Scholarship as Bricolage: ‘Hybrid Works’ and Styles of Reasoning in the Enlightenment-Era Humanities

Eighteenth-century scholarship is full of hybrid works: works that integrate elements from different fields and genres, sometimes from different authors and different periods, each with their own forms of organization and argumentative/rhetorical structures. This article analyses such hybrid works as documents of changes in the architecture of knowledge. Applying Ian Hacking’s notion of “styles of reasoning” to the history of the humanities, it shows how this bricolage reflects the uses of different models for transforming information into knowledge. The article focuses on three eighteenth-century genres that are particularly representative of a style of reasoning: histoire philosophique, grammaire générale, and historia literaria, and how they come together in hybrid works such as Gébelin’s Monde Primitif (1773–82), Monboddo’s Origin and Progress of Language (1773–93), Astle’s The Origin and Progress of Writing (1784), and Heeren’s Ideen (1793–96; 1824–26). Tracing the genealogies of these genres and their intersections, we can discern broader developments in eighteenth-century ideas of history, language, literature, and knowledge, from their early modern origins to the making of the modern humanities.