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European History Quarterly
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DOI: 10.1177/0265691406059610
2006 36: 7 European History Quarterly
Roberto M. Dainotto
the De-Centering of Montesquieu's Europe
The Discreet Charm of the Arabist Theory: Juan Andrs, Historicism, and

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The Discreet Charm of the Arabist Theory:
Juan Andrs, Historicism, and the
De-Centering of Montesquieus Europe
Roberto M. Dainotto
Duke University, USA
The history of Europe, Lindsay Waters suggested in 1997, needs retelling from
the point of view of Defoes Friday, of Shakespeares Caliban. Waters contention
was that a history of Europe can no longer be limited to the fable of Europe . . .
taming the worlds anarchy by the light of [its] culture,
1
and has to start taking
into account the different perspectives offered by Europes own colonized subjects.
Since the publication of Waters piece On the Idea of Europe, Friday and
Caliban have certainly offered groundbreaking contributions to the rewriting of
such history and, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, to provincializing
Europe.
2
Enrique Dussell and Edgardo Lander from Latin America; Ranajit Guha
and Gyan Prakash from India; Molefi Asante from Sub-Saharan Africa all these
scholars, and many more, have taught us that looking at Europe from a subaltern
position means not only to change perspectives and points of view, but, more
radically, to interrogate the very cultural categories history, culture, civiliza-
tion, and knowledge itself on which an idea of Europe as end of history (or as its
final and Hegelian realization) has so often been predicated. As James Blaut wrote
in 1993, Eurocentrism is not a matter of attitudes in the sense of values and
prejudices, but rather . . . a matter of science, and scholarship, and informed and
expert opinion.
3
A retelling of Europes history from the point of view of Friday
and Caliban, accordingly, has become, quite consistently, a re-theorization,
above all, of that body of science and scholarship that goes under the name of
history. It has been history, as Chakrabarty maintains, that has prepared the
idea of Europe (a geographical place) as modernity (a temporal category); and it
has been history, again, that has hypostatized Europe as the center, according to
european hi story quarterly ;
European History Quarterly Copyright 2006 SAGE Publications,
London, Thousand Oaks, ca, and New Delhi (www.sagepublications.com), Vol. 36(1), 729.
issn 0265-6914. doi: 10.1177/0265691406059610
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a logic that Blaut called diffusionism, from which events (revolution, democracy,
and so on) are diffused to other, backward or developing places.
If so much has been done already by the subaltern historiography of the new
Fridays and Calibans, even more, arguably, remains to be done from at least
another subaltern position that of Europes own PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece
and Spain, in Brussels diplomacy, quite cynical acronym). A few years ago,
Gyan Prakash suggested that It is up to the scholars . . . including Europeanists
to start using the theoretical frameworks of post-colonial and subaltern studies.
4
The fact is that Europeanists have very good reasons to do just that: Eurocentrism
itself, as Antonio Gramsci well knew, does have its own margins and southern
questions. A border gnoseology is then not only possible, but also necessary to
articulate from within Europe as a critical reflection on knowledge production
from . . . the interior borders of the modern/colonial world system.
5
This border
gnoseology intends to disprove the dominant assumption of European Studies:
that in the eighteenth century the concept of Europe is ultimately defined, and
that, with Montesquieu, Europe looked as if it had taken permanent shape.
Rather, a look at the borders of eighteenth-century Europe shows that what
contemporary interpreters have considered to be a final and permanent shape of
Europe was in fact what Denis de Rougemont with less scruples calls a French
Europe.
6
Already in the eighteenth century, such a Franco-centric Europe was
coming under attack not only from its eastern
7
but also from its southern margins.
What follows is an attempt to recover such often-muted controversy.
Montesquieus Europe: History as Geography
In his essay, Montesquieu et lEurope Jean Goldzink asked, Is Europe but a
category effectuated by Montesquieus reflection?.
8
According to his biographer,
Montesquieu had repeatedly expressed in his Penses the intention to write a
historical work.
9
We know that, apart from scattered notes on what had to
become a Universal History, Montesquieu never realized such a project. A dis-
trust for history was certainly in the air of Montesquieus France, and could, at
least in part, explain his decision to abandon the work: the reformation of know-
ledge which Descartes envisaged, and actually did bring about, was designed to
contribute nothing to historical thought, because he did not believe history to
be, strictly speaking, a branch of knowledge at all. In particular, the idea of
Universal History, that Bossuet had codified in his Discourse on Universal
History (1681), sounded so much like Biblical orthodoxy that it was largely
perceived as incompatible with the new spirit of scientific enquiry stirring in the
late seventeenth century.
10
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That Montesquieu eventually discarded his historiographical project to write
instead the Spirit of the Laws does not mean, however, that Montesquieu had
abandoned his historicist ambitions altogether: on the contrary, we are informed
in the Preface that the book intended to trace nothing less than the histories of
all nations; and by book three, we are reminded that Montesquieus was not a
refutation of previous histories, but, rather, its ultimate synthesis and confirma-
tion of the entire body of historiography.
11
In fact, despite Montesquieus unease with the work of Bossuet, one could
argue that both the Discourse and the Spirit had a similar understanding of
history as a chronology and teleology of great epochs carrying a precise meaning
in the great scheme of things. For Bossuet, the goal of Universal History was to
understand what Europe is in the universe and what Paris and the Ile de France
mean within Europe.
12
Europe, in other words, was the climax of historys tele-
ology and France its center. For Montesquieu, not altogether differently, history
was a way of understanding how Europe has come to such a high degree of power,
that history cannot compare it to anything else; and how Europe, conceived as
the ultimate epiphany of modernity (the progress towards the Law), was firmly
centered on France, most powerful nation, heart or even head of Europe.
13
However, whereas Bossuets history was guided by a theological design,
Montesquieus had to make do simply with a teleological one: the progress of
humankind, aimed at affirming the superiority of the present age and of France
within it, could no longer be derived deductively from a putative will of God,
but inductively, from the empirical order of physical realities. This was
Montesquieus dialectics of history: it began from empirical observations, and
finished by arranging them into a telos pointing to the manifestation of an
intemporal truth.
14
While the creation of the Lord Almighty no longer appeared perfect in all its
parts, humankinds secularized progress was then imagined as a movement from
an utterly imperfect savagery, through barbarism, and to the final triumph of
our admirable law of today.
15
To grasp such a progress in some empirical
way, however, history had to be somehow re-theorized. How else could history
seriously discuss the past epochs of savagery when those very epochs could be
neither scientifically observed, nor reconstructed on the basis of any written
record? As Voltaire would declare in the Encyclopdie, with words that
Montesquieu would have certainly understood, the long and universal ignorance
of this art [history] that records facts through writing makes any history of the
origin of humankind unreliable: before writing, historical memory is transmitted
from one generation to another. Such accounts are more reliable at the beginning,
and lose a degree of reliability at each passing generation. With time, the fable
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grows, and truth diminishes: hence, all the hypotheses of the origin of people are
absurd.
