Wednesday, March 12, 2014

12:30pm

Room 5307

Graduate Center

The Enlightenment and its offshoot, Liberalism, are still often described as “secularizing” moments in European intellectual history, a time when philosophers tried to break free from religion and, in the process, invented “modernity”.

Drawing on her own work on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Stael, Helena Rosenblatt will show that such a picture of the Enlightenment and early liberalism is unhistorical, simplistic and, in the end, quite wrong. Rousseau, Constant and Stael gave a lot of thought to the relationship between religion and politics. Their ideas are both illuminating of their own times and relevant to our own.

Helena Rosenblatt is Professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.  Her research interests include European Intellectual History, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Constant, Republicanism, Liberalism, Christian Thought, and Church/State Relations.  She is author, most recently, of Rousseau and Geneva. From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749-1762 (2007) and Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion (2008).