Minchul Kim
Ewha Womans University, History, Adjunct
- Intellectual History, Modern European History, French Revolution, French Revolution and Antiquity, History of Political Thought, French Revolution and Napoleon, and 12 moreHistory of Ideas, Enlightenment, Eighteenth Century History, Haitian Revolution, Republicanism, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, Historiography of the French Revolution, Representation, Enlightenment Political Thought, History of Slavery, Abolition of Slavery, and Atlantic Slave Tradeedit
- Researcher interested in the intellectual history of the Enlightenment and the French Revolutionedit
Thèse soutenue par Minchul Kim et dirigée par M. le Professeur Richard Whatmore (Université St Andrews, IIH, History). Le Jury était composé de M. le Professeur James A. Harris (juré interne, St Andrews, IIH, Philosophy) et M. le... more
Thèse soutenue par Minchul Kim et dirigée par M. le Professeur Richard Whatmore (Université St Andrews, IIH, History). Le Jury était composé de M. le Professeur James A. Harris (juré interne, St Andrews, IIH, Philosophy) et M. le Professeur Pierre Serna (juré externe, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, IHRF/IHMC).
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Article accepted for publication: to be published in Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 396 (2019:2) (subject to change)
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Article accepted for publication: to be published in European History Quarterly, 49:2 (2019) (subject to change)
Research Interests: Modern History, Intellectual History, Political Theory, Early Modern History, Republicanism, and 12 moreFrench Revolution, Historiography of the French Revolution, Enlightenment, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, Modernity, History of Political Thought, Democracy, French Revolution and Napoleon, Thomas Paine, Condorcet, Robespierre, and Julius Caesar
The ‘Enlightened narrative’ of eighteenth-century historiography had always been connected to the political concern of decline and fall, and Volney’s Leçons amounted to a frustrated yet optimistic post-Thermidorian restatement of that... more
The ‘Enlightened narrative’ of eighteenth-century historiography had always been connected to the political concern of decline and fall, and Volney’s Leçons amounted to a frustrated yet optimistic post-Thermidorian restatement of that historiography. What was proffered in the Leçons was a counter-Terror programme for the Moderns against the Ancients, à la Benjamin Constant decades before De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes was delivered at the Athénée royal de Paris in 1819. Historical methodology was important for Volney because he deemed it key to averting another Terror, which was considered at the time to be concurrent with ‘democracy’ or popular government, a political anachronism that confounded the social conditions of the Moderns with those of the Ancients. Volney’s Leçons belonged undeniably to the republican search for durable liberty established upon the rejection of both aristocratic ‘despotism’ and democratic ‘anarchy’ ...
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The radical ideas of the French Revolution are generally regarded as the offspring of the theory of social contract. However, even though the Revolutionaries cherished Rousseau’s legacy, the period was not without instances in which this... more
The radical ideas of the French Revolution are generally regarded as the offspring of the theory of social contract. However, even though the Revolutionaries cherished Rousseau’s legacy, the period was not without instances in which this legacy could be subject to variation and the notion of social contract could be attributed, in a decidedly negative tone, less to Rousseau than to Hobbes. In this context, the present study of Jean-Baptiste Salaville’s L’Homme et la société, ou nouvelle théorie de la nature humaine et de l’état social (1799) demonstrates that the idea of natural sociability could provide an opportunity to elaborate a radical republican future without the notion of social contract. Salaville’s political vision, built on the tradition of natural jurisprudence, posited a new idea of the general will and empiricist legislation in the last days of the French Revolution.