16
Also, for Montesquieu, savagery was at best the fable of pre-Edenic
communities, or of Hobbes natural state. Yet savagery was also central to his
notion of progress: far from being absurd, savagery was the necessary idea to
prove how much better the laws of today are compared to the absence of any law
in savage societies. Savagery had to be postulated in order to claim the universal
law of progress. But how?
Here lies the essence of Montesquieus theory of history: if Hobbes state of
nature is, by definition, a fable transmitted from one generation to another, the
fact remains that a savage state comparable to the one described by Hobbes is
still observable today or so Montesquieu alleges in non-European tribes.
Progress, to put it differently, is understood as a series of contiguous, observable
places. History merges with geography. Savage, accordingly, no longer is the
myth of a pre-historic past impossible for the scientist to observe, but an ethno-
graphic space open to the gaze of the analyst: savage is then the new world of
Louisiana and of America in general; savage is Siberia, and part of North
Africa.
17
In these places was the observable origin of historical progress that the
reportages of merchants, travelers, local historians, and missionaries had but
begun, ethnographically, to reconstruct.
Geography then became the new organizing principle of Montesquieus theory
of progress. History was, like a branch of the ars memorandi, a forward motion
best represented as a movement from one place to another. Barbarity was its
second stage, observable in the farming tribes of North Africa, in the despotic
regimes of the Near East, in the customs of India, and no matter what others
say, of China. Barbarous was a place of history, where nomadic hunting
had been successfully replaced by a farming culture rooted in the communal
territory. Barbarous, more importantly, was a place where histories always feel
servitude
18
and register the lack of a just Law.
History was thus spatialized, and time converted into place: Asia, Africa, and
America represented old, pre-historic moments in the geography of Universal
History. They were assigned a place elsewhere of the present, marginalized as
the not-yet of the European structure of time.
19
It was in Europe, and in Europe
only, that true history had begun as a passage from barbarity to the laws of
today.
In the Penses Montesquieu was collecting for his eventually aborted attempt
at writing a Universal History, we read that Greece, in fact, had opened nothing
less than a new time: In those new times, the fervour for liberty gave them
[Greeks] love for the country, heroic courage, and hatred of kings and this drove
them to do great things.
20
The greatest of these things was the institution of the
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Law, which protected the citizens freedom against the despotism of the powerful.
Love of freedom was the proof of the novelty of the Greeks in the telos of
Universal History. If savagery and barbarism were then pre-historical stages,
true history seemed to open, for Montesquieu, with the new times of freedom.
History was the story of freedoms unfolding, and this was a story that never
happened in savage Africa and America, or in despotic Asia, but coincided instead
with a place Europe.
Rome, after Greece, and for only a short while, represented the second stage of
the European progress towards freedom, at least until this democracy became
corrupted. With the fall of Rome, it was then our German fathers The people
of the North of Europe, source of freedom who came to answer the historical
task of realizing liberty in Europe once and for all.
21
German, like its counterpart Roman, was a term loaded with political over-
tones in Montesquieus France: Romanists imagined the French monarchy as the
ideal heir of the absolute powers of the Roman emperor; Germanists, instead,
argued for a Germanic origin of France, in which the monarchs powers were
subject to a check by the intermediate (between king and people) feudal classes.
Hardly any argument about Rome and Germania, in fact, was free from political
overtones in this context. Attempts to sever France from southern and specifically
Roman origins had noticeably begun at the time of the Gallican schism of the
fifteenth century, and a politico-religious question had soon turned into a wider
cultural one concerning the relation of France with Rome. Put simply: was France
the heir of Rome, or was its ancestry to be located somewhere else, as in the
German forests?
Following Martin Thom, I should observe that this dispute had very important
bearing on theories and historical chronologies of Europe. The question was
whether Europe had originated in the Mediterranean, during classical times; or
whether it had begun in the Middle Ages, with the Northern Franks destruction
of the Roman Empire. Romanists were ready to condemn rather than celebrate
the medieval order,
22
whereas the Germanists, anticipating the Romantic cult of
the Middle Ages, made modern Europe originate from a northern overcoming of
ancient and Mediterranean Europe. In other words, the antithesis was not simply
a political one pitting against each other the Romanist defenders of absolute
monarchy and the Germanist proponents of an aristocratic middle class between
monarch and third estate. The antithesis was also, in the full sense of the word,
geopolitical: whereas Germanism celebrated the contribution of the Aryan
nomadic tribes to European culture, Romanism, instead, argued that it was the
urban traditions of Egypt, Phoenicia and Asia Minor that had created a basis for
civilization in the Mediterranean that had peaked with Rome.
23
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Far from de-mythologizing
24
the myth of either a Roman or a German origin
of Europe, Montesquieu was ready to take from the diatribes of Romanists and
Germanists a twofold conclusion: Roman laws belonged to an ancient cycle of
history that had by now ended with the fall of Rome; and German laws had
opened yet a new historical cycle modernity that had now climaxed in France.
The admonition addressed to French monarchy was clear: in Althussers words,
absolute power was an ancient form of government, and a reintroduction of
absolutism in France today would have meant a regress into historys past;
modern times belong to feudal monarchy, and feudal monarchy belongs to
modern times.
25
We notice the idiosyncratic way in which Montesquieu translated the political
split between Germanists and Romanists in his own geo-historical terms.
Germans and Romans, in other words, became for him concepts dividing Europe
into two complementary antitheses, and its history into an ancient and a
modern time. Book IV.iv had already established, in some Manichean way, the
Differences of the Effects of Education in the Ancients and the Moderns. In addi-
tion, Book XXI.iv had been devoted to The Principal Difference between the
Commerce of the Ancients and the Moderns. In truth, the Spirit of the Laws in its
entirety was committed to contrasting the tyrannical and arbitrary principles
that were guided by ancient histories to our modern reason.
26
Germania and
Rome were now the places and times of all these differences. And it is not only the
old Rome of empire that was, for Montesquieu, ancient. If Montesquieu, as it
has often been noticed, considered the prioritization of commerce [as] the chief
distinguishing feature of modernity,
27
then also present-day Rome was, quite
consistently, a place of antiquity: in Rome, every one is at his ease except those
who labour, those who cultivate the arts, those who are industrious, those who
have land, those who are engaged in trade. Not Rome as a historical empire, but
Rome as a place is ancient. What is then Rome? Rome, simply, is the past the
time of Europes yore that archaeology and tourism are already reclaiming for the
northern gaze: We can never leave the Romans; so it is that still today, in their
capital, we overlook the new palaces and go look for the ruins of the past.
