The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism
by Adrian Wooldridge · 7 Apr 2026 · 342pp · 129,097 words
discover the truth through intellectual combat. The boundaries of the debate were broadened by the humanists during the Renaissance, who posited the existence of a ‘republic of letters’ which operated according to more tolerant rules than the republic of regular people, and by the philosophes during the Enlightenment. The justification for the debate
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38–48, 175–6, 259 See also individual religion and church name Renaissance 8, 25, 36, 40, 200 rent-seeking 140, 147, 203–6, 255 ‘republic of letters’ 40–41 Republican Party, US xi, xiii, xiv, 27, 85, 103, 156–8, 169–71, 190, 198, 207, 248, 252, 264–5, 268, 298–9
A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
by Joel Mokyr · 8 Jan 2016 · 687pp · 189,243 words
10: Cultural Change and the Growth of Useful Knowledge, 1500–1700 142 Chapter 11: Fragmentation, Competition, and Cultural Change 165 Chapter 12: Competition and the Republic of Letters 179 Part IV: Prelude to the Enlightenment Chapter 13: Puritanism and British Exceptionalism 227 Chapter 14: A Culture of Progress 247 Chapter 15: The Enlightenment
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(briefly) with Huygens, Leibniz, and Johann Bernoulli, and was universally regarded quite early on as an international scientific superstar, the most successful citizen of the Republic of Letters. As Westfall (1980, pp. 472–73) notes, the two most prominent intellectuals on the Continent, Christiaan Huygens and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, had initial doubts
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off scholarly communication with people of different religious convictions, because such “restrictions could only hamper the flow of information and ideas.” Moreover, citizens of the Republic of Letters argued against religious persecution, a voice that became louder as wars of religion increasingly showed themselves to be destructive and pointless after 1562. Prominent citizens
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of the Republic of Letters, from Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563) to Spinoza to Voltaire, argued for religious tolerance and against the persecution of apostates (Zagorin, 2003).20 Even scholars
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increasingly common, and the outcomes were determined by evidence, logic, and other cultural biases. Contestability and skepticism of received wisdom, the hallmarks of the Republic of Letters, found their way into the writings of intellectuals of many stripes and nationalities, from Michel de Montaigne to Giordano Bruno to Thomas Browne. All of
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culture of intellectuals at the time. 26 Equally interesting, merchant accounts and letters served as sources of information for many well-connected members of the Republic of Letters interested in geography, history, botany, and many other areas in which knowledge from foreign countries was accumulating. Especially Peiresc, well-connected and enormously erudite
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clearly located in formal organizations—the Royal Society, the French Royal Academy, and the many Continental academies founded in the eighteenth century.4 The Republic of Letters was the institution that resolved the problem of rewarding creative individuals for efforts and talent and above all for originality and creativity. Competitive patronage was
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commercialization and the growth of medium- and long-distance trade. The improvements in shipping and other transport technologies were key to the expansion of the Republic of Letters. Reputations and correspondence networks were strongly complementary: intellectuals measured themselves by their ability to communicate with the superstars of the scholarly world. D’Alembert,
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to create conditions that were conducive for sustained knowledge creation. The community in question was known in its time as the Respublica Literaria or the Republic of Letters, an institution already encountered repeatedly. It has received a great deal of attention from historians (Daston, 1991; Brockliss, 2002; Darnton, 2003; Grafton, 2009a; Fumaroli,
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certainty that those who successfully implemented new ideas into the production sphere would keep their profits and gain the respect of their fellow citizens. The Republic of Letters was not entirely virtual. Some brick-and-mortar organizations helped make it work. Some of its citizens resided at universities, although the relationships were
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the mobility of intellectuals. In the Age of Enlightenment, Amsterdam became the location for presses that published books prohibited elsewhere, “the central city of the Republic of Letters” in that limited sense (Eisenstein, 1979, p. 420). The most famous French authors of the age of Enlightenment were published primarily by printers outside
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seventeenth century it was clear what the tools of such an investigation should be: the experimental method and observation relying on scientific instruments. Within the Republic of Letters, practitioners developed a scientific language of communication and rhetorical conventions that determined which knowledge was tight, that is, what constituted proof and which argument was
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practice, this was an age in which these things mattered a great deal, and they mattered more than most citizens of the Republic of Letters would have liked to admit.16 The Republic of Letters was a transnational institution, but one that had to exist in a political reality. Many of those defending Newton in his
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Whether such secrecy would have been successful in the long run is questionable, but it may have weakened the transnational nature of the Republic of Letters. The citizens of the Republic of Letters were almost by definition highly educated, and with few exceptions literate both in Latin and their own languages. A large proportion of the
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materialism would have us believe. Thus, the epistolary network, as it developed after 1500, was an essential part of the Republic of Letters. To be a member of the intellectual community of the Republic of Letters was to be connected with others. As Paul Dibon (1978, p. 46) has noted, “it was the strict duty
