This article, inspired by Colin Jones’ ‘Bourgeois Revolution Revivified’, calls on historians to pay renewed attention to the social and economic contexts of the French Enlightenment, and its relationship to the rise of commercial capitalism. It criticizes influential works in the ‘social history of ideas’ for placing too much emphasis on the compatibility of the Enlightenment and Old Regime social structures, and instead suggests that French Enlightenment writing had a symbiotic relationship to the period’s consumer revolution. This relationship becomes clear if we recognize that consumerism centrally involved practices of self-cultivation. French Enlightenment writing not only provided the expanding reading public of the eighteenth century with tools and guides for self-cultivation, but actively encouraged the process through the styles and genres with which it sought to appeal to and interact with this public. The article concludes by noting that in the political context of late eighteenth-century France, social experience and intellectual exploration alike metamorphosed into pointed social critique, which worked especially to the benefit of the upper Third Estate—that is to say, France’s emerging bourgeoisie.

中文翻译：

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“资产阶级启蒙运动复兴”

本文受到科林·琼斯《资产阶级革命复兴》的启发，呼吁历史学家重新关注法国启蒙运动的社会和经济背景及其与商业资本主义兴起的关系。它批评“思想社会史”中具有影响力的著作过分强调启蒙运动和旧制度社会结构的兼容性，并指出法国启蒙运动的写作与该时期的消费革命具有共生关系。如果我们认识到消费主义主要涉及自我修养的实践，这种关系就会变得清晰起来。法国启蒙运动的写作不仅为十八世纪不断扩大的阅读公众提供了自我修养的工具和指南，而且还通过其试图吸引公众并与之互动的风格和体裁积极鼓励这一过程。文章最后指出，在十八世纪末法国的政治背景下，社会经验和知识探索都转变为尖锐的社会批判，这尤其有利于上层第三等级——即法国的新兴资产阶级。