Research Interests: Intellectual History, Social Contract Theory, Republicanism, Natural Law, French Revolution, and 9 moreEnlightenment, Scottish Enlightenment, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes, French Revolution and Napoleon, Jean Jaques Rousseau, Samuel von Pufendorf, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, and Francis Hutcheson
The republican dream of constitutional perfection assumed that man could not be trusted with power. Mere avoidance of monarchy was insufficient, and the underlying dilemma of the Revolution was manifest: the dynamics between law and... more
The republican dream of constitutional perfection assumed that man could not be trusted with power. Mere avoidance of monarchy was insufficient, and the underlying dilemma of the Revolution was manifest: the dynamics between law and passions dictated that representative institutions themselves could be given neither full confidence nor complete distrust. At this point, the dilemma of The Ruins is also clear. The fate of the state depended on both the society and the individuals, since a state could prosper only upon its citizens’ virtuous manners, but these were men whose natures were also guided by passions. Eighteenth-century political thought was predicated upon the view that all republics eventually failed because of cupidity, and history seemed to prove the vulnerability of republics in large commercial states. Particularly, as the war progressed, it seemed that the French state would either succumb to the coalition of foreign powers or become a belligerent empire under a military government. For French republicans, the former option had to be avoided at all costs; but the latter was no better, as such a prospect had been dreaded throughout the century as the horrifying vision of “universal monarchy.” How could the large, commercial republic stave off the apparently imminent catastrophe?
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Situating Volney within his century’s anxieties about the prospect of modern liberty yields a larger picture of Enlightenment historiography and the French Revolution. His concerns about the threats of the cycle of history and the vicissitudes of civilizations, and his search for a way to build a free and stable government fit for modern France are significant because they show how the well-traveled French philosophe, building on the intellectual tradition of the eighteenth century, negotiated his journey, at once hopeful and distressed, through the last days of the Old Regime and the early days of the Revolution. By examining Volney’s political pamphlet, travelogue, and conjectural history together, this essay has offered a newly contextualized reading of his works. This reading provides a way to see how revolutionary thought was rooted in the historical concerns of the eighteenth century. The merit of this approach lies in the warning it issues against adopting binary categories that can easily populate the historiography of an event as immense and contested as the French Revolution. In a telling way, the author of The Ruins did not make simplistic choices between the “radical” and the “moderate,” between “conservatism” and “progressivism,” or between “republicanism” and “royalism”; he approached the predicament of his time through historical thinking, not as a disciplinary practice but as a mode of navigating through the vast complexity of social, political, and international relations in an age of commerce, war, and revolutions.
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Situating Volney within his century’s anxieties about the prospect of modern liberty yields a larger picture of Enlightenment historiography and the French Revolution. His concerns about the threats of the cycle of history and the vicissitudes of civilizations, and his search for a way to build a free and stable government fit for modern France are significant because they show how the well-traveled French philosophe, building on the intellectual tradition of the eighteenth century, negotiated his journey, at once hopeful and distressed, through the last days of the Old Regime and the early days of the Revolution. By examining Volney’s political pamphlet, travelogue, and conjectural history together, this essay has offered a newly contextualized reading of his works. This reading provides a way to see how revolutionary thought was rooted in the historical concerns of the eighteenth century. The merit of this approach lies in the warning it issues against adopting binary categories that can easily populate the historiography of an event as immense and contested as the French Revolution. In a telling way, the author of The Ruins did not make simplistic choices between the “radical” and the “moderate,” between “conservatism” and “progressivism,” or between “republicanism” and “royalism”; he approached the predicament of his time through historical thinking, not as a disciplinary practice but as a mode of navigating through the vast complexity of social, political, and international relations in an age of commerce, war, and revolutions.
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This article examines the political thought of Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, a prominent democrat during the French Revolution. In pamphlets and newspaper articles between 1795 and 1799 he put forth an elaborate theory of 'representative... more
This article examines the political thought of Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, a prominent democrat during the French Revolution. In pamphlets and newspaper articles between 1795 and 1799 he put forth an elaborate theory of 'representative democracy' which was a novel and radical vision of political reform and republican international order. His political and economic plan for a democratic future was focused on conceptualizing a realistic transition path to a genuinely republican society. In the wake of historians who pointed out the existence and importance of the idea of 'representative democracy' during the Directory, this article delves into the content of this idea by placing it in the context of Antonelle and his fellow travellers' political struggle to consolidate the Republic while avoiding both anarchy and aristocracy.