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the wealthy and socially prominent French intellectual, astronomer, and classical scholar Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) has been called “the prince of the Republic of Letters,” but clearly this distinction was related to his intellectual power and widespread personal and correspondence networks. Of his correspondence, about 10,000 letters survive.32
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answer in institutional analysis is that legitimacy—a shared set of beliefs—reduces enforcement costs for any institution. It is this growing legitimacy of the Republic of Letters that made it successful in imposing its rules. These rules, as noted, included contestability, transnationality, independence from authority, and openness. The incentive structure that
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drove the market for ideas depended on reputations and the Republic of Letters set the criteria by which reputations were established. Reputations required openness. Besides the obvious importance of establishing a reputation, openness was in part driven by
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more trustworthy and accurate. Better experiments, more careful calculations, and exact observations all became part of the scientific discourse. As noted earlier, in the Republic of Letters, between 1500 and 1700, a number of scientific debates took place that illustrate the effectiveness of the market for ideas to arbitrate and decide disputes
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corpuscularianism, and infinitesimals. The fate of the Jesuits is especially telling. In many ways their best scientific minds considered themselves bona fide members of the Republic of Letters. They were torn between the formal rules of the order and their formidable intellectual abilities, which often created a contradiction between the scriptures and their
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of sustainable economic growth. The institutionalists maintain, quite rightly, that one of the main ways that institutions fostered economic growth was by supporting markets. The Republic of Letters and its daughter, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Republic of Science, provided the institutional underpinning of a well-functioning market for ideas. It was
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insufficient. It helped to have the sharp pen of Voltaire on one’s side. To return to the important work of Henrich (2009), the Republic of Letters underscores the critical importance of interconnectedness and access. The increasingly efficient and dense networks created communications among scholars slaving away on problems in mathematics, anatomy
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confirmed the beliefs of a mechanistic, understandable universe and a controllable environment that could and should be manipulated for the material benefit of humankind. The Republic of Letters of the seventeenth century, then, prepared the ground for the Industrial Enlightenment by offering to the market for ideas the metaconcept that people’s
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scholars worked and which set the incentives that drove them and the constraints that disciplined them. That institution was the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Republic of Letters. The Republic of Letters that began to emerge in Europe around the time of the great voyages and reached a crescendo in the age of Enlightenment is the most
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to painters and musicians, whose work the patrons mostly judged themselves. 38 Daston puts it well: “the avowed foundation of the … diffuse and often quarrelsome Republic of Letters … was merit … and many Enlightenment intellectuals came to believe that foreigners were more trustworthy judges of merit than compatriots” (Daston, 1991, p. 379, emphasis
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itself was not necessarily the taproot of the technological flourishing of the eighteenth century, but it was indicative of something much deeper that characterized the Republic of Letters. Moreover, Merton argued that seventeenth century Puritanism, whether it was loyal to the Church of England, Presbyterian, or vacillating between them, associated a great
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Germans, Swedes, the Swiss, and the Dutch in this endeavor. In the end, it was Europe that was the locus of the Republic of Letters and experienced its consequences. Thus the Republic of Letters, by construction, transcended national boundaries. For instance, Dutch intellectuals maintained close connections with their British colleagues despite three wars (Cook, 2007, p
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intellectual innovators there encountered more resistance than in Britain, but even without Britain’s leadership Western Europe would eventually have found the path from the Republic of Letters to economic growth. The Industrial Enlightenment prepared the ground for nations to apply useful knowledge and align their institutions with economic modernization and growth (Mokyr
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the Enlightenment that mattered to subsequent economic change were products of the competition in the market for ideas and were a direct continuation of the Republic of Letters. The economic dimensions of the European Enlightenment, discussed in Mokyr (2002, 2009a), are sufficiently important to merit special monikers, such as the “Industrial,” the
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the Eroica symphony or Finnegans Wake. In the political configuration in Europe, a fragmented political system combined with an intellectual unity ensconced in the transnational Republic of Letters created unique opportunities for dramatic cultural changes. Such changes were led and coordinated by cultural entrepreneurs from Luther and Paracelsus to Marx and Darwin. The
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and Bureaucracy, translated by H. M. Wright. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Barnett, Lydia. 2015. “Strategies of Toleration: Talking across Confessions in the Alpine Republic of Letters.” Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 48, pp. 141–57. Barzilay, Isaac. 1974. Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo (Yashar of Candia): His Life and Works. Leiden: E. J.
