Search Results

“... perhaps the misfortune, of the Enlightenment that its historians frequently write very long books. Franco Venturi’s Settecento Riformatore, which must surely be one of the longest, has now reached its fifth and final volume. As an enterprise it can have few parallels even among dixhuitièmistes. It offers no less than the description of an entire ...”

“... the pre-perestroika Gorbachev, and of fighting liberals like the distinguished and admirable Franco Venturi, partisan commander and historian of the European Enlightenment and of Russian Populism. Severe and intellectually serious, no Italian city has a better record of anti-Fascism, even among its big businessmen. It also has a Jewish community of ...”

“... Enlightenment exerted a particular fascination through the scholarship of Arnaldo Momigliano and Franco Venturi. Further afield, his interests as a historian of political thought have extended to ancient Chinese philosophy and the conceptual vocabulary of Maori discourse. The world of Edward Gibbon (1737-94) provides a canvas spacious enough for a work ...”

“... and state – the Enlightenment as described by historians such as Cassirer, Gay, Daniel Mornet, Franco Venturi, Robert Darnton, John Marshall (and myself) – dissolves in Israel’s dialectical thinking. Israel sees two Enlightenments, one radical and good, the other moderate and of mixed value at best. Born and educated in Britain, now teaching in ...”

“... work? Here the key term is the anomaly. An anecdote can serve as illustration. One day Franco Moretti and Carlo Ginzburg went to the Metropolitan Museum in New York together. Coming upon Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, depicting a servant-girl drowsing at a table laden with fruit, a wine-glass lying on its side, a painting of Cupid on the wall ...”