Daniel Gordon

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History

Postmodernism and the Enlightenment

New Perspectives in Eighteenth-century French Intellectual History

Gregory Crewdson

“A straight photograph is an exact representation of a segment of space and time circumscribed by the physical and optical limitations of the medium. So, although the representation is exact, because of the circumscription, it is also a visual fiction. Daniel Gordon explores this boundary with inventiveness, playfulness, and physical stamina.” —Stephen Shore “The artist’s short, gravity-killed glides are real, though his fantastical pictures suggest that computer-based trickery might have been used.” —The Dallas Morning News “On a fundamental level, the art of photography is about the miracle, and how to make the ordinary extraordinary. These pictures do that in it’s purest form. They capture suspended moments, perfectly situated between transcendence and doom.” —Gregory Crewdson Between 2001 and 2004, on the snowy fields in New York’s Hudson Valley and the rocky coasts of the Bay Area in Northern California, photographer Daniel Gordon learned to fly—if only for 1/125 of a second. Using a camera mounted on a tripod, Gordon frames his picture. He then runs out onto the landscape and launches himself into the air, while an assistant snaps the shutter. The images in Flying Pictures are at once pastoral landscapes and documents of a performance. Only after considering them for a while, does the thought occur that their fleeting bliss was swiftly met with physical doom—a crash back to Earth. Such a journey requires great humility as well as hubris, and a will to achieve the impossible if only for a moment. The project began at a time when digital technology was changing the role that truth has historically played in the media of film and photography. The ease with which one could now alter an image with Photoshop created a new sense of paranoia concerning the veracity of photographs. Flying Pictures’ unbelievable, unaltered images reveal that there never was just one truth in photography.

Flying Pictures

Voltaire

This new edition of Candide, by Voltaire, with Related Documents continues to preserve the provocative nature of Voltaire's portrayal of eighteenth-century European society while placing the work and its author in historical context. Daniel Gordon’s translation enhances Candide’s readability and highlights the text’s wit and satire for twenty-first century readers. The revised introduction provides insight into Voltaire’s views on slavery, showing students how the complexities of Voltaire’s life relate to the events, philosophy, and characters of Candide. An expanded Related Documents section further reveals Voltaire’s relation to slavery with new extracts from The Black Code and Voltaire’s own work on the subject. Helpful editorial features include explanatory notes throughout the text, a chronology of Voltaire’s life, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography.

Candide

The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville contains original interpretations of Tocqueville’s major writings on democracy and revolution as well as his lesser-known ideas on colonies, prisons, and minorities. The Introduction by Daniel Gordon discusses the process by which Tocqueville was canonized during the Cold War and the need to reassess the place of Tocqueville’s voice in the conversation of post-Marxist social theory. Each of the contributors compares Tocqueville’s ideas on a given subject to those of other major social theorists, including Bourdieu, Dahl, Du Bois, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss and Marx. This comprehensive volume is based on the idea that Tocqueville was not merely a “founder” or “precursor” whose ideas have been absorbed into modern social science. The broad questions that Tocqueville raised, his comparative vision, and his unique vocabulary and style can inspire deeper thinking in the social sciences today.

The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville

In a wide-ranging interpretation of French thought in the years 1670-1789, Daniel Gordon takes us through the literature of manners and moral philosophy, theology and political theory, universal history and economics to show how French thinkers sustained a sense of liberty and dignity within an authoritarian regime. A penetrating critique of those who exaggerate either the radicalism of the Enlightenment or the hegemony of the absolutist state, his book documents the invention of an ethos that was neither democratic nor absolutist, an ethos that idealized communication and private life. The key to this ethos was "sociability," and Gordon offers the first detailed study of the language and ideas that gave this concept its meaning in the Old Regime. Citizens without Sovereignty provides a wealth of information about the origins and usage of key words, such as société and sociabilité, in French thought. From semantic fields of meaning, Gordon goes on to consider institutional fields of action. Focusing on the ubiquitous idea of "society" as a depoliticized sphere of equality, virtue, and aesthetic cultivation, he marks out the philosophical space that lies between the idea of democracy and the idea of the royal police state. Within this space, Gordon reveals the channels of creative action that are open to citizens without sovereignty--citizens who have no right to self-government. His work is thus a contribution to general historical sociology as well as French intellectual history. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Daniel Gordon

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