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Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Feingold, Mordechai. 2003. “Jesuits: Savants.” In Mordechai Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–45. ———. 2004. The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010
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Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, Vol. 9, pp. 186–89. Goldgar, Anne. 1995. Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Goldschmidt, Richard B. 1940. The Material Basis of Evolution, reprinted, 1982. New Haven, CT: Yale University
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Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Vol. 46, pp. 78–93. ———. 2009a. “A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: the Republic of Letters.” The Republic of Letters: a Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1–18. Reprinted in Worlds Made by Words
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. Grant, Edward. 2003. “The Partial Transformation of Medieval Cosmology by Jesuits in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In Mordechai Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 127–55. Greene, Kevin. 2000. “Technological Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World: M. I. Finley Re-considered.”
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“The ‘Sceptical Crisis’ Reconsidered: Galen, Rational Medicine and the Libertas Philosophandi.” Early Science and Medicine Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 247–74. ———. 2008. “The Medical Republic of Letters.” Intellectual History Review Vol. 18, No. 1 (Special Issue: Humanism and Medicine in the Early Modern Era), pp. 15–30. MacLean, Gerald, ed. 1995. Culture
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Christine. 2007. Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malcolm, Noel. 2004. “Private and Public Knowledge: Kircher, Esotericism, and the Republic of Letters.” In Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything. New York: Routledge, pp. 286–98. Malherbe, Michel. 1985. “Bacon, l’Encyclopédie, et
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to innovation, 19 Christina, Queen, 204 Christina of Florence, Duchess, 152 Christopoulou, Rebekka, 35, 38 Cipolla, Carlo, 53, 132, 137, 160 cities, and the Republic of Letters, 174 civil service, Chinese, 308 Civil Service, ranks in the Chinese, 306 civil service examinations, Chinese, 165, 303, 304, 324, 332 civil society, 132 Clairaut
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China, 310 contingency, 32, 170, 219, 232 contract enforcement, 122 Cook, Harold, 62, 122, 161, 243 cooperation, and religion, 128, 129 cooperative behavior, in the Republic of Letters, 199 Copenhaver, Brian T., 211, 220 Copernican cosmology, 169 Copernicanism, 130, 156 Copernicans, 157 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 19, 72, 148, 157, 158, 170, 173, 188,
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China, 292, 295, 330 and religious competition, 234 see also human capital education reform, 235-237 efflorescences, before the Industrial Revolution, 315 egalitarianism, in the Republic of Letters, 200 Egyptian hieroglyphs, Newton’s work on, 100 Ehrlich, Paul, 257 Einstein, Albert, 288 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 159, 184, 187, 195, 208 Eldredge, Niles, 26,
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heretics, 59, 115, 170, 171 persecution of, 53, 65, 171, 300 Hermann, Jakob, 110 Hermeticism, 210 Hess, Charlotte, 185 Hetherington, Norriss, 103 hierarchy, in the Republic of Letters, 200 Hilaire-Pérez, Liliane, 273, 274 Hill, Christopher, 74, 77, 88, 97, 133, 164, 249, 281 Hills, Richard, 125 historical materialism, 47, 276 History
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Winter, Sidney, 22 Wiseman, Richard, 91 witchcraft, 220 Withers, Charles, 265 Wittenberg, University of, 173, 174 Woeßmann, Ludger, 127 Wolff, Christian, 245 women, and the Republic of Letters, 199 Wong, Bin, 287, 289 Woodside, Alexander, 292, 304, 305, 307, 322 Woodward, Hezekiah, 235 Wootton, David, 55, 160, 201, 213, 216, 218, 248,
Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy
by Michael Knox Beran · 2 Aug 2021 · 800pp · 240,175 words
jail; Sinclair received a shorter sentence for contempt of Congress and jury tampering. V. Berry had a sharp nose for what was doing in the republic of letters; the close friend, as we have seen, of Edith Wharton and Marcel Proust, he lived to see the Lost Generation of the Jazz Age before
