Border crossing with Rousseau: Emile and Francisco de Miranda's Tour of the United States, 1783–1784
Abstract Drawing on Charles W.J. Withers's analysis of the transnational geographies of Enlightenment culture, this essay reconsiders the early Atlantic border crossings of Francisco de Miranda, forerunner of Latin American independence, in relation to Emile, Jean Jacques Rousseau's revolutionary work on education. During his time as an officer in Cádiz, Spain, Miranda participated in the circulation and reading of Rousseau, extending a network of readers who challenged the Inquisition's criminalization of forbidden books in what might be called a shadow public sphere. Miranda's travel diary of his journey through the United States, Diario del Viaje por los Estados Unidos de América del Norte (The Diary of Francisco de Miranda: Tour of the United States, 1783–1784) shows how he transculturated Rousseau's theories on empiricism, travel and education, and political maturation to develop a secular creole epistemology that ushered and affirmed his vision of independence, and his entry into the larger Enlightenment republic of letters as a self-identified American. Miranda thus enacted a model of traveling knowledge-making that paralleled and diverged from the work of Jesuits such as Francisco Clavijero and others who, as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra shows, developed patriotic epistemologies within religious frameworks.
Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family
Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family. By Eileen Hunt Botting. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 258p. $65.00. This book reminds us of the importance of theorizing the family/state relationship. Eileen Hunt Botting argues that while Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke proposed different versions of a patriarchal structuring of the family in contrast to Mary Wollstonecraft's egalitarian version, the three eighteenth-century theorists shared a view of the function of the family as providing the relational and moral foundations for the state. To relate as a father, husband, son, wife, sister, or daughter was to learn how to sympathize, and to work for a common purpose, both of which were absolutely necessary for developing patriotic feelings and civic virtue. The significance of the book goes beyond taking us back to the Enlightenment origins of the notion of the family as an agent of political socialization. It raises crucial questions about Wollstonecraft's status as a canonical democratic theorist; it also suggests fascinating implications for how political theory could make a contribution to our contemporary conversations on gay families, religion and the family, and the clash of civilizations and the family.
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.