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.
Contesting the grounds for feminism in the Hispanic eighteenth century
Eighteenth-century intellectuals like Benito Feijoo and Josefa Amar defended women’s rights and role in society, invoking Enlightenment ideals of reason, equality, social utility, and improvement through education. By the end of the century, the extent of women’s education remained undefined and theories about women’s nature assigned them to the domestic sphere. Works about women’s education show how Enlightenment ideas about women circulated throughout the Atlantic world at the beginning of the liberal era and reflected broader anxieties about shifting power relations caused by the extension of literacy, cultural authority, and political agency to more classes of society.
The Reaction in Eighteenth-Century England to Rousseau's Two Discours
The early reactions of Englishmen to the famous works of Jean Jacques Rousseau have never been adequately studied. Jacques Pons, Louis J. Courtois, and Margaret Hill have been the only writers to present well-documented studies of any large phase of the subject; but their attention has been confined to the impact of Rousseau's pedagogical theories and to various aspects of his visit in England during the years 1766–67. Even the bibliography of Théophile A. Dufour is very incomplete in its citations of English editions. Under these circumstances, authors have generally taken refuge in assertions of tremendous and universal influence emanating from Rousseau, or they have surmised as to the effect of his works in England. The present work undertakes to provide a basis for more definite conclusions. The numerous assertions of the impetus which Rousseau is alleged to have given to the “romantic” revival of the late eighteenth century are familiar, and we know already that the diffusion of his works in England was wide. Furthermore, the first production of the French writer to excite attention there was the Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750); and, although several works intervened, including the Devin du village (1752), Narcisse (1752), and the Lettre sur la musique française (1753), the next writing to excite comment was the Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité (1755). Thus, although Rousseau's diffusion and popularity in England were due chiefly to La nouvelle Héloïse, the two Discours mark the beginning of his reputation in that country. Furthermore, the theses of these two productions have been closely associated with Rousseau. The insistence in the first Discours upon the baneful effect of modern civilization was also closely allied with the praise of primitive life in the second, and the designation of private property as the source of human inequality. Moreover, both of these productions questioned the justice of existing institutions; and Roussean himself maintained that, with Émile, they form a single entity.