Andrew Carnegie
by David Nasaw · 15 Nov 2007 · 1,230pp · 357,848 words
the president, returned every compliment. Theodore Roosevelt, he told his audience, was not just the president of the United States but “a prince in the republic of letters…I doubt not that of the books taken from this library his will rank high in the list. We hail him to-day, therefore in
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI
by Yuval Noah Harari · 9 Sep 2024 · 566pp · 169,013 words
the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: The Politics of Particularism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Catherine Secretan, “ ‘True Freedom’ and the Dutch Tradition of Republicanism,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 2, no. 1 (2010): 82–92; Henk te Velde, “The Emergence of the Netherlands
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker · 24 Sep 2012 · 1,351pp · 385,579 words
points. And it may have contributed in a second way: by creating a hothouse for new ideas about moral values and the social order. THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS AND ENLIGHTENMENT HUMANISM In David Lodge’s 1988 novel Small World, a professor explains why he believes that the elite university has become obsolete: Information
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people portable. The result was the same: a global campus, a public sphere, or as it was called in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Republic of Letters. Any 21st-century reader who dips into intellectual history can’t help but be impressed by the blogosphere of the 18th. No sooner did a
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minds provides at least a chance that it will wither and die. Superstitions, dogmas, and legends ought to have a shorter half-life in a Republic of Letters, together with bad ideas about how to control crime or run a country. Setting fire to a person and seeing whether he burns is a
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the credit for the Humanitarian Revolution. Bringing people and ideas together, of course, does not determine how those ideas will evolve. The rise of the Republic of Letters and the cosmopolitan city cannot, by themselves, explain why a humanitarian ethics arose in the 18th century, rather than ever-more-ingenious rationales for torture
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number of books published in the United States increased almost fivefold. 305 I’ve mentioned the connection before. The Humanitarian Revolution came out of the Republic of Letters, and the Long Peace and New Peace were children of the Global Village. And remember what went wrong in the Islamic world: it may have
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psychological response that turns perspective-taking into sympathy (chapters 4 and 9). Beginning in the 17th century, technological advances in publishing and transportation created a Republic of Letters and a Reading Revolution in which the seeds of the Humanitarian Revolution took root (chapter 4). More people read books, including fiction that led them
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the 20th a Global Village began to emerge that made people even more aware of others unlike themselves (chapters 5 and 7). Just as the Republic of Letters and the Reading Revolution helped to kindle the Humanitarian Revolution of the 18th century, the Global Village and the electronics revolution may have helped along
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their tribal, authoritarian, and religious ideologies (chapter 6). But even these societies may not be able to withstand the liberalizing currents of the new electronic Republic of Letters forever. The metaphor of an escalator, with its implication of directionality superimposed on the random walk of ideological fashion, may seem Whiggish and presentist and
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. 55. 140. Novels denounced: Quoted in Hunt, 2007, p. 51. 141. Morally influential novels: Keen, 2007. 142. Global campus: Lodge, 1988, pp. 43–44. 143. Republic of Letters: P. Cohen, “Digital keys for unlocking the humanities’ riches,” New York Times, Nov. 16, 2010. 144. Combinatorial mind: Pinker, 1999, chap. 10; Pinker, 1997, chap
