Reviews for Communities of discourse

The average rating for Communities of discourse based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-04-19 00:00:00 Roby John An excellent and thought-provoking book, very well-written. Daniel Gordon tries to show that "sociability" became an ideological alternative to politics for eighteenth-century French citizens. Living under an authoritarian government, French intellectuals carved a space for equality and progress without directly challenging the hierarchy and absolutism of their state. The language of sociability, according to Gordon, originated with the elite. It emerged from the etiquette manuals of early modern courtiers, who endeavored to make their discourse pleasing to others. It entered politics when theorists of absolutism employed it as an alternative to Hobbesian contractualism; latent sociability justified the rule of a benign monarch. Enlightenment philosophes then endeavored to expand the realm of politeness (i.e., self-policing), the realm in which egalitarian exchange could take place without the monarch's coercive oversight. Some, particularly those following the Scottish Enlightenment model, employed a theory of overall social progress that tied politeness to other forms of exchange, including modern trade. Without attacking royal sovereignty, these philosophes marginalized it, locating meaning in other forms of human relation instead. Thus they liberated themselves without destroying the old order. There was a dangerous tension, however, between the methods of sociability and the methods of practical politics. The ethic of consultation was at odds with the ethic of political will. The French Revolution demonstrated this clearly when the Terror put an end to the "Age of Sociability," replacing it with a different sort of egalitarian age -- an intolerant and coercive one. Those who had championed social exchange now had to look to private property, i.e., to the sanctity of individual rights, for a hedge on the will of the state. Gordon mourns this loss but thinks it is a permanent one. Public opinion in the modern era simply doesn't work in the deliberative, tolerant way the philosophes hoped. "It strikes me," he writes, "[...] that the spirit of sociability is at odds with modern culture in a variety of ways that militate against any effort to revive it on the scale envisioned in prerevolutionary Europe. Society, in other words, is dead."

Review # 2 was written on 2013-10-20 00:00:00 Robert Moore Read this work after coming across it in Alan Jacobs' new book "Breaking Bread with the Dead, so I decided to give it a go. Not a bad book, although I was expecting more in the way of history and comparison between Washington and Cincinnatus, we got more sculpture and painting history of the Founding Fathers...SLT