28
This meant, above all, a spatialization of the idea of historical progress that had
to transcend the limited metaphoric reach of categories such as German and
Roman, and converge into the most programmatic theory of the differential
character of southern and northern Europe. In Europe there is a kind of balance
between the southern and the northern nations.
29
It was now this balance that
needed to be theorized. In other words, if Montesquieus often-noticed goal was to
discover the differential character of European and Asian States,
30
his most
modern preoccupation, and one that has been but rarely noticed, was to find the
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same difference within Europe. Europe, for Montesquieu, had an internal Asia
a south of Europe [where] laws do [in the present tense!] exactly the contrary of
what European laws ought to do;
31
a south of Europe, incidentally, that was
Asiatic not only in climate and political (i.e. despotic) customs, but in history
itself, from al-Andalus to Sicily.
You will find, in the climates of the north, peoples who have few vices, many
virtues, and much sincerity and candor. As you move toward the countries of
the south, you will believe you have moved away from morality itself. And
then again: In northern regions a machine robust and well built but heavy finds
pleasure in whatever is apt to throw the spirits into motion.
32
In the south, instead,
as for example in Italy:
a southern wind called Sirocco . . . passes through the sands of Africa
before reaching Italy. It rules that country; it exerts its power over all
spirits; it produces a universal weightiness and slowness; Sirocco is the
intelligence that presides over all Italian heads.
33
What this meant was that, if mankind are influenced by various causes, and if in
each country, as any one of these causes acts with more force, the others weaken
in proportion,
34
one could then conclude that nature (climate) was the strongest
cause in the south, historical progress in the north. Any advancement from
ancientness to modernity remained the prerogative of a northern spirit in motion:
According to Montesquieu, climate in the north . . . is such that in the end
it has little visible effect on political institutions. It is in the zones close to
the equator, according to Montesquieu, that climate has a determining role
in a direct sense . . . it is in the south where the particular circumstances
of climate have a directly determining effect.
35
Only Europe, compared to the savagery and barbarity of other continents, has a
history. In a way, history is Europe, whereas other continents are only fragments
of past and pre-historic stages. Yet, history is also a progress that goes from an
ancient south a bad country governed by climate to the modern north a
better one.
36
A new and modern kind of Eurocentrism was thus emerging in 1748,
with the publication of the Spirit of the Law: certainly, Europe was hypostatized
as the center and even the end of Universal History; but this center had already its
own internal margin. The PIGS were already the internal Other of Europe their
negative side, or, at best, their backward past.
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Juan Andrs: A Spanish Jesuit in Italy
Montesquieus theorization of a modern Europe divided between northern and
southern peoples,
37
with France at its head, was undoubtedly richest in conse-
quences. It might suffice to recall here Montesquieus influence on the Coppet
group, and on the formation of a modern northern Romanticism Madame de
Stals distinction of two European cultures, the one that comes from the south,
and the one which descends from the north; Charles Victor de Bonstettens The
Man of the South and the Man of the North; or even Hegels Philosophy of
History, in which history a science that falls under the category of Time as well
as Space is evolution from the southern Europe to its northern half.
38
Montesquieus reification of the south as Europes nave past, however, did not go
unchallenged for long.
Arguably the son of an encyclopedic age that had its roots in [Roger] Bacon,
the Encyclopdie, and the British Universal History,
39
Juan Andrs began to
write the eight-volume Of the Origins, Progress, and Present State of all Litera-
tures from his Italian exile in 1780. His general goal was to oppose the implanta-
tion of the restraining Gallic literary tenets and precepts of the neoclassical school
of thought . . . [and] counteract the influence of Encyclopedism.
40
Practically, this
meant to rescue Europes south from Montesquieus backwardness, which
Voltaire, like the philosophes, had made his own: The Oriental climate, nearer to
the South, obtains everything from nature; while we, in our North-West, we
owe everything to progress.
41
Theoretically, this meant to undo, first of all,
Montesquieus Universal History.
Juan Andrs had arrived in Italy through quite adventurous circumstances. As
a youth, he had renounced his right of primogeniture on Christmas Eve, 1754, to
wear the robe and become a Jesuit. He could not have chosen a worse time. Since
the Order had been founded in 1540 with the implicit (though never stated) intent
to stop the Protestant Reformation, Europe had already witnessed an ideological
divide between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Protestantism and
Catholicism, Molinism and Probabilism that had typically set Jansenists and
Jesuits against each other. The accusations against the Jesuits that led to their first
expulsion from Portugal (1758), however, had struck fairly new notes. In 1750,
Sebastio Jos de Carvalho y Melo, Count of Oeyras and future Marquis de
Pombal, had escalated the campaign against the Jesuits by blaming them not only
for exercising economic control in the colonies (especially Paraguay), but also for
monopolizing education in the home country. As Franco Venturi summarizes,
Pombal had accused the Jesuits of opposing the will of the mercantilist state,
which had now decided to control the economy and education, religion and
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culture.
42
Control of culture and education meant for Pombal a modernization of
the curriculum: the ancient humanities history and Belles Lettres above all
had to make room for the new experimental and practical sciences that had
started to spread their hegemonic light from Paris (where the first volume of the
Encyclopdie was published in 1748) to the rest of Europe.
In such a way, Pombal had prepared the terrain for the philosophes denuncia-
tions of the Jesuits backward humanistic culture in a modern world giddily
moving towards the new practical sciences
43
already sung by the Encyclopdie. As
Robert Palmer noticed the expulsion of the Jesuits in France had coincided with
a growing interest on the part of school reformers La Chalotais, Rolland,
Navarre, Guyton de Morveau to create a modern and national, Gallican educa-
tional system for the preparation of citoyens:
44
Their general message was that education should be nationalized, and its
object be to form citizens. Reformers complained that the schools were too
secluded from civil life, that teachers in religious orders lacked patriotic
spirit, that children were taught to see their true country in another world,
and to place their allegiance too exclusively in God and religion. The old
humanistic and literary education was condemned as useless in itself . . .
La Chalotais held, against the cosmopolitan and humanistic tradition of
the Jesuits, that education should conform to the national character, be
controlled by the government, and conducted by men who, not renounc-
ing the world, practiced the civic virtues that they taught, and had
interests the same as those of the country.
45
In 1762, the Order was expelled from France. The secularization and state control
of national education was again part of the decision of Carlos III to expel Andrs
order from Spain in 1767. Carlos was an attack against the Jesuits stake 669
colleges, 176 seminaries, and all the private tutoring for young aristocrats
46
to
organize education against the state monopoly.
