The Idea Of Progress In Eighteenth Century Britain

The idea of progress stood at the very center of the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Britain, closely linked to every major facet of the British Enlightenment as well as to the economic revolutions of the period. Drawing on hundreds of eighteenth-century books and pamphlets, David Spadafora here provides the most extensive discussion ever written of this prevailing sense of historical optimism.

The idea of progress from the Enlightenment to postmodernism is still very much with us. In intellectual discourse, journals, popular magazines, and radio and talk shows, the debate between those who are "progressivists" and those who are "declinists" is as spirited as it was in the late seventeenth century. In History of the Idea of Progress, Robert Nisbet traces the idea of progress from its origins in Greek, Roman, and medieval civilizations to modern times. It is a masterful frame of reference for understanding the present world. Nisbet asserts there are two fundamental building blocks necessary to Western doctrines of human advancement: the idea of growth, and the idea of necessity. He sees Christianity as a key element in both secular and spiritual evolution, for it conveys all the ingredients of the modern idea of progress: the advancement of the human race in time, a single time frame for all the peoples and epochs of the past and present, the conception of time as linear, and the envisagement of the future as having a Utopian end. In his new introduction, Nisbet shows why the idea of progress remains of critical importance to studies of social evolution and natural history. He provides a contemporary basis for many disciplines, including sociology, economics, philosophy, religion, politics, and science. History of the Idea of Progress continues to be a major resource for scholars in all these areas.

"We may believe in the doctrine of Progress or we may not, but in either case it is a matter of interest to examine the origins and trace the history of what is now, even should it ultimately prove to be no more than an idolum saeculi, the animating and controlling idea of western civilisation." Contents: Some Interpretations of Universal History: Bodin and Le Roy Utility the End of Knowledge: Bacon Cartesianism The Doctrine of Degeneration: the Ancients and Moderns The Progress of Knowledge: Fontenelle The General Progress of Man: Abbe De Saint-Pierre New Conceptions of History: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Turgot The Encyclopaedists and Economists Was Civilisation a Mistake? Rousseau, Chastellux The Year 2440 The French Revolution: Condorcet The Theory of Progress in England German Speculations on Progress Currents of Thought in France After the Revolution The Search for a Law of Progress: "Progress" in the French Revolutionary Movement (1830-1851) Material Progress: the Exhibition of 1851 Progress in the Light of Evolution

Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. From the field of natural philosophy, involving the science of sounds and acoustics, to the realm of imagination, involving resounding music and art, the branches of modern culture that were involved in the intellectual tradition of the science of music proved to be variously appealing to men of letters. Among these, a particularly rich field of investigation was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Focussing on the world of sensation - trying to describe how the human mind could develop ideas and emotions by its means - philosophers and physicians often took their cases from art's products, be it music (sounds), painting (colours) or poetry (words as signs of sound conveying a meaning), thus looking at art from a particular point of view: that of the perceiving mind. The relationship between music and the philosophies of mind is presented here as a significant part of the construction of a Science of Man: a huge and impressive 'project' involving both the study of man's nature, to which - in David Hume's words - 'all sciences have a relation', and the creation of an ideal of what Man should be. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: a complex and articulated vision of the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'; or Musikwissenschaft.

John Bagnell Bury (1861-1927), known as J. B. Bury, was an eminent Irish historian, classical scholar, Byzantinist and philologist. Bury was born and raised in Clontibret, County Monaghan. He was educated first by his parents, then at Foyle College in Derry and Trinity College in Dublin, where he graduated in 1882 and was made a fellow in 1885. In 1893 he gained a chair in modern history at Trinity College, which he held for nine years, thereafter joining the Cambridge University. Bury's writings, on subjects ranging from ancient Greece to the 19th-century papacy, are at once scholarly and accessible to the layman. His two works on the philosophy of history elucidated the Victorian ideals of progress and rationality which undergirded his more specific histories. He also led a revival of Byzantine history, which English-speaking historians, following Edward Gibbon, had largely neglected. He contributed to, and was himself the subject of an article in, the 1911 Encyclopdia Britannica. Among his most famous works are: A History of Freedom of Thought (1914) and The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (1920).

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