Darrin M Mcmahon
Biographic Data
| ID | 458297 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Darrin M Mcmahon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Darrin M |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcmahon |
| SIGNATURE | MCMAHON D M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dartmouth College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 57 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 31 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Routledge History of Happiness
Imaginary Equality
Imaginary Equality
A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Enlightenment . Vol. 4 of A Cultural History of Sport
This work, which covers the period between 1650 and 1800, constitutes volume 4 of Bloomsbury's six-volume A Cultural History of Sport. Its focus is on Great Britain and Western Europe, with some attention paid to North America, and it follows the organizational conventions mandated by the Bloomsbury series as a whole, with an introduction and a general chapter on the purposes of sport during the time frame under consideration, followed by seven m…
The Enlightenment
The History of the Humanities and Human Flourishing
The effort to encourage a eudaimonic turn in the humanities marks less a turn, than a return, to the emphasis on human flourishing that was once a central feature of the liberal arts and the humanities as they developed in the West. Though eclipsed for much of the twentieth century, this long-standing emphasis is currently being rediscovered and revived for the conditions of the twenty-first century. Just as psychologists and other social scienti…
Equality and the Horizon of Human Expectations
This article investigates the origins and impact of an assumption: that humanity is moving in the direction of an expanding equality, and that the arc of history is taking us there. That notion has roots stretching back at least to the eighteenth century, and was developed in important ways in the century that followed, before coming to fruition in the twentieth century, above all in the global north in the aftermath of the Second World War. The …
History and Human Flourishing
To Write the History of Equality
This article discusses the history of equality and recent efforts to write that history in the context of a detailed discussion of Siep Stuurman's The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History. It begins by pointing out the surprising paucity of writing on the history of equality, particularly its conceptual and intellectual history, despite that notion's centrality in modern political and philosophical discussion. …
Illuminating the Enlightenment
This article explores the relationship between the Enlightenment as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon and actual illumination in the long 18th century. Focused on street lighting in Paris, it nonetheless seeks to situate the French case in the broader context of developments in public lighting in the French provinces, Europe, and the Atlantic World. In the concerted effort to illuminate dark streets, the Enlightenment was operationalized in …
What Is the History of Emotions
Polity’s Press’s “What is History?” series asks leading practitioners to summarize the principal methods, findings, and interventions of important sub-disciplines in the historical field. Rosenwein and Cristiani’s welcome volume addresses the currently thriving sub-discipline of the history of emotions. Rosenwein, a prominent contributor to the field, and her co-writer offer four succinct chapters, framed by a concise introduction and conclusion,…
Reflections on the Revolution in France
The most enduring work of its time, Reflections on the Revolution in France was written in 1790 and has remained in print ever since. Edmund Burke’s analysis of revolutionary change established him as the chief framer of modern European conservative political thought. This outstanding new edition of the Reflections presents Burke’s famous text along with a historical introduction by Frank M. Turner and four lively critical essays by leading schol…
La Floride française
Florida was a central concern of French governments between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries in their repeated attempts to secure a French presence in the New World. From the expeditions of the Huguenot Jean Ribault and Rene de Laudonniere that led to the creation of Fort Caroline in 1565, somewhere in the vicinity of present-day Jacksonville, to bold plans at the time of the Louisiana sale, in 1803, to turn Eastern Florida into a Frenc…
Afterword
AfterwordWhy Big, Why Now? Darrin M. McMahon (bio) If it need hardly be said that bigger is not always better, most would agree that less is not always more. The contributors to this timely volume recognize the truth of both propositions, and they remain sensitive to the challenges and potential shortcomings of critical inquiry when carried out exclusively in either register, big or small. But in the face of a widespread movement across the human…
Colin Jones. The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris
Journal Article Colin Jones. The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris. Get access Colin Jones. The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 231. $39.95. Darrin M. McMahon Darrin M. McMahon Dartmouth College [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 120, Issue 5, December 2015, Pages 19…
The Return of the History of Ideas?