47
With the expulsion of the Jesuits,
in other words, the traditional war of religion had translated into a new querelle
between an old intellectual order still busy studying an old unmovable tradition
based on the lesson and imitation of the ancients for the sole benefit of the
aristocracies,
48
and a state-sponsored modern innovation of the curriculum for the
new emerging bourgeoisie. Central to the political decision of expelling the Jesuits
in Portugal, France and Spain was the cultural question of national educa-
tion
49
the choice, namely, between a pragmatically utilitarian national culture
for the sciences and trades on the one hand and the Jesuits humanistic culture on
the other.
When the decree of expulsion was promulgated in Madrid on 2 April 1767,
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Andrs had to leave his post at the Royal and Pontifical University of Ganda,
where he had been teaching for three years courses in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew
under the general rubric of Rhetoric. He left Spain and moved first to Bonifacio, in
Corsica, where the patriots led by Pasquale Paoli were in the midst of their never-
ending revolution for self-determination (against Genoa at that time, soon after
against the French). He left Corsica for the more tranquil Italian mainland in 1768,
when Pope Clement XIII offered asylum to the Jesuits in the Papal States. Here,
in Ferrara, he lived for five years, until, on 15 August 1773, the Pope changed his
mind and suppressed the Order from his lands. From Ferrara, Andrs moved to
Mantua, where he arrived in January 1774, and where he stayed until the arrival
of Napoleon in 1796. In Mantua, Andrs achieved a rather prominent status as a
learned person and as citizen of the international Republic of Letters: he was
visited by Herder and Goethe, got in touch with learned Italians, befriended his
Jesuit compatriots in exile, and carried out his research to write Of the Origins and
Progress of All Literatures.
When he started writing the first pages of his eight-volume work, Andrs knew
that a criticism of Franco-centrism meant, above all, a criticism of the theory of
knowledge that had been made hegemonic by the Encyclopdie. In the Pre-
liminary Discourse, DAlembert had followed Roger Bacons taxonomy and
divided human knowledge into erudition (memory), Belles Lettres (imagination),
and philosophy (reason). Andrs began his book by questioning the possibility of
dividing one kind of knowledge from the others:
Such division is correct if we consider the relations of the various sciences
with the faculties of our mind; but it is not very fruitful if we want to follow
the progress that has been accomplished in those sciences . . . such
division . . . can serve those who want to examine the single sciences, but
not those of us who want to write their history.
50
If Universal Reason and the public utility of modern education had determined
the method of the Encyclopdie, the Jesuit, feeling victim of exactly that educa-
tional system, had to find a different methodological principle for his work:
history, critical history, or philosophical history
51
the study of the past was
for him essential to understand the progress towards modernity. This is interest-
ing (and unsurprising), first of all because it follows what has been characterized
as a general trend of literary studies in the eighteenth century. Earlier epochs had
studied the corpus of a poetic tradition not with a properly historical . . . interest,
but from a rhetorical point of view.
52
They had singled out authoritative
examples, possibly to imitate, in a given literary tradition. Only in the eighteenth
century is a predominant rhetorical interest abandoned in favor of a chronological
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organization (alternative, incidentally, to the alphabetical one of the encyclo-
pedia). What Andrs found was that such novel interest in chronology was in fact
not so general, and had instead its own geography: the French, under the spell of
Cartesian Reason and Montesquieus General Spirit, had failed to develop
chronology into true history. Jean Pierre Nicerons Memoirs, 172945, or Prosper
Marchands Historical Dictionary, 17589, were for Andrs but fragmentary and
itemized collections of biographic details. Even the French Literary History, 1733,
developed by the Benedictines under the direction of Antoine Rivet de la Grange
and Charles Clemencet, arguably the model [of literary historiography] that
other nations have taken on themselves to imitate, remained for him farthest
from the perfection that this kind of work requires.
53
True historiography, for Andrs, had to be found in Montesquieus south
more precisely in his adoptive Italy, where Gian Mario Crescimbeni, already in
1698, had produced a History of Vulgar Poetry. Crescimbenis history had been
followed by Giacinto Gimmas (1723), Francesco Saverio Quadrios (173952),
Francesco Antonio Zaccarias (1750) literary histories, and finally by the wise
Girolamo Tiraboschi.
54
The French may have had their philosophes, Andrs
seemed to say, but Italy had its literary historians (who, incidentally, had all
belonged to the Jesuit Order):
Other writers have written biographies, have compiled factual details,
have collected monuments, which have greatly served to enlighten literary
history; but only Tiraboschi has given us a literary history. France [has its]
literary histories, but theirs are still imperfect; only Italy has a complete
and finished one Tiraboschis.
55
What attracted Andrs to these texts was that they all presented, through history,
an explicit defense of southern culture against the accusations of French classi-
cism: that southern literature, starting with Petrarchs taste for the embellish-
ment, and more so under the influence of the Spanish baroque, had become
unreasonable.
56
The historicist defense of Petrarch consisted in claiming that the
significance of his poetry had to be measured not on the basis of exogenous stan-
dards say, Reason but as the manifestation of the particular cultural develop-
ment of Italian literature in Petrarchs own epoch. Universal Reason the Italian
historians seem to suggest is not only Franco-centric, but a-historical as well.
This point brings me to the second reason why Andrs turn to history is at the
same time interesting and unsurprising. In his 1948 Harvard lecture on Vico
and Aesthetic Historism, Eric Auerbach had already observed that historicism
practically originated in the second half of the eighteenth century, as a reaction
against the European predominance of French classicism. Historicism was:
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the conviction that every civilization and every period has its own possi-
bilities of aesthetic perfection; that the works of art of the different peoples
and periods, as well as their general forms of life, must be understood as
products of variable individual conditions, and have to be judged each by
its own development, not by absolute rules of beauty and ugliness.
57
In truth, we should not exaggerate the range of what Auerbach calls every
civilization and every period here. Certainly born within Europe, and certainly
short-circuited in the attempts to articulate variations on a master narrative
that could be called the history of Europe, eighteenth-century historicism can
hardly be seen as some kind of multiculturalism aimed at going beyond the strict
confines of a Eurocentric universe: Europe remains the sovereign, theoretical
subject of all histories.
58
What the emergence of historicism signals, however, is
that the very center of this Eurocentric vision becomes a contested site of theoreti-
cal confrontations around the eighteenth century: against a fixed notion of
European culture promoted by French classicism and rationalism, historicism pits
its own alternative centers. The history of historicism is then the story of a battle
for the definition of Europe and its culture that a homogenizing notion of
Eurocentrism runs the risk of obliterating.
Put bluntly, historicism had emerged, by the second half of the eighteenth
century, as the ideology and methodology of a subaltern Europe Vicos Italy,
Schlegels Germany, and Andrs Spain pitted against the hegemony of
France.
