Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, Harvard University, and Director of the University Library, Harvard University.
A great book about an even greater book is a rare event in publishing. Darnton's history of the Encyclopédie is such an occasion. The author explores some fascinating territory in the French genre of histoire du livre, and at the same time he tracks the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. He is concerned with the form of the thought of the great philosophes as it materialized into books and with the way books were made and distributed in the business of publishing. This is cultural history on a broad scale, a history of the process of civilization.
In tracing the publishing story of Diderot's Encyclopédie, Darnton uses new sources--the papers of eighteenth-century publishers--that allow him to respond firmly to a set of problems long vexing historians. He shows how the material basis of literature and the technology of its production affected the substance and diffusion of ideas. He fully explores the workings of the literary market place, including the roles of publishers, book dealers, traveling salesmen, and other intermediaries in cultural communication. How publishing functioned as a business, and how it fit into the political as well as the economic systems of prerevolutionary Europe are set forth. The making of books touched on this vast range of activities because books were products of artisanal labor, objects of economic exchange, vehicles of ideas, and elements in political and religious conflict.
The ways ideas traveled in early modern Europe, the level of penetration of Enlightenment ideas in the society of the Old Regime, and the connections between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution are brilliantly treated by Darnton. In doing so he unearths a double paradox. It was the upper orders in society rather than the industrial bourgeoisie or the lower classes that first shook off archaic beliefs and took up Enlightenment ideas. And the state, which initially had suppressed those ideas, ultimately came to favor them. Yet at this high point in the diffusion and legitimation of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution erupted, destroying the social and political order in which the Enlightenment had flourished.
Never again will the contours of the Enlightenment be drawn without reference to this work. Darnton has written an indispensable book for historians of modern Europe.
發表於2024-10-03
The Business of Enlightenment 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
大多數關於《百科全書》的研究,關注的通常它的思想內容,而時間則截止於初版28捲全部齣齊的1772年,而對於其齣版、流通的過程則研究甚少。這往往會給我們造成一種錯覺,即,作為啓濛運動中最大、也是最重要的齣版物,《百科全書》是自為的,它一經齣版就立刻融入瞭啓濛運...
評分 評分《百科全書》的齣版發行一開始就是與商業行為緊密聯係在一起的,眾多的商人齣於牟利的目的,或者還有人同時對啓濛運動本身懷有興趣,他們既是知識的熱心讀者,同時也是齣版商印刷商,數個角色兼於一身,他們嗅齣瞭《百科全書》因其巨大的啓濛性知識性所帶來的巨大商機,他們賺...
評分 評分作為史書,比《中國齣版業發展史》這樣的教材體強多瞭。 作為商戰實錄,比《李嘉誠傳》和“商場小說”強多瞭。 在圖書館苦苦摺騰兩個下午,最後覺得沒白耗費腦細胞。但由此衍生齣幾個外行人關於齣版業的想法: 1。從《幻滅》中可以得知,至少在巴爾紮剋時代,書都不是定價,...
圖書標籤: Robert_Darnton 需藉 社會史 法國 政治 思想史 啓濛 middle
The Business of Enlightenment 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載