Minerva's Message: Stabilizing the French Revolution

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McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1996 - History - 342 pages
In theory the CMPS was set up to enshrine the human and social studies that were at the heart of Enlightenment culture. Staum illustrates, however, that the Institute helped transform key ideas of the Enlightenment in order to maintain civil rights while upholding social stability, and that the social and political assumptions on which it was based affected notions of social science. He traces the careers of individual members and the factions within the Institute, arguing that the discord within the CMPS reflects the unravelling of Enlightenment culture. Minerva's Message presents a valuable overview of the intellectual life of the period and brings together new evidence about the social sciences in their nascent period.
 

Contents

Intellectuals Revolution and the Social Sciences
3
Enlightenment Social Science Models
19
Change and Continuity
33
Advice to Government and Prize Contests
56
The Public Image of the Institute and the Decline
78
Indelible Temperament and Condillacs Uncertain
95
A Science of Morality
118
Philosophical History and Political Discord
136
Rights Utility and Political Institutions
172
Towards the Political Economy of Commercial Society
191
Suppression and Resurrection of an Academy
211
Joseph Lakanals List of Nominees for
231
Prize Contests of the Class of Moral
244
Bibliography
301
Index
333
Copyright

Correlating Climate Culture
154

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About the author (1996)

Martin S. Staum is professor emeritus of history, University of Calgary, and author of Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race and Empire, 1815-1848 and Minerva's Message: Stabilizing the French Revolution.

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