59
In this context we should understand Andrs insistence that France had
no histories: certainly, Bossuet, Montesquieu and Voltaire had written the kind
of Universal Histories that the Origin and Progress of All Literatures was now
trying to rewrite. Yet, those histories were, to use Stephen Greenblatts term,
monologic:
60
they assumed there was one telos, and one direction of progress
pointing invariably towards France.
The French Universal Histories, in sum, lacked the very idea of historicism.
The latter was a concept of relativism radically opposed to the linear model of
Montesquieu. Progress was not a line that went simply from south to north. For
Andrs, who had Giambattista Vicos New Science (and at least a second-hand
knowledge of Ibn Khalduns Muqaddimah) under his belt, each place has a
history of its own and has to be judged on the basis of this local history, not from
the perspective of a putative end of history located in a western and northern
modernity. Each place traverses cycles of barbarity, excellence and decadence.
Progress is to be understood not as a teleology of continuous perfectibility,
but rather as the simple chronological passage of cultural hegemony from one
decaying nation to a rising one:
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In general, I believe that we can consider Asia as the true motherland, the
cradle of literature. Because Asia was the first country to be populated
after the Flood, it was the first to cultivate the sciences. It can also be said
that the light of letters, like that of the sun, began to enlighten the Oriental
quarters, following then its westward course, casting light first on Egypt,
and then on Greece, and after that illuminating our western regions [i.e.
Europe]. God willing, this light will stay above us a little longer, or maybe
will stop its course in our hemisphere, rather than keep moving towards
the West transferring the splendor of sciences to America and leaving
Europe in the same darkness of ignorance that nowadays casts a shadow
not only on the Asiatic nations, but also on Egypt and on the eastern parts
of Europe.
61
Montesquieu had notoriously denied Asia any light of culture at all let alone the
prerogative of being the cradle of literature. His cradle was of course Greece
first, and then, and foremost, Charles the Greats Frankish school system:
Charlemagnes continuous victories, the sweetness and justice of his
government, seemed to found a new monarchy . . . Arts and Sciences
seemed to reappear. One can say that the people of France were destroying
Barbarity.
62
Andrs idea of progress differed from Montesquieu not only because it denied
any continuous perfecting of literature its light just moves, like the sun, from
one place to another; more importantly, Andrs history did not end with France.
The light of literature is moving westward, towards the Atlantic. Where do we
find then the light of culture now? Without being exceedingly surprised, we find
the light exactly around Spain and Portugal, where it is hesitating to jump to the
other shore of the ocean. The image is halfway jingoistic tastelessness and sheer
beauty: by reclaiming the importance of Spain as the last Thule of Europes culture
before light would move to the New World, Andrs is already hinting at where
modern literature really is. Paris is pass; New York may be the future. Madrid,
no doubt, is the present. Modernity is a Spanish light.
Arabist Theory
Literatures light then stations, in the present of European modernity, over the
Iberian Peninsula. Spain is the present of Enlightened Europe. Andrs would have
not been happy at the way French (and, to some extent, Scottish) Enlightenment
would soon become the antonomasia of the eighteenth century: a southern
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eighteenth century, climaxing in Spain, and rich of Italian historians, was for him
just as modern as the Age of Reason that Paris and Edinburgh had declared.
Andrs historicism was in fact aimed at reopening exactly the question of who,
besides the French Academy, the Encyclopdie, and the Parisian Republic of
Letters, had the right to produce and control the formation of a modern European
culture. At any rate, to say that Spain is the last Thule of European modernity is
still not enough for Andrs: what is the origin of that very modernity?
As we have seen, Asia is for Andrs the cradle of culture. Its light then moves
westward first to Egypt, then to Greece where it knows exemplary perfection.
63
The next stage is Imperial Rome, and then . . .
. . . Then what? Chronology is of the utmost importance here: because, with the
fall of the Roman Empire, begins a modern Europe divided into nations and into
national (vulgar) tongues. To understand where the light of literature moves
after Rome, means therefore to understand in which language, and in which
nation, the cultural origin of modern Europe resides. Montesquieu had claimed
that Greek and Latin culture was recuperated, and translated into vulgar tongues,
in Charlemagnes Frankish schools and monastery. This was meant to give
France a key role in the configuration of modern Europe. In addition, France
(Provence) was said to be the geographic origin of both modern troubadour
poetry syllabic and in rhymes, against the non-rhyming Greco-Latin tradition
based on the stresses on the verse and of the modern genre of the vulgar roman.
Linguistic nationalism, in other words, had begun in France.
Andrs began his demolition of the Frankish myth of origins by diminishing
considerably the role of Charlemagne the same Charles, incidentally, that had
tried to invade Spain in 778, and that had occupied Barcelona in 801. In a curious
(for a man of the church) anti-clerical turn, Andrs declared that, yes, Charles had
preserved something but that something was only the pseudo-culture of
mediocre theologians, ignorant clerics, and illiterate priests. It was not culture at
all:
Because in fact the Emperor, Alcuinus, Theodulf, and all those who were
working for a reformation of studying had only one goal: service to the
church. Accordingly, their great schools taught little more than grammar
[useful only to read the psalms] and ecclesiastical singing.
In Frankish Europe, in other words:
Schools were created; but only to teach reading, singing, counting, and
little more. Teachers were formed; but it was enough that they knew some
grammar, and if one was ahead of his peers enough to know also a little bit
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of mathematics or astronomy, he was considered an oracle. But a Terence,
a Cicero, a Quintilian did not exist in all France.
64
In the last analysis, what Charlemagne, quintessential Frenchman, had done, was
to submit literature to the control of instrumental reason not the instrumental
reason of enlightened nationalism, to be sure, but certainly the instrumental
reason of the church.
As for the claim of a Provenal origin of modern literature, this is, Andrs tells
us with Vico in mind, just the arrogance and pretentiousness of the French, who
brag monuments of superior antiquity both in prose and in verse. After all, what
is there to brag about such a mediocre poem as the Roman de la Rose, where
absolutely nothing happens but the picking of a rose!
65
The French, for Andrs,
were essentially inept to revitalize literature. Inheriting Charlemagnes reforms,
the French, not the Spaniards, had been the center and cause of Europes dark
ages, which Andrs characterizes as a fall into sterile, sophomoric scholasticism:
None of the first scholastics was a Spaniard. None of the early contro-
versies that excited the scholastics excited Spain. And none of the early
scholastic sects was born in those places. Spaniards got scholastics from
the Gauls that scholastic, so valued and respected in France and
Germany.
66
Scholasticism, rather than inventing a modern European literature, had only
drowned Europe in so much dialectical nonsense and left the whole of Europe in
a state of total cultural disarray.
