Critics Of The Enlightenment

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Critics of the Enlightenment

Author : Christopher Olaf Blum
Publisher : Intercollegiate Studies Institute
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Critics of the Enlightenment by : Christopher Olaf Blum

Download or read book Critics of the Enlightenment written by Christopher Olaf Blum and published by Intercollegiate Studies Institute. This book was released on 2004 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the Anglo-American world, Edmund Burke is the touchstone of counter-revolutionary thought, but in this volume, Christopher Olaf Blum shows that in attempting to vindicate the principles that had, at its best, animated the Old Regime, and in critiquing the institutions and beliefs associated with the New Regime, the French counter-revolutionary tradition is unparalleled. To understand adequately what Georges Bernanos called the spiritual drama of Europe, it is a tradition that must be grappled with. Critics of the Enlightenment makes available new translations of representative selections from some of the leading French conservative thinkers of the nineteenth century: Franois de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, Frederic Le Play, Emile Keller, and Rene de La Tour du Pin. The selections span much of the nineteenth century, from Chateaubriand's 1814 pamphlet against Bonaparte to La Tour du Pin's 1883 essay on the theory of the corporate state. The volume, therefore, not only includes responses of the French conservatives to the French Revolutions of 1789 through 1815, but also testifies to the continuing elaboration of this critique against the background of the troubled nineteenth century. Blum's introduction sets these selections within the contexts of the events giving rise to them and the lives of their authors. The French political philosopher Philippe Beneton supplies the book's foreword. Blum's elegant translations of texts heretofore difficult or impossible to find in English allow Anglophone readers to profit from the counter-revolutionaries' insights about social and cultural matters of perennial importance, such as the necessary roles of religion, family, and local communities within any larger political society--matters of pressing concern to the counter-revolutionaries of our own time

Three Critics of the Enlightenment

Author : Isaiah Berlin
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400848520
Total Pages : 571 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Three Critics of the Enlightenment by : Isaiah Berlin

Download or read book Three Critics of the Enlightenment written by Isaiah Berlin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-10 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isaiah Berlin was deeply admired during his life, but his full contribution was perhaps underestimated because of his preference for the long essay form. The efforts of Henry Hardy to edit Berlin's work and reintroduce it to a broad, eager readership have gone far to remedy this. Now, Princeton is pleased to return to print, under one cover, Berlin's essays on these celebrated and captivating intellectual portraits: Vico, Hamann, and Herder. These essays on three relatively uncelebrated thinkers are not marginal ruminations, but rather among Berlin's most important studies in the history of ideas. They are integral to his central project: the critical recovery of the ideas of the Counter-Enlightenment and the explanation of its appeal and consequences--both positive and (often) tragic. Giambattista Vico was the anachronistic and impoverished Neapolitan philosopher sometimes credited with founding the human sciences. He opposed Enlightenment methods as cold and fallacious. J. G. Hamann was a pious, cranky dilettante in a peripheral German city. But he was brilliant enough to gain the audience of Kant, Goethe, and Moses Mendelssohn. In Hamann's chaotic and long-ignored writings, Berlin finds the first strong attack on Enlightenment rationalism and a wholly original source of the coming swell of romanticism. Johann Gottfried Herder, the progenitor of populism and European nationalism, rejected universalism and rationalism but championed cultural pluralism. Individually, these fascinating intellectual biographies reveal Berlin's own great intelligence, learning, and generosity, as well as the passionate genius of his subjects. Together, they constitute an arresting interpretation of romanticism's precursors. In Hamann's railings and the more considered writings of Vico and Herder, Berlin finds critics of the Enlightenment worthy of our careful attention. But he identifies much that is misguided in their rejection of universal values, rationalism, and science. With his customary emphasis on the frightening power of ideas, Berlin traces much of the next centuries' irrationalism and suffering to the historicism and particularism they advocated. What Berlin has to say about these long-dead thinkers--in appreciation and dissent--is remarkably timely in a day when Enlightenment beliefs are being challenged not just by academics but by politicians and by powerful nationalist and fundamentalist movements. The study of J. G. Hamann was originally published under the title The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism. The essays on Vico and Herder were originally published as Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. Both are out of print. This new edition includes a number of previously uncollected pieces on Vico and Herder, two interesting passages excluded from the first edition of the essay on Hamann, and Berlin's thoughtful responses to two reviewers of that same edition.

Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism

Author : Gene Callahan
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030425991
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (34 download)

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Book Synopsis Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism by : Gene Callahan

Download or read book Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism written by Gene Callahan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-05-13 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of some of the most important critics of “Enlightenment rationalism.” The subjects of the volume—including, among others, Burke, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, C.S. Lewis, Gabriel Marcel, Russell Kirk, and Jane Jacobs—do not share a philosophical tradition as much as a skeptical disposition toward the notion, common among modern thinkers, that there is only one standard of rationality or reasonableness, and that that one standard is or ought to be taken from the presuppositions, methods, and logic of the natural sciences. The essays on each thinker are intended not merely to offer a commentary on that thinker, but also to place that thinker in the context of this larger stream of anti-rationalist thought. Thus, while this volume is not a history of anti-rationalist thought, it may contain the intimations of such a history.

The Enlightenment

Author : Ritchie Robertson
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062410679
Total Pages : 1008 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (624 download)

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Book Synopsis The Enlightenment by : Ritchie Robertson

Download or read book The Enlightenment written by Ritchie Robertson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 1008 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.

