Daniel L. Purdy Libri

In The Tyranny of Elegance, Daniel Purdy examines the coming of bourgeois fashion (Mode) and luxury consumerism (Luxus) to eighteenth-century Germany. Purdy examines the extraordinary influence of Frederick Bertuch's Mode Journal, which chronicled in obsessive detail the clothing and decorative trends in London, Paris, and other European capitals. He traces the elite reaction against fashion that followed the example of the king, Frederick the Great, who dressed poorly - in worn and even dirty clothes - to separate himself from the francophile fastidiousness typical of absolutist armies. The changing notions of personal appearance that swept Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, Purdy concludes, were more than simply new styles reflecting new political ideologies - they indicated a fundamental shift in the epistemology of the subject and the body.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, European intellectuals shifted from admiring China as a utopian place of wonder to despising it as a backwards and despotic state. That transformation had little to do with changes in China itself, and everything to do with Enlightenment conceptions of political identity and Europe's own burgeoning global power. China in the German Enlightenment considers the place of German philosophy, particularly the work of Leibniz, Goethe, Herder, and Hegel, in this development. Beginning with the first English translation of Walter Demel's classic essay "How the Chinese Became Yellow," the collection's essays examine the connections between eighteenth-century philosophy, German Orientalism, and the origins of modern race theory.

Purdy traces the use of architectural reasoning as a method for critically examining consciousness from Kant and Hegel to Benjamin and Libeskind.