Robert Launay, "Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder" (U of Chicago Press, 2018)

The University of Chicago Press Podcast · Mar 25, 2021 · 1h

Take a look at a globe. Europe is there in big letters, and, to us, this hardly merits a passing thought. But Europe is a concept, a construct, an idea. So too is modernity. These categories have rich and contested histories.

It is to their lineage that Robert Launay looks in Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder (University of Chicago Press, 2018). In this lucid and discerning volume, Professor Launay explores how a host of European luminaries used others to think about themselves and their worlds.

Prior to the nineteenth century, discourses about the…