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effects of souls vs. lives and suicide terrorism theocracies traditions in and violence wars of see also Bible; God Remarque, Erich Maria Renaissance Renoir, Jean Republic of Letters reputation: for goodness for toughness resource curse resource determinism responsibility, diffusion of ressentiment restorative justice retaliation; see also revenge revenge and counterempathy in cultures of
Danube (Panther)
by Claudio Magris · 10 Jan 2011 · 459pp · 154,280 words
is a grotesque parable of the delirium of the intelligence which destroys life, a terrible picture of the lack of love and of bewilderment. The republic of letters, with its benign historical approach, was the book’s ideal mediator, but it rejected the work for the most obvious reason – the absolute and radical
Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg · 14 Sep 2020 · 505pp · 138,917 words
, barometers, chronographs and vacuum pumps, which they often built themselves, they uncovered more of nature’s secrets than ever before. The Republic of Letters Tying philosophers and scientists together was the remarkable Republic of Letters, ‘the main institution behind the meteoric takeoff of useful knowledge in Europe during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment’, according to
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the Dutch-American-Israeli historian Joel Mokyr, who has documented its importance.49 The Republic of Letters was a spontaneously organized institution, consisting of intellectuals who corresponded on philosophy, politics and science. It was not set up by anyone, it was not
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very unusual in the history of the world. A tradition is by definition a behaviour passed on by previous generations. The extraordinary achievement by the Republic of Letters and other Enlightenment thinkers was that they managed to turn the challenge of tradition into a new tradition. Dogmatic slumber Research is a collaborative and
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cosmopolitan venture as well as a competitive one. Today, a single academic paper can look a bit like the Republic of Letters. Between 2014 and 2018, there were 1315 papers listed in the Web of Science citation index by more than a thousand co-authors. There were
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and contemporary Herbert Spencer put it.63 The mixing of people and ideas gave us the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The Republic of Letters was a momentous example of what can happen when people meet across borders, but we also saw this mixing across professional borders within societies during
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a bit like a 1990s Apple advert for ‘Think different’. In most previous cultures aberration was seen as apostasy. But as a result of the Republic of Letters and other Enlightenment thinkers, a tradition of criticism had emerged. For a brief moment in time, in a small part of the world, it was
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of, 117–18 German Jews (1933–45), 104–6, 109 Rembrandt, 99 reminiscence bump, 294 Renaissance, 5, 6, 132, 143, 145–6, 149–50, 215 Republic of Letters, 157–9, 165, 195 Republic, The (Plato), 352 Republican Party, 164, 225, 238, 240, 301 Reynell, Carew, 184 Reynolds, Glenn, 308 Ridley, Matthew, 20–21
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, 156–7 Great Vanishing, 134–5 in Greece, 127–32 jealous emulation and, 154–7 in Islamic world, 70, 132, 136–41 Renaissance, 145–6 Republic of Letters, 157–9, 165, 195 sclera, 25 Scotland, 101, 194 Scotney Castle, Kent, 287 Sculley, John, 304 sea peoples, 43 sea snails, 44 Seinfeld, Jerry, 224
Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century
by Geoffrey Parker · 29 Apr 2013 · 1,773pp · 486,685 words
men’ of Europe, whether dead (such as Bacon, Harvey, Galileo and Descartes) or alive (they named Robert Boyle, Thomas Hobbes and Robert Hooke).61 The ‘Republic of Letters’ also included practitioners who lived east of the Elbe and south of the Pyrenees. The Danzig brewer and astronomer Johannes Hevelius, who in 1647 published
How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
by Arthur Herman · 27 Nov 2001 · 510pp · 163,449 words
to their pens, or to their status in one of the middle-class professions. For ten years it was the central forum of Edinburgh’s republic of letters. A paper or talk presented there received a fairer and more rigorous hearing than it could from any academic or university audience. As one participant
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