Research Interests: Intellectual History, Political Theory, Democratic Theory, Republicanism, French Revolution, and 11 morePolitical Violence and Terrorism, Populism, History of Terrorism, History of Political Thought, Democracy, Republican Rome, Radical Democracy, Directory, Representative Democracy, Directoire, and Revolutionary War
This article examines Bertrand Barère’s Montesquieu peint d’après ses ouvrages (1797) within the context of the speculations on the future of modernity in the political thought of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution. Broadly,... more
This article examines Bertrand Barère’s Montesquieu peint d’après ses ouvrages (1797) within the context of the speculations on the future of modernity in the political thought of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution. Broadly, Barère’s work contained three arguments: Montesquieu had been a covert republican forced to conceal his candid thoughts; Montes-quieu had been wrong to despair about the future of large republics; The Spirit of Laws needed to be used as a guide for the political leaders of the French First Republic. Rescued from the narrow context of political inten-tions and placed in a wider intellectual context, Barère’s critical reading of Montesquieu demonstrates the importance of the notions of military dictatorship and commercial capacity in revolutionary political thought.
Research Interests: Intellectual History, History of Ideas, Republicanism, Revolutions, French Revolution, and 21 moreHistoriography of the French Revolution, Political Violence and Terrorism, Enlightenment, Edmund Burke, Roman Republic, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, History of Political Thought, Early Modern Intellectual History, Democracy, Republican Rome, Enlightenment Political Thought, 18th Century France, European Enlightenment, Monarchy, Montesquieu, Commerce, Military Dictatorship, Adam Ferguson, First French Republic, French Republicanism, and Committee Of Public Safety
Research Interests: Intellectual History, History of Religion, French Revolution, Enlightenment, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, and 9 moreAmerican Revolution, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Religious Studies, Thomas Paine, Radicalism, Georgian Studies, Thomas Paine and Early America, Thomas Paine's Political Thought and Early America, and Common Sense by Thomas Paine
...... As such, Cabanis never lost faith in the Revolution as a project to improve humanity. While the transition mechanism to his ultimate goal did change from democracy to dictatorship, the vision was always alive for Cabanis. The great... more
...... As such, Cabanis never lost faith in the Revolution as a project to improve humanity. While the transition mechanism to his ultimate goal did change from democracy to dictatorship, the vision was always alive for Cabanis. The great achievement of Saad’s book is to reveal the full extent of this vision of a perfected world.
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...... There was much at stake in the animal question, as Salaville keenly identified: if eighteenth-century developments in natural history led to the conceptualization of man as a kind of animal, and if it was (rightly or wrongly)... more
...... There was much at stake in the animal question, as Salaville keenly identified: if eighteenth-century developments in natural history led to the conceptualization of man as a kind of animal, and if it was (rightly or wrongly) assumed that there were different kinds of men as there were different kinds of animals, condoning the brutal treatment of animals ran the risk of lending justification to the enslavement of other men deemed inferior and to the cruel treatment of slaves and the poor. Then, the critical problem for the French under the Directory and the Consulate was not just about ending the Terror in political terms but more profoundly about finding ways for all creatures to live together by ‘escaping from the barbarity of the animality’ (224). Serna demonstrates in this pioneering study that even though the importance of regenerating mœurs was recognized by all revolutionaries the logical implications of this moral and political task had innumerable twists and turns that stretched out to the realm of animals, which is not surprising if we consider the physical proximity of man and animal in the everyday lives of the eighteenth century ......
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..... Istvan Hont brings the masters of eighteenth-century European intellectual field back to life. The book makes a compelling reading and relights some of the influential worldviews of the age of commerce, enlightenment and... more
..... Istvan Hont brings the masters of eighteenth-century European intellectual field back to life. The book makes a compelling reading and relights some of the influential worldviews of the age of commerce, enlightenment and revolutions. The themes in his previous collection of essays Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective are replayed magisterially through Rousseau and Smith in these lectures. Politics in Commercial Society successfully demonstrates the interconnectivity of moral philosophy, politics, religion, history (natural, social and conjectural), political economy, war and international trade in the eighteenth century. It leaves us to wonder if the nineteenth-century division of academic disciplines in the West has done us only good.
