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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2015
If you have never had a conversation with Tony La Vopa—and I mean a serious, four-hour conversation, in which topics range from Rousseau to the Final Four to marzipan to Kant—you have missed out on one of academia's great pleasures. Tony is one of intellectual history's most beloved conversationalists: because he knows many things, because he loves to tell stories, because he listens, because he argues. He also, incidentally, has mastered the pithy, but somehow personal, email: he once wrote me, simply “You’re not resting,” and another time: “I’m alarmed about your porcelain addiction.” Those readers who know Tony only from his work on this journal or his published works will know the clarity, deep intelligence, and admirable density of his research and his editing, but may not know much about the conversations that he has sustained and that have sustained him across his career, and haven't caught the impish glint in his eye when he launches into a story about his own current fetishes (photography, gooseberry Küchen), or lightly, invitingly, teases you about your own (according to Tony, mine include “loony men in gray suits”). And so, having had the pleasure of being a friend, coconspirator, and conversation partner of Tony's for several decades now, I have gladly accepted the honor of further acquainting Modern Intellectual History's readership with the career and contributions (so far!) of Anthony J. La Vopa, whose work has done so much to make intellectual history the thriving field it is today.
1 See Kidd's, Colin essay on Phillipson's career and contributions, “The Phillipsonian Enlightenment,” in Modern Intellectual History, 11/1 (2014), 175–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 For a full list of titles, see www.palgrave.com/series/results/CIH.
3 La Vopa, Anthony, Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 143 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 La Vopa, Anthony, “Specialists against Specialization: Hellenism as Professional Ideology in German Classical Studies,” in Cocks, Geoffrey and Jarausch, Konrad, eds., German Professions, 1800–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 27–45, at 32–3Google Scholar.
5 Turner, R. Steven, “Of Social Control and Cultural Experience: Education in the Eighteenth Century,” Central European History, 21/3 (1988), 300–8, at 307 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 La Vopa, Grace, Talent, and Merit, 276.
7 Turner, “Of Social Control,” 307.
8 La Vopa, Grace, Talent, and Merit, 354, 383.
9 See La Vopa, Anthony, Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762–1799 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 61–74 Google Scholar.
10 Ibid., 365.
11 Ibid., 19, 20.
12 La Vopa, Anthony, “Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” Journal of Modern History, 64/1 (1992), 79–116, at 116 Google Scholar.
13 La Vopa, Anthony, “A New Intellectual History? Jonathan Israel's Enlightenment,” Historical Journal, 52/3 (2009), 717–38, at 719 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Sorkin, David J., The Religion Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
15 La Vopa, “A New Intellectual History?”, 730.
16 La Vopa, , “Thinking about Marriage: Kant's Liberalism and the Peculiar Morality of Conjugal Union,” Journal of Modern History, 77/1 (2005), 1–34, at 29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Ibid., 32.
18 La Vopa, Anthony, “Women, Gender, and the Enlightenment: A Historical Turn,” Journal of Modern History, 80/2 (2008), 332–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Siep Stuurman, François Polain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge, MA, 2004).
20 Ibid., 341.