This article examines the demise and discredit of the “history of ideas,” as advocated originally by Arthur Lovejoy, seeking to explain how it fell out of favor as a disciplinary and methodological practice. Focusing on two of the most forceful critiques of the history of ideas—that of Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School and of Robert Darnton and the social history of ideas—the article argues that while this criticism was originally timely a…
Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History
This book is a collection of essays by leading practitioners of modern European intellectual history, reflecting on the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the field. The essays each attempt to assess their respective disciplines, giving an account of their development and theoretical evolution, while also reflecting on current problems, challenges, and possibilities. Collectively, they seek to assess the state of modern European inte…
Mark Curran. Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary Europe
Mark Curran has produced a well-written and well-documented study that will be of considerable interest to scholars working on eighteenth-century religion, the Enlightenment, and the intersection of the two. Curran's point of departure is a publishing history of the works of the Baron d'Holbach, the notorious atheist and materialist who wrote virtually all of his work anonymously in the second half of the eighteenth century. Through a meticulous …
Teaching Happiness Is No Joke
What Does the Ideal of Happiness Mean
Far from seeking to deny ourselves, we seem intent on pursuing pleasure and happiness at every turn. The subject of intense fascination in the media and popular culture, and of lively research in a host of academic disciplines ranging from psychology to sociology to economics, happiness as emerged in recent years as a major preoccupation of our time, at once the goal of individual lives and the "sole horizon," as the critic Pascal Bruckner has ob…
Fear & trembling, strangers & strange lands
Jean Delumeau begins his classic study of fear in early-modern Europe with an account, drawn from the travel journals of Montaigne, of entering the great walls of the free imperial city of Augsburg, Germany, by night. 1 Four massive gates, reinforced iron barriers and doors, sealed passageways, a drawbridge, and another bridge traversing a moat together offered a daunting prospect to outsiders while protecting the sixty thousand inhabitants of th…
New Order on China's Hunan Miao Frontier, 1796-1812
What Are Enlightenments
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) “A public can only attain enlightenment slowly,” Kant famously observed. His use of the term “public” ( Publikum ), of course, is notoriously slippery, and even now, after decade…
Happiness and The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
This article reexamines Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers from the perspective of the history of happiness
The market and the pursuit of happiness
Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History
This book is a collection of essays by leading practitioners of modern European intellectual history, reflecting on the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the field. The essays each attempt to assess their respective disciplines, giving an account of their development and theoretical evolution, while also reflecting on current problems, challenges, and possibilities. Collectively, they seek to assess the state of modern European inte…
Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment
Joseph Mali, Robert Wokler, Mark Lilla, Roger Hausheer, John Robertson, Darrin M. McMahon, Frederick Beiser, Graeme Garrard, Lionel Gossman, John E. Toews, Michael Confino, Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 93, No. 5 (2003), pp. i-xi, 1-11, 13-31, 33-71, 73-131, 133-196
From the happiness of virtue to the virtue of happiness
Illuminating the Enlightenment
This article explores the relationship between the Enlightenment as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon and actual illumination in the long 18th century. Focused on street lighting in Paris, it nonetheless seeks to situate the French case in the broader context of developments in public lighting in the French provinces, Europe, and the Atlantic World. In the concerted effort to illuminate dark streets, the Enlightenment was operationalized in …
Fear & trembling, strangers & strange lands
Jean Delumeau begins his classic study of fear in early-modern Europe with an account, drawn from the travel journals of Montaigne, of entering the great walls of the free imperial city of Augsburg, Germany, by night. 1 Four massive gates, reinforced iron barriers and doors, sealed passageways, a drawbridge, and another bridge traversing a moat together offered a daunting prospect to outsiders while protecting the sixty thousand inhabitants of th…
What Are Enlightenments
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) “A public can only attain enlightenment slowly,” Kant famously observed. His use of the term “public” ( Publikum ), of course, is notoriously slippery, and even now, after decade…
What Does the Ideal of Happiness Mean
Far from seeking to deny ourselves, we seem intent on pursuing pleasure and happiness at every turn. The subject of intense fascination in the media and popular culture, and of lively research in a host of academic disciplines ranging from psychology to sociology to economics, happiness as emerged in recent years as a major preoccupation of our time, at once the goal of individual lives and the "sole horizon," as the critic Pascal Bruckner has ob…
The Other Transatlantic Tie
The Birthplace of the Revolution
THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE REVOLUTION: PUBLIC SPACE AND POLITICAL COMMUNITY IN THE PALAIS-ROYAL OF LOUIS-PHILIPPE-JOSEPH D'ORLÉANS, 1781–1789 DARRIN M. MCMAHON DARRIN M. MCMAHON *The author is a Ph.D. candidate and a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Yale University. He would like to express his sincere gratitude to David A. Bell, without whose criticism and encouragement this paper would never have been completed. John M. Merriman has similarly prov…
The counter-enlightenment and the low-life of literature in pre-revolutionary France
Journal Article THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE LOW-LIFE OF LITERATURE IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE Get access Darrin M. McMahon Darrin M. McMahon Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 159, Issue 1, May 1998, Pages 77–112, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/159.1.77 Published: 01 May 1998
Enemies of the Enlightenment
Critics have long treated the most important intellectual movement of modern hstory—the Enlightenment—as if it took shape in the absence of opposition. In this ground-breaking new study, Darrin McMahon demonstrates that, on the contrary, contemporary resistance to the Enlightenment was a major cultural force, shaping and defining the Enlightenment from the moment of its inception, while giving rise to an entirely new ideological phenomenon—what w…
Narratives of Dystopia in the French Revolution
Darrin M. McMahon, Narratives of Dystopia in the French Revolution: Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and the "Isle des philosophes" of the Abbé Balthazard, Yale French Studies, No. 101, Fragments of Revolution (2001), pp. 103-118
Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment
Joseph Mali, Robert Wokler, Mark Lilla, Roger Hausheer, John Robertson, Darrin M. McMahon, Frederick Beiser, Graeme Garrard, Lionel Gossman, John E. Toews, Michael Confino, Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 93, No. 5 (2003), pp. i-xi, 1-11, 13-31, 33-71, 73-131, 133-196
The Other Transatlantic Tie
From the happiness of virtue to the virtue of happiness
Happiness and The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
This article reexamines Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers from the perspective of the history of happiness
The market and the pursuit of happiness
What Are Enlightenments
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) “A public can only attain enlightenment slowly,” Kant famously observed. His use of the term “public” ( Publikum ), of course, is notoriously slippery, and even now, after decade…
Fear & trembling, strangers & strange lands
Jean Delumeau begins his classic study of fear in early-modern Europe with an account, drawn from the travel journals of Montaigne, of entering the great walls of the free imperial city of Augsburg, Germany, by night. 1 Four massive gates, reinforced iron barriers and doors, sealed passageways, a drawbridge, and another bridge traversing a moat together offered a daunting prospect to outsiders while protecting the sixty thousand inhabitants of th…
New Order on China's Hunan Miao Frontier, 1796-1812
What Does the Ideal of Happiness Mean
Far from seeking to deny ourselves, we seem intent on pursuing pleasure and happiness at every turn. The subject of intense fascination in the media and popular culture, and of lively research in a host of academic disciplines ranging from psychology to sociology to economics, happiness as emerged in recent years as a major preoccupation of our time, at once the goal of individual lives and the "sole horizon," as the critic Pascal Bruckner has ob…
Teaching Happiness Is No Joke
Mark Curran. Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary Europe
Mark Curran has produced a well-written and well-documented study that will be of considerable interest to scholars working on eighteenth-century religion, the Enlightenment, and the intersection of the two. Curran's point of departure is a publishing history of the works of the Baron d'Holbach, the notorious atheist and materialist who wrote virtually all of his work anonymously in the second half of the eighteenth century. Through a meticulous …
The Return of the History of Ideas?
This article examines the demise and discredit of the “history of ideas,” as advocated originally by Arthur Lovejoy, seeking to explain how it fell out of favor as a disciplinary and methodological practice. Focusing on two of the most forceful critiques of the history of ideas—that of Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School and of Robert Darnton and the social history of ideas—the article argues that while this criticism was originally timely a…
Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History
This book is a collection of essays by leading practitioners of modern European intellectual history, reflecting on the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the field. The essays each attempt to assess their respective disciplines, giving an account of their development and theoretical evolution, while also reflecting on current problems, challenges, and possibilities. Collectively, they seek to assess the state of modern European inte…
Colin Jones. The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris
Journal Article Colin Jones. The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris. Get access Colin Jones. The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 231. $39.95. Darrin M. McMahon Darrin M. McMahon Dartmouth College [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 120, Issue 5, December 2015, Pages 19…
Reflections on the Revolution in France
The most enduring work of its time, Reflections on the Revolution in France was written in 1790 and has remained in print ever since. Edmund Burke’s analysis of revolutionary change established him as the chief framer of modern European conservative political thought. This outstanding new edition of the Reflections presents Burke’s famous text along with a historical introduction by Frank M. Turner and four lively critical essays by leading schol…
La Floride française
Florida was a central concern of French governments between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries in their repeated attempts to secure a French presence in the New World. From the expeditions of the Huguenot Jean Ribault and Rene de Laudonniere that led to the creation of Fort Caroline in 1565, somewhere in the vicinity of present-day Jacksonville, to bold plans at the time of the Louisiana sale, in 1803, to turn Eastern Florida into a Frenc…
Afterword
AfterwordWhy Big, Why Now? Darrin M. McMahon (bio) If it need hardly be said that bigger is not always better, most would agree that less is not always more. The contributors to this timely volume recognize the truth of both propositions, and they remain sensitive to the challenges and potential shortcomings of critical inquiry when carried out exclusively in either register, big or small. But in the face of a widespread movement across the human…
Illuminating the Enlightenment
This article explores the relationship between the Enlightenment as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon and actual illumination in the long 18th century. Focused on street lighting in Paris, it nonetheless seeks to situate the French case in the broader context of developments in public lighting in the French provinces, Europe, and the Atlantic World. In the concerted effort to illuminate dark streets, the Enlightenment was operationalized in …
What Is the History of Emotions
Polity’s Press’s “What is History?” series asks leading practitioners to summarize the principal methods, findings, and interventions of important sub-disciplines in the historical field. Rosenwein and Cristiani’s welcome volume addresses the currently thriving sub-discipline of the history of emotions. Rosenwein, a prominent contributor to the field, and her co-writer offer four succinct chapters, framed by a concise introduction and conclusion,…
To Write the History of Equality
This article discusses the history of equality and recent efforts to write that history in the context of a detailed discussion of Siep Stuurman's The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History. It begins by pointing out the surprising paucity of writing on the history of equality, particularly its conceptual and intellectual history, despite that notion's centrality in modern political and philosophical discussion. …
The History of the Humanities and Human Flourishing
The effort to encourage a eudaimonic turn in the humanities marks less a turn, than a return, to the emphasis on human flourishing that was once a central feature of the liberal arts and the humanities as they developed in the West. Though eclipsed for much of the twentieth century, this long-standing emphasis is currently being rediscovered and revived for the conditions of the twenty-first century. Just as psychologists and other social scienti…
History (20 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Political science (14 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Art (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Enlightenment (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works)