Description
"American Enlightenment" argues that the European conquest of America and the development of the Atlantic slave system provided the necessary preconditions for the subsequent intellectual innovations of the Enlightenment era--and that writings out of America provided the pre-texts for modern Western philosophy. It proceeds from a series of streamlined, suggestive close readings, paired with foundational texts of Enlightenment philosophy with roughly contemporaneous foundational texts of Anglo-American colonization. These case studies are arranged chronologically, spanning from the turn of the seventeenth century to the turn of the nineteenth. This first half is concerned with English texts exclusively, putting writings from Virginia, New England, and Carolina directly into conversation with Bacon, Hobbes and Locke; the later case studies expand scope to consider works of continental philosophy as well. The subject of investigation in each section is not Enlightenment theory itself so much as how it is able to be conceived and articulated: what sorts of figures and language authors employ in order to craft their New Thought. This methodology positions this work at an intersection between literary history--the history of modes of expression--and the history of ideas. "American Enlightenment" is, thus, also intended as a showcase of what philological interpretation--seen by general readers in the past several decades as increasingly arcane and irrelevant--has to offer to the broadest reaches of humanistic inquiry.