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..... Mansfield’s work on Ramsay constitutes not only one of the rare contributions to understanding the Chevalier’s œuvre but also a deft analysis of the complex strands of political thought in Britain and France in the late seventeenth... more
..... Mansfield’s work on Ramsay constitutes not only one of the rare contributions to understanding the Chevalier’s œuvre but also a deft analysis of the complex strands of political thought in Britain and France in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. All the while, most significantly, Mansfield keeps in view—through the figure of Ramsay, in which he sees ‘a true mélange of French and British political theory’—the intellectual exchanges between these nations, thus significantly adding to the currently renewed interest in the subject pursued by Rachel Hammersley, among others.
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..... Ascribing a ‘historical’ role to the quantity theory of money as she does hammers home the relevance of both ‘high-intellectual’ history and ‘cultural–intellectual’ history: how people ‘thought’ more often than not defined their... more
..... Ascribing a ‘historical’ role to the quantity theory of money as she does hammers home the relevance of both ‘high-intellectual’ history and ‘cultural–intellectual’ history: how people ‘thought’ more often than not defined their actions, including legislation and customs. What legislators held to be true had a sometimes self-contradicting and sometimes self-fulfilling effect on the entire of society: in the case of the assignat, Spang demonstrates, the legislators’ dominant theoretical faith incapacitated the Revolution. Since ‘ordinary people's monetary habits could certainly be tenacious’ (257), the monetary Ancien Régime took a long time to perish, almost a half-century after the 18 Brumaire, normally considered as the endpoint of the French Revolution. In narrating the story of this process, the point made in the book by the cultural historian is that ‘the distinction of material from mental causes, of socioeconomic from political or cultural history, of solid reality from intangible faith may occlude more than it reveals’ (272). As such, Stuff and Money is a solid contribution to the history of the assignat, written with great clarity. It is evidently based on hard work poring over numerous archives across France and on attentive penetration into the everyday working of the ‘money’. The book reveals, not for the first time but in a particularly effective way that only a meticulous cultural historian can do, the inseparable relation between politics and economy during the French Revolution.
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..... With its historical approach and its focus on the self-claimed moderate centre of France's First Republic, First Empire and Restoration, A Virtue for Courageous Minds offers a rare opportunity for contemplating on the breadth and... more
..... With its historical approach and its focus on the self-claimed moderate centre of France's First Republic, First Empire and Restoration, A Virtue for Courageous Minds offers a rare opportunity for contemplating on the breadth and depth of the political centre that was born into the modernity at the foundational turning point of European history at the end of the long eighteenth century (or, in a sense, the beginning of the long nineteenth century). Despite the curious discordance between its main body and its front and rear, the book will inspire scholars to enter a field that has insufficiently treated the many aspects of moderation to date.
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..... The authors demonstrate the complex web of nineteenth-century French political contexts that gave birth to the theory, or rather, theories, of ‘bourgeois revolution’ and in which the man-concept named Robespierre was appropriated by... more
..... The authors demonstrate the complex web of nineteenth-century French political contexts that gave birth to the theory, or rather, theories, of ‘bourgeois revolution’ and in which the man-concept named Robespierre was appropriated by various political positions, forming a relation of mutual feedback between historical view and contemporary action. For the republicans and the socialists of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their respective prospect of future ideal society necessitated a reinterpretation of Robespierre and the French Revolution. It was regarded as a ‘bourgeois revolution’ from the very beginning (e.g., by Barnave) and its early afterlife (e.g., by Guizot), but the precise meaning and the political implication of the term remained volatile. Recently the term has been engaged in another battle between the advocates of the consciousness of the historical actors and those of the unpredictability of historical outcome and its discordance with original intentions; for the moment, the stake of the term has been scaled down to the latter position in order to keep the word as an analytical term, its strong claims of being a ‘precursor’ to a socialist revolution now brushed aside. The book shows that the view on Robespierre has been changing in tandem with the future-oriented stake of the ‘bourgeois revolution’ or with the strategy to realise sociopolitical transitions. This renders the well-known twentieth-century ‘trench warfare’ between the school of Lefebvre and that of Cobban, and most of all between those of Soboul and of Furet more deeply comprehensible. It is clear from Belissa and Bosc's book that from 1794 up to the present day, there has been no one Robespierre, no one positive or one negative view of Robespierre, no one Robespierre the demonic dictator or one Robespierre the revolutionary hero. There have always been so many ‘Robespierres’ even within the positive and within the negative—as it may well be that they will live on, the book is a timely contribution to the long historiography of the French Revolution and its most (in)famous protagonist.
