| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Jacob Soll. Publishing the Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 2002. $49.50.

Historians of European intellectual history now struggle with a tension. We want an intellectual history grounded in the real world, a place where even the "great books" can be situated in the humanity of those who produced them. Or as Jacob Soll puts it, even "high books such as The Prince could lead low lives, as socially nonelite scholars." Such was his hero, Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye (d. 1706). These foot soldiers of the early Enlightenment, he argues, helped shape the meaning of the texts they critically edited or translated (p. 5). Like so many of us, Soll wants to make the tension between the social and the realm of ideas go away. He would resolve it by situating the central intellectual event of early modernity, namely the origins of the Enlightenment, in the critical mind set of humanist editors and authors, who sometimes wrote insightfully about power while in the service of princes, and who in the process invented a critical posture that would ultimately undermine absolutism. In short, by encouraging critical interpretations of political life and action, absolute monarchs and their servants like Jean-Baptiste Colbert sowed the seeds of their own later destruction. The social life of the court and its humanist protégées encouraged critical techniques that could only, in the end, be used to question authority.

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