Ritchie Robertson: The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680–1790

Excerpt

The history of ideas (Ideengeschichte), once the preferred genre for writing about the history of thought and culture, has deservedly fallen into disfavor. It focused upon great thinkers and their ideas, generally those deemed rational and worthwhile by the historian writing about them. Ritchie Robertson, the Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at Oxford University—perhaps in keeping with his Germanophile expertise and the origins of the genre—seeks to rescue Ideengeschichte and apply its method to all the enlightened eighteenth-century ideas under examination. They are discussed sometimes in excruciating detail, but true to the genre, the context of the ideas—the social commitments or interests, and the beliefs of their authors—receive scant attention. This is the case despite Robertson’s focus on such ideas as being in pursuit of happiness. …