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..... The binary division between the 'Radical' and the 'moderate' Enlightenment as provided by the author is not a plausible framework for the French Revolution and its dramatic development of political thought, which should not be... more
..... The binary division between the 'Radical' and the 'moderate' Enlightenment as provided by the author is not a plausible framework for the French Revolution and its dramatic development of political thought, which should not be reduced to strict and static Manichean dichotomy allegedly dating back to Spinoza and Descartes and its resultant teleology. Structures, no matter how appealing they may be, should not be forced onto the historical narrative; they must be tested beforehand by keen observation of precise historical contexts. Dividing the thoughts of the whole European Enlightenment and furthermore of the French Revolution into such a binary opposition is already problematic, and with Rousseau completely excluded from the Enlightenment, the whole picture is even less credible as a sincere historical presentation.
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C.-F. Volney’s Leçons d’histoire, given as a series of five lectures at the École normale between January and May 1795, have been read (by most scholars who have written on the text, including Jean Gaulmier, Malcolm Cook, Martin Davies... more
C.-F. Volney’s Leçons d’histoire, given as a series of five lectures at the École normale between January and May 1795, have been read (by most scholars who have written on the text, including Jean Gaulmier, Malcolm Cook, Martin Davies and Sanja Perovic) as a valuable source in the search for the origin of modern historical scholarship or of a sceptical philosophy of history, marked by an ‘absence of any reference to revolutionary events’. However, the existing readings of the Leçons are far from satisfactory for they omit or gloss over the key historical context: revolutionary politics. In contrast, this paper reads the Leçons as a work in history rather than a work on history. I suggest that the Leçons should be read as a commentary on revolutionary politics since Volney directed his intellectual effort after the Thermidor to diagnosing the causes of the Terror and formulating the remedy: his Leçons argued that the culmination of the revolutionary process in the Terror had primarily been a symptom of the misunderstanding and malpractice of history which called for urgent rectification. It was a decidedly political tract, enriched with scholarly scepticism trying to perceive itself as based on rational observation.
Research Interests: History, French Literature, Scepticism, French History, French Revolution, and 9 morePolitical Violence and Terrorism, Enlightenment, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, History of Political Thought, Historical Methodology, Thermidor, 18th/19th French Political Thought, Volney, and The Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns
Rooted in the period of crisis for the French First Republic (1792–1804), tangled in war and increasingly losing political legitimacy due to repeated electoral defeat and manœuvre, this paper examines a radical republican’s endeavour to... more
Rooted in the period of crisis for the French First Republic (1792–1804), tangled in war and increasingly losing political legitimacy due to repeated electoral defeat and manœuvre, this paper examines a radical republican’s endeavour to re-conceptualise the theoretical base of the revolutionary state. This is done by analysing a heretofore neglected political treatise written by Jean-Baptiste Salaville: L’homme et la société, ou Nouvelle théorie de la nature humaine et de l’état social (1799), praised by Benjamin Constant as ‘very estimable’. Based on the problématique of the Directorial period, Salaville elaborated a new political theory aimed at justifying, strengthening and stabilising the Republic in crisis. The radical ideas of the French Revolution are generally regarded as the offsprings of the theory of social contract. However, even though the revolutionaries cherished Rousseau’s legacy, the period was not without instances in which this legacy could be multifarious and the notion of social contract could be attributed, in a decidedly negative tone, less to Rousseau than to Hobbes. In this context a study of Salaville demonstrates that the idea of natural sociability could provide a stepping stone for elaborating a radical republican future without the notion of social contract. Salaville’s political vision, built on the tradition of natural jurisprudence, posited a new idea of the general will and empiricist legislation in the last days of the French Revolution.