67
If the French had not invented modern prose and rhyme, then who had? There
was only one answer for Andrs: Arab literature was the central influence in the
rebirth of modern Europe. With a prose reminiscent of the Thousand and One
Nights, Andrs described Baghdad as the very light of modern culture as
the locus, namely, where a shift from classical languages to the vulgar ones
accessible to the people had been transacted:
One could see hundreds of camels entering Baghdad, heavy only of
manuscripts and books; and all books scholars thought should be made
accessible to the people, were immediately translated into Arabic, no
matter in which language they had originally been written.
From Baghdad, hegemonic centre of the ninth century, literature had been then
exported to the world entire:
So, throughout the vast Arab domains, in all the three parts of the world
[the one known at the time: Asia, Africa and Europe] where their empire
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had been extended, we see Saracen letters enter triumphantly, and domi-
nate, like their armies, the globe. Since the ninth century of our era, the
light of Arabic literature began to shine, and for six or seven centuries it
kept glittering bright.
68
Not unaware of the consequences of such an assertion, Andrs conceded that this
is a truth that many will take as a ridiculous paradox; namely, that modern
literature, not only in the sciences, but also in the Belles Lettres, recognizes the
Arab as its mother.
69
Accordingly, Andrs devoted to what would later be known
as the Arabist Theory the lengthiest and most problematic chapter of his entire
treatise a chapter he was not even sure how to title in order to render it more
palatable to his European reader: vaguely, Of Arab Literature in the Parma
edition; programmatically, Of Arab Influence in the Modern Culture of the Belles
Lettres in the Venetian and Prato editions; hiding the Arab, Of the Introduction
of the Vulgar Tongues in the Belles Lettres, particularly in Poetry in the Roman
and Pisan editions.
Andrs was not the first scholar to formulate the Arabist Theory.
70
In England,
Hermetics and Rosicrucians had already recognized Arabic as the linguistic
medium through which much of the Hermetic corpus had been transmitted to
Europe in the medieval period.
71
Even in France, Pierre Daniel Huet, bishop of
Avranches, had begun his 1670 letter to Monsieur de Segrais by saying that the
invention of the roman was due to the Orientals,
72
and that it is the Arabs, in my
opinion, that have given us the art of rhyming.
73
But it was especially in Italy,
where Andrs was exiled, that the question of an Arab influence in the develop-
ment of European wisdom had been tackled since Nicol Cusanos De docta
ignorantia (1440) with the patriotic aim of pointing to Pythagoras school of
Crotone as the Italic origin of western philosophy.
74
Giambattista Vico had
impugned the same thesis, with clear anti-Cartesian intentions, in De anti-
quissima italorum sapientia (1710).
Following Vico, Andrs then claimed that Arab was the origin of modern
poetry, of the novel, literary historiography, modern philosophy, mathematics,
astronomy, medicine, and jurisprudence. All of modern literature came to us
from Arabia, inglorious peninsula.
75
As suggested above, Andrs was not inventing the Arabist Theory. He was,
however, taking it away from the restricted domain of Arabists, theorists of
national literature, and critics of literary genres. By rearticulating an old theory,
he was positing the rather controversial hypothesis of a non-French (and in fact
non-European) origin of Europes modern culture. What for Huet was a mere
philological question, had become for Andrs a more radical re-orientation of the
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putative origin of modern Europe in the context of his new Universal History a
history with no teleology, historicist in its refusal to understand progress, which
in the 1780s would invariably end with the hegemony of France, as a necessary
betterment.
The question today is how to interpret Andrs controversial proposition. In
1941, Ramn Menndez Pidal had liquidated any opposition to the Arabist
Theory as a very rooted prejudice: the belief in the lack of intellectual communi-
cation between the two worlds, the Christian and the Islamic. In more recent
times, Maria Rosa Menocal has claimed that the Arabist Theory first ceases to be
discussed and then becomes altogether taboo in the second part of the nineteenth
century, when a European sense of self emerged . . . which was the height of
the colonialist period, and the prevailing attitudes precluded, consciously or sub-
consciously, any possibility of indebtedness to the Arabic world . . . it would
have been inconceivable or very difficult for most Europeans to imagine, let alone
explore or defend, a view of the European as being culturally subservient to the
Arab.
76
Both Menndez Pidals and Menocals reading of Andrs Arabist theory may
in fact be a little too kind: Andrs was quite far from claiming a subservient role
for Europe; it was not Europe that had to be de-centered for him, but France as the
center of a Eurocentric world. Although Domnguez Molt imagines Andrs as an
admirer, defender, and popularizer of Arab culture,
77
nowhere does the Origin
show much sympathy towards the Arab, itinerant and nomadic nation, pyro-
maniac of Alexandrias library, and bamboozled by Mohammed famoso impos-
tore.
78
That Andrs was not concerned with the destiny of the Arab is clear from
his total disinterest in trying to learn the language, preferring instead to rely on the
Spanish copies of the Escorial and on Miguel Casiris translations. He treated
Arab literature only insofar as it meant something for the history and genesis of
European culture. In contrast, Chinese and Indian literatures became irrelevant in
the space of one paragraph each, because unimportant for the progress of Europe.
Besides the Arabs, only Chaldeans can stay in our memory, because from their
doctrines the Greeks drew many notions; and Egypt only deserves, from the
whole of Africa, our consideration, Egypt having been the school of the Greeks.
79
In the end, a true European poetry was found by Andrs not in the places of
encounter between Europe and the Arab Moorish Spain, Fredericks Sicily but
in a second moment of translation, when whatever the Arab had given Europe was
purified and codified into a modern European idiom without any trace of the Arab
origin. So, for instance:
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where Arab science bloomed more, where the light of their knowledge
shined brighter, where the reign of their literature got fixed, so to speak,
was in Spain.
In conclusion:
the first flashes, which gave blinded Europe some light, came from Spain;
therefore, we can reasonably say that the origin of modern literature
derived from Spain.
80
Montesquieu, in that masterpiece of eighteenth-century Hispanophobia that is the
Persian Letters,
81
had painted Spain as an old empire possessing today only the
simulacra of its old glory and culture:
The eyeglasses [that all Spaniards wear] show demonstratively that
the one who wears them is a man enlightened by science and a profound
reader so profound indeed that his eyesight has weakened. [In Spain]
any nose adorned or weighed by [glasses] can be passed, with no one
daring to question, as a savants nose.
For Montesquieu the Spaniard of today is an inferior intellect, devoid of culture
culture being, of course, that essentially French attribute otherwise known as
raison:
Sure you can find some intelligence and some common sense people among
the Spaniards; but dont look for any in their books. Take for instance their
libraries, with their fantastic literature on one side, and the scientific works
on the other. It is as if the whole thing had been arranged and collected by
some secret foe of human reason.
Oriental in their habits, the Spaniards treat their women as if they were slaves in
the harem: They are, firstly, bigots secondly, jealous.
