a model of cultural progress as in the age of Voltaire and Hume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anthropological sensibility has often been seen as growing out of opposition to Enlightenment universalism. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is often cited as an ancestor of modern cultural relativism, in which cultures exist in the plural. This article argues that Herder's anthropology, and anthropology generally, are more closely related to Enlightenment thought than is generally considered. Herder certainly attacks Enlightenment abstraction, the arrogance of its Eurocentric historical teleology, and argues the case for a proto-hermeneutical approach which emphasizes embeddedness, horizon, the usefulness of prejudice. His suspicion of the ideology of progress and of associated theories of stadial development leads to a critique of cosmopolitanism and, particularly, of colonialism. But a comparison with a central Enlightenment figure like the natural historian Buffon (1708–88) reveals shared anthropological assumptions: human beings are characterized by the flexibility of their relationship to their environment, and by their ability to transmit and receive social knowledge. Herder's critique of progress is thus an unstable one: culture [Kultur] as the process through which humanity develops can also be called Enlightenment [Aufklärung]. Herder's definition of culture is much closer to a unitary Enlightenment model of civilization than is frequently suggested. Herder's relativism is thus open to question: he holds on to certain universal criteria for transcultural judgements. This reassessment of Herder's place in Enlightenment anthropology raises questions of contemporary relevance regarding cultural relativism on the one hand, and modernization and globalization on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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