Research Interests: Democratic Theory, Republicanism, Hobbes, Natural Law, French Revolution, and 12 moreEnlightenment, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, History of Political Thought, Rousseau, Moral Philosophy, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Natural Law Theory, Kantian Moral Theory, Etienne Bonnot, abbé de Condillac, "natural Law" Jurisprudence, and Idéologie
By locating the French revolutionary debate on war and patriotism in the intellectual context of the eighteenth-century reading of Roman history, this paper argues that K. M. Baker’s interpretation of classical republicanism of the French... more
By locating the French revolutionary debate on war and patriotism in the intellectual context of the eighteenth-century reading of Roman history, this paper argues that K. M. Baker’s interpretation of classical republicanism of the French Revolution needs revision. Brissot argued in 1791 that war would strengthen the revolutionary state and society in a benevolent circle because the experience of war would foster valour and patriotism which would in turn guarantee military victories to come. This kind of belligerent republicanism is often portrayed as proof that the revolutionaries had an anachronistic idea of the inter-relationship between patriotism and war. It is cited to point out the weak grasp they had on the reality of modern commercial society as well as proof that they venerated the classical era of citizen soldiers who protected their own fatherland without a professional army. However, such a view needs to be altered by a closer reading of sources in their intellectual historical contexts. The key is the revolutionaries’ view of the history of Rome. What was particularly associated at the time with the study of Roman history was the anxiety about the prospect of military governments in Europe. Rome mattered less because it offered justification and strategy for imperial expansion than because it represented the danger of the deadly prospect of that very imperial expansion combined with military government. This paper proposes to read the political thoughts of Robespierre, Saint-Just and Billaud-Varenne within the broader ‘Enlightenment’ context of speculations on the history and the future of Europe. This gives rise to a picture in which the Jacobins are no more the ferocious ‘Ancients’ as they have been widely denounced ever since Thermidor.
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By locating the French revolutionary debate on war and patriotism in the intellectual context of the eighteenth-century reading of Roman history, this paper argues that Keith Baker’s interpretation of classical republicanism of the French... more
By locating the French revolutionary debate on war and patriotism in the intellectual context of the eighteenth-century reading of Roman history, this paper argues that Keith Baker’s interpretation of classical republicanism of the French Revolution needs revision. Brissot argued in 1791 that war would strengthen the revolutionary state and society in a benevolent circle because the experience of war would foster valour and patriotism which would in turn guarantee military victories to come. This kind of belligerent republicanism is often portrayed as proof that the revolutionaries had an anachronistic idea of the inter-relationship between patriotism and war. It is cited to point out the weak grasp they had on the reality of modern commercial society as well as proof that they venerated the classical era of citizen soldiers who protected their own fatherland without a professional army. However, such a view needs to be altered by a closer reading of sources in their intellectual historical contexts. The key is the revolutionaries’ view of the history of Rome. What was particularly associated at the time with the study of Roman history was the anxiety about the prospect of military governments in Europe. Pace Edward Andrew, Rome mattered less because it offered justification and strategy for imperial expansion than because it represented the danger of the deadly prospect of that very imperial expansion combined with military government. This paper proposes to read the political thoughts of Robespierre, Saint-Just and Billaud-Varenne within the broader ‘Enlightenment’ context of speculations on the history and the future of Europe. This gives rise to a picture in which the Jacobins are no more the ferocious ‘Ancients’ as they have been widely denounced ever since 9 Thermidor.
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History Departments Joint Seminar, Seoul National University.