“Decorum” and “Politesse”: Thomasius’s Theory of Civilized Society in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Drawing on a comparison between political economy in eighteenth-century Scotland and Naples, John Robertson has suggested putting “the enlightenment above national context” back on the agenda.1 As he rightly observes, over the past twenty years much scholarly attention has been devoted to the study of Enlightenment in national contexts. Taking the Scottish Enlightenment as an example, Robertson first points to the interpretative gains of the national approach to the Enlightenment. However, he then observes that the insistence upon the national particularities of the Enlightenment has attenuated scholars’ awareness of the interconnectedness of intellectual activity. As a consequence, some historians seem to question that something like the Enlightenment has ever existed. Against this background Robertson invokes Franco Venturi’s approach to the Enlightenment “which recognized the specific, local concerns of its adherents without sacrificing the conviction that it was also in an important sense an international movement” (672). Taking the Enlightenment as “a specific intellectual movement, extending across the European world” (673), he then sets out to explore how wide the differences were “that patriotism might impose upon cosmopolitanism, within the framework of political economy” (675).