Determinist Thought: Stendhal and the Eighteenth-century Inheritance

Abstract

Tracing influences is regarded in many quarters as a disreputable game, and, like many disreputable games, it can rapidly become a pleasurable addiction. The hazards of disentangling the many factors that make a novelist what he is are obvious enough. While a number of the major Realists claimed to be directly indebted to various of the thinkers mentioned below, others had read none of them. Yet they all moved in a society where the intellectual climate, that much maligned term, had been conditioned by them. Like huge savanna trees, their contribution to the atmosphere was diffusive and hard to quantify, but nonetheless far-reaching.