2. There are a few details you could quibble with in @jbouie (new scholarship* has complicated our understanding of Locke & slavery) but what he's articulating is the overwhelming mainstream consensus of historians of Enlightenment.
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14. * Footnote on Locke: this is the paper that is revising consensus on Locke & slavery. Linkage of slavery with monarchy is very interesting & suggestive:https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/122/4/1038/4320238?redirectedFrom=fulltext …
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15. I want to say one last thing about the way this Enlightenment business played out on twitter. What seems to have sparked this off is this thread by
@jbouie which offended@bdomenechhttps://twitter.com/jbouie/status/984813256345780224 …
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16.
@jbouie original thread was a response to a David Brooks column which claimed Locke (or, cagily "a story we tell about Locke") "paved the way for human equality, pluralism, democracy, capitalism" etc.pic.twitter.com/LZctq03F7k
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17. Now, Brooks claim might be defensible if it at least acknowledged all the ways Locke was not a champion of "human equality" etc. (he denied natives had land rights, was complicit in slavery, had very hedged view of Catholic civil rights, etc.)
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18. Brooks himself seems to know grand claim he's making is, in scholarly terms, bullshit. That's why he had hedge: "That belief, championed by John Locke, or a story we tell about Locke, paved the way for human equality": "a story we tell about Locke." LOL
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19. Now,
@jbouie is an extremely careful & conscientious writer with a much better grounding in scholarship than most journalists. The stuff he tweeted out was very mainstream intellectual historyShow this thread -
20. The guy who went after Bouie is Ben Domenech, a very dubious character, who was able to send chittering flying monkeys, almost all of who argued in bad faith or ignorance, to harass Bouie for a whole day. That's twitter for you.
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which, you know, the ability to improve and move forward through the dialectical movement of critique/response is an enlightenment idea!
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Yep. I'd like to think Paine, Jefferson etc would hate that they've become marble busts rather than founders of a living, evolving tradition.
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@jbouie My gut reaction is: Yeah, of course we’re talking about the fetishized Enlightenment; there’s no reason for anyone outside a very narrow grad seminar to care about the ‘historical’ one in the sense you mean it. Every era label that broad is a selective reconstruction. -
Yes! But that's exactly what the scholarship and social activism makes contested, ie, what will be the expression of "selective reconstruction" we advance in early 21st century. That's the contested terrain of historiography. We selectively reconstructed, um, Reconstruction too.
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