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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
It has been perhaps half a century since an historian could make a reputation by solemnly affirming, against the established nineteenth-century belief, the congeniality of history to eighteenth-century thinking. Hence the familiar, unrevised approach to eighteenth-century historiography is not the archaic notion of its essentially anti-historical character but rather the subsequent scheme, popularized by Carl Becker in the early 1930s, which acknowledged the importance of “the new history” in the philosophes' “heavenly city.” According to this scheme, “the new history” was an integral production of the philosophes' intellectual enterprise because it was “philosophy teaching by example”—because, that is, it was associated with the philosophes' own religiosity, which was negatively related to the traditional doctrine of a Christian dispensation.
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21. Klempt, Adalbert, Die Säkularisierung der universalhistorischen Auffassung: Zum Wandel des Geschichtsdenkens im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1960);Google Scholar Klempt has more recently (in 1969) repeated the argument in Randa, Alexander, ed., Munsch und Weltgeschichte, pp. 222–223.Google Scholar
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55. Thus Manuel: “Eighteenth-century writers were notoriously oblique; ideas of the gods often covered other concerns.” Ibid., p. viii.
56. See the argument that the shift from the natural theology of the late seventeenth century to the religion of reason in the eighteenth, a shift associated with the development from Newton to Priestley, was a shift associated with the change from the belief in the passivity to the belief in the activity of nature and with the change of beliefs from the voluntarism to the immanence of God rather than with a diminution in the subscription to divine causality, in Heiman, P. M., “Voluntarism and Immanence: Conceptions of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas (1978) 39: 272–273.Google Scholar