82
Answering Montesquieus Hispanophobic prejudice that as an appendage of
the Oriental world of Islam, the civilization of Spain did not constitute an integral
part of Europe,
83
Andrs argued that its connection to the east gave Spain a
constitutive role in the cultural formation of modern Europe. And if Montesquieu
had naturalized the superiority of France and marginality of Spain according to
his much discussed theory of climates, Andrs responded:
It is quite common to attribute to climate an influence on everything, and
especially on artistic taste and on the perfection of literature. I certainly
agree that also climate has some role in all that pertains to the strength
of the spirit. But to claim that the influence of climate determines the true
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origin and essence of the culture of various nations seems to me an
assertion not backed by experience, and unconfirmed by facts. Under the
same climate, with no great planetary change, the Greeks, brutes at first,
became then for long time the wisdom of the world; and that same Greece,
which was for many centuries the garden of Europe, has lately become a
sterile desert . . . Cold, says Montesquieu tightens the pores, and
makes the body stronger; at the same time, makes the nutritional juices
coarser, and the spirit becomes less lively. The fame of the author would
deserve a longer confutation than the one needed by the weakness of his
reasoning. I only would like to ask Montesquieu if, France being colder
than Spain, we should conclude that the French have stronger bodies and
less lively spirit.
84
Not climatology (which Montesquieu understood as a branch of the experimental
sciences) but history a critical and philosophical one can truly understand
the decline and fall of Greece. And history, more importantly, can alone under-
stand the centrality of southern and Oriental Spain in the formation of modern
Europe.
Certainly, if the scope of Andrs historicism was, in Auerbachs sense, to
debunk the myth of the center and introduce a measure of relativism in a world
ruled by (classicist) standards, then the Origin fell a little short of its goal. A
center Paris had been replaced by another al-Andalus. Moreover, the claim
of the superiority of Catholic Spain over an Arabia swindled by the famoso
impostore risks sounding like yet another Eurocentric design. One can only say
that, in his incapacity to extend the implications of his historicism beyond the
borders of his world system, Andrs was precisely the historical product of
Auerbachs individual conditions of his own place and time. A fundamental
blindness prevented him from seeing the full consequences of both his historicism,
and of his Arabist theory: that historical relativism could hardly be reconverted
into a theory of Spanish (or southern) centralism; and that the Arab origin of
European poetry could hardly justify his commitment to keep East and West as
cultural antitheses of each other. In this, rather than representing any solution,
Andrs remains the allegory of the problems and difficulties that we may still face
when attempting to provincialize Europe from its interior borders. However, these
problems and difficulties should not justify any uncritical embracing of mono-
lithic notions of Eurocentrism. As for the more general question, it is not only an
idea of a Europe that ends where Christianity ends and Islam . . . begins
85
that
needs to be reassessed today, starting with Andrs, and possibly going beyond
the limits of his prejudices. Also to be reassessed is the canon of the European
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Enlightenment, which, besides Paris and Edinburgh, could start counting, for
instance, Italian historicism and Andrs comparative history. Beyond that, the
prevalent assumption that Europe took permanent shape in the writings of
Montesquieu and the philosophes should seriously be questioned today, lest that
Europe, which emerged from the historical circumstances of French hegemony, is
not mistaken as a truth of Universal validity.
Notes
The present work is part of a longer project on the theorizations (and counter-theorizations) of
modern Europe. A version of it was presented at the University of Notre Dame, and came out of it
enriched by the suggestions, questions, and emendations of a most lively and generous new
program in Literature.
1. Lindsay Waters, On the Idea of Europe, Boston ReviewVol. 22, No. 2 (1997), 14.
2. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton, NJ 2000). A very small bibliography of subaltern Europeanism: Enrique Dussel,
Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism, Nepantla: Views from South Vol. 1, No. 3 (2000),
46578; Enrique Dussel, World-System and Trans-Modernity, Nepantla: Views from
South Vol. 3, No. 2 (2002), 22144; Edgardo Lander, La colonialidad del saber. Eurocentrismo
y ciencias sociales: perspectivas latinoamericanas (Caracas 2000); Ranajit Guha, A Subaltern
Studies Reader, 19861995 (Minneapolis, MN 1997); Gyan Prakash, Subaltern Studies as
Postcolonial Criticism, The American Historical ReviewVol. 99, No. 5 (1994), 147590;
Molefi K. Asante, The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism: An Afrocentric Response to Critics
(Trenton, NJ 1999).
3. James M. Blaut, The Colonizers Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and
Eurocentric History (New York, NY 1993), 9.
4. Prakash, op. cit., 1490.
5. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and
Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ 2000), 11.
6. References are to: Federico Chabod, Storia dellidea dEuropa (Bari 1995), 85; Denis de
Rougemont, Vingt-huit sicles dEurope. La conscience europenne travers les textes,
dHsiode nos jours (Paris 1961), 143; and, on the idea of Europe taking permanent shape in
Montesquieus age, Paul Hazard, The European Mind: The Critical Years, 16801715, trans.
J. Lewis May (New Haven, CT 1953), 53; the same conclusion is reached, for instance, in
Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh 1957); G.R.R. Treasure, The
Making of Modern Europe, 16481780 (New York, NY 1985); Europe: Conceptualizing a
Continent, in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European
Union (Washington, DC 2002), 3354; Heikki Mikkeli, Europe as an Idea and an Identity
(New York, NY 1998).
7. For a perspective from the Eastern margins, see Nikolaj Trubeckoj, LEuropa e lumanit. La
prima critica delleurocentrismo, trans. Olga Strada (Turin 1982); Alexander Tchoubarian,
The European Idea in History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A View from
Moscow(Ilford 1994); Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity
and International Relations (London 1996).
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8. Jean Goldzink, Montesquieu et lEurope, in Alfred Grosser and Michel Perrin, eds, Lide de
lEurope au fil de deux millnaires (Paris 1994), 141.
9. Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (Oxford 1961), 227.
10. Quotes are from: R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (2nd edn) (New York, NY 1956), 59;
and C. Barraclough, Universal History, in H.P.R. Finberg, ed., Approaches to History: A
Symposium(Toronto 1962), 84. Montesquieus historicist ambitions, and his skepticism vis--
vis history, are discussed in Mark Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley, CA
1976), 35 and 14072.
11. Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, uvres completes, Roger Caillois, ed. (2 vols, Paris 1949),
Vol. 2, 229; and Vol. 2, 251.
12. Jacques-Bnigne Bossuet, Discours sur lhistoire universelle (Paris 1681), 4.
13. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 2, 644; Vol. 2, 375; and Vol. 2, 30.
14. Montesquieus Franco-centric philosophy of history is discussed in David W. Carrithers,
Montesquieus Philosophy of History, Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 47, No. 1 (1986),
61; and in Suzanne Gearhart, Reading De LEsprit des Lois: Montesquieu and the Principles
of History, Yale French Studies Vol. 59 (1980), 175200, 180. On Montesquieus historical
empiricism, see Roger B. Oake, Montesquieus Analysis of Roman History, Journal of the
History of Ideas Vol. 16, No. 1 (1955), 4459, 489; for the historical dialectics, the reference is
to Louis Althusser, Montesquieu; la politique et lhistoire (Paris 1959), 3758.
15. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 2, 317.
16. Voltaire, Histoire, in Encyclopdie, ou Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences et des mtiers
(Chicago, IL 2001), 8, 221.
17. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 2, 292; Vol. 2, 536; Vol. 2, 537; and Vol. 2, 602.
18. Ibid., Vol. 2, 478; Vol. 2, 537; Vol. 2, 602; and Vol. 1, 1358.
19. Chakrabarty, op. cit., 8.
20. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 1, 1364.
21. Ibid., Vol. 1, 1354; Vol. 1, 1369; and Vol. 2, 329.
22. Martin Thom, Tribes without Nations: The Ancient Germans and the History of Modern
France, in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London 1990), 26.
23. Ibid., 27.
24. As claimed by Hulliung, op. cit., 60.
25. Althusser, op. cit., 645.
26. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 2, 379.
27. David W. Carrithers, Introduction: Montesquieu and the Spirit of Modernity, SVEC Vol. 9
(2002), 18.
28. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 2, 414; and Vol. 2, 713.
29. Ibid., Vol. 2, 603.
30. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London 1979), 465.
31. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 2, 481.
32. Ibid., Vol. 2, 477.
33. Ibid., Vol. 2, 45.
34. Ibid., Vol. 2, 558.
35. Gearhart, op. cit., 187.
36. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 2, 5323.
37. Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley,
CA 2002), 13.
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38. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of World History, trans. John Sibree
(Buffalo, NY 1991), 79 and 103. My reference to de Stal is from Anne-Louise Germaine
Necker Madame de Stal, De la littrature considre dans ses rapports avec les institutiones
sociales, Grard Gengembre and Jean Goldzink, eds, (Paris 1991), 17881.
39. Franco Arato, Un comparatista: Juan Andrs, Cromos Vol. 5 (2000), 1.
40. Guido Ettore Mazzeo, The Abate Juan Andrs, Literary Historian of the XVIII Century (New
York, NY 1965), 17.
41. Voltaire, uvres compltes, Jean Michel Moreau et al., eds, (Paris 1877), 1589.
42. Franco Venturi, Church and Reform in Enlightenment Italy: The Sixties of the Eighteenth
Century, The Journal of Modern History Vol. 48, No. 2 (1976), 224.
43. Catherine M. Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment, 17001762 (Oxford
1991).
44. Op. cit., 2, 261.
45. Robert R. Palmer, The National Idea in France before the Revolution, Journal of the History
of Ideas Vol. 1, No. 1 (1940), 1012.
46. Adolfo Domnguez Molt, El abate D. Juan Andrs Morell, un erudito del siglo XVIII
(Alicante 1978), 21.
47. Gian Paolo Brizzi, The Jesuits and Universities in Italy, in Helga Robinson-Hammerstein,
ed., European Universities in the Age of Reformation and Counter Reformation (Dublin
1998), 189.
48. Jos Antonio Valero, Una disciplina frustrada: La historia literaria dieciochesca, Hispanic
ReviewVol. 64, No. 2 (1996), 192.
49. Palmer, op. cit., 100.
50. Andrs, op. cit., I.iv.
51. Ibid., I.iv.
52. Giovanni Getto, Storia delle storie letterarie (4th edn), (Florence, 1981), 2.
53. Andrs, op. cit., III, 372.
54. Ibid., II, xiv.
55. Ibid., III, 385.
56. On this topic, see Gabriel Maugain, Boileau et lItalie (Paris 1912); Mario Fubini, Dal
Muratori al Baretti. Studi sulla critica e sulla cultura del Settecento (3rd edn) (Bari 1968);
Mario Puppo, Critica e linguistica del Settecento (Verona 1975), 336.
57. Erich Auerbach, Vico and Aesthetic Historism, Scenes from the Drama of European
literature (Minneapolis, MN 1984), 1835.
58. Chakrabarty, op. cit., 27.
59. See, for instance, Georg G. Iggers, Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,
Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 56, No. 1 (1995), 12952.
60. Stephen Greenblatt, Introduction, Genre Vol. 15, No. 12 (1982), 3.
61. Andrs, op. cit., I, 1920.
62. Ibid., 1, 1095.
63. Andrs, op. cit., II, 2631.
64. Ibid., I, 10811.
65. Ibid., I, 266; and I, 338.
66. Ibid., I, 168.
67. Ibid., I, 182.
68. Ibid., I, 120; and I, 124.
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69. Ibid., I.xi.
70. Maria Rosa Menocal, Pride and Prejudice in Medieval Studies: European and Oriental,
Hispanic ReviewVol. 53, No. 1 (1985), 67; Mazzeo, op. cit., 1567; James T. Monroe, The
Historical Arjuza of ibn Abd Rabbihi, a Tenth-Century Hispano-Arabic Poem, Journal of the
American Oriental Society Vol. 91, No. 1 (1971), 67.
71. N. I. Matar, Islam in Britain, 15581685 (Cambridge 1998), 89.
72. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Trait de lorigine des romans (Stuttgart 1966), 11.
73. Ibid., 15.
74. Paolo Casini, Lantica sapienza italica. Cronistoria di un mito (Bologna 1998).
75. Andrs, op. cit., I, 13753; and II, 2867.
76. References are to Ramn Menndez Pidal, Poesa rabe y poesa europea, con otros estudios
de literatura medieval (Buenos Aires 1941), 34; and Menocal, op. cit., 678.
77. Domnguez Molt, op. cit., 73.
78. Andrs, op. cit., I, 116; and I, 131.
79. Ibid., I.1417.
80. Ibid., I.12274.
81. See Jos Cadalso, Defensa de la nacin espaola contra la Carta persiana LXXVIII de
Montesquieu, Guy Mercadier, ed., (Toulouse 1970).
82. Montesquieu, op. cit., Vol. 2, 24850.
83. Maria Rosa Menocal, Close Encounters in Medieval Provence: Spains Role in the Birth of
Troubadour Poetry, Hispanic ReviewVol. 49, No. 1 (1981), 501.
84. Andrs, op. cit., I, 267.
85. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New
York, NY 1996), 158, note 17.
roberto m. dai notto is Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. He is
the author of Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Cornell University Press 2000),
and of the forthcoming Europe (in Theory).
Dainotto: Juan Andrs and the De-centering of Montesquieus Europe :,
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