Enlightenment Now

Author : Steven Pinker
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0698177886
Total Pages : 578 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (981 download)

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Book Synopsis Enlightenment Now by : Steven Pinker

Download or read book Enlightenment Now written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.

Reclaiming the Enlightenment

Author : Stephen Eric Bronner
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231126085
Total Pages : 201 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (311 download)

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Book Synopsis Reclaiming the Enlightenment by : Stephen Eric Bronner

Download or read book Reclaiming the Enlightenment written by Stephen Eric Bronner and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1947 Horkheimer and Adorno connected the Enlightenment with totalitarianism. Since when the Left has drifted into the language and imagery of the European Counter-Enlightenment, the movement against 1776 and 1789. Bronner sets out to reclaim the heritage of progressive politics.

Critique and Crisis

Author : Reinhart Koselleck
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262611572
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (115 download)

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Book Synopsis Critique and Crisis by : Reinhart Koselleck

Download or read book Critique and Crisis written by Reinhart Koselleck and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000-03-13 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critique and Crisis established Reinhart Koselleck's reputation as the most important German intellectual historian of the postwar period. This first English translation of Koselleck's tour de force demonstrates a chronological breadth, a philosophical depth, and an originality which are hardly equalled in any scholarly domain. It is a history of the Enlightenment in miniature, fundamental to our understanding of that period and its consequences. Like Tocqueville, Koselleck views Enlightenment intellectuals as an uprooted, unrealistic group of onlookers who sowed the seeds of the modern political tensions that first flowered in the French Revolution. He argues that it was the split that developed between state and society during the Enlightenment that fostered the emergence of this intellectual elite divorced from the realities of politics. Koselleck describes how this disjunction between political authority proper and its subjects led to private spheres that later became centers of moral authority and, eventually, models for political society that took little or no notice of the constraints under which politicians must inevitably work. In this way progressive bourgeois philosophy, which seemed to offer the promise of a unified and peaceful world, in fact produced just the opposite. The book provides a wealth of examples drawn from all of Europe to illustrate the still relevant message that we evade the constraints and the necessities of the political realm at our own risk. Critique and Crisis is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment

Author : Laurence Brockliss
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191086541
Total Pages : 403 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment by : Laurence Brockliss

Download or read book Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment written by Laurence Brockliss and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) was recognized as Britain's most distinguished historian of ideas. Many of his essays discussed thinkers of what this book calls the 'long Enlightenment' (from Vico in the eighteenth century to Marx and Mill in the nineteenth, with Machiavelli as a precursor). Yet he is particularly associated with the concept of the 'Counter-Enlightenment', comprising those thinkers (Herder, Hamann, and even Kant) who in Berlin's view reacted against the Enlightenment's naïve rationalism, scientism and progressivism, its assumption that human beings were basically homogeneous and could be rendered happy by the remorseless application of scientific reason. Berlin's 'Counter-Enlightenment' has received critical attention, but no-one has yet analysed the understanding of the Enlightenment on which it rests. Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment explores the development of Berlin's conception of the Enlightenment, noting its curious narrowness, its ambivalence, and its indebtedness to a specific German intellectual tradition. Contributors to the book examine his comments on individual writers, showing how they were inflected by his questionable assumptions, and arguing that some of the writers he assigned to the 'Counter-Enlightenment' have closer affinities to the Enlightenment than he recognized. By locating Berlin in the history of Enlightenment studies, this book also makes a contribution to defining the historical place of his work and to evaluating his intellectual legacy.

Mass Enlightenment

Author : Julia Simon
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 9780791426371
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (263 download)

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Book Synopsis Mass Enlightenment by : Julia Simon

Download or read book Mass Enlightenment written by Julia Simon and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the writings of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School as a framework, this book uncovers the tensions and contradictions associated with the rise of capitalism as manifested in the writings of Rousseau and Diderot.

The Enlightenment

Author : Anthony Pagden
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191636711
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (916 download)

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Book Synopsis The Enlightenment by : Anthony Pagden

Download or read book The Enlightenment written by Anthony Pagden and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters tells nothing less than the story of how the modern, Western view of the world was born. Cultural and intellectual historian Anthony Pagden explains how, and why, the ideal of a universal, global, and cosmopolitan society became such a central part of the Western imagination in the ferment of the Enlightenment - and how these ideas have done battle with an inward-looking, tradition-oriented view of the world ever since. Cosmopolitanism is an ancient creed; but in its modern form it was a creature of the Enlightenment attempt to create a new 'science of man', based upon a vision of humanity made up of autonomous individuals, free from all the constraints imposed by custom, prejudice, and religion. As Pagden shows, this 'new science' was based not simply on 'cold, calculating reason', as its critics claimed, but on the argument that all humans are linked by what in the Enlightenment were called 'sympathetic' attachments. The conclusion was that despite the many tribes and nations into which humanity was divided there was only one 'human nature', and that the final destiny of the species could only be the creation of one universal, cosmopolitan society. This new 'human science' provided the philosophical grounding of the modern world. It has been the inspiration behind the League of Nations, the United Nations and the European Union. Without it, international law, global justice, and human rights legislation would be unthinkable. As Anthony Pagden argues passionately and persuasively in this book, it is a legacy well worth preserving - and one that might yet come to inherit the earth.

The Enlightenment as Social Criticism

Author : Paschalis M. Kitromilides
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400862728
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis The Enlightenment as Social Criticism by : Paschalis M. Kitromilides

Download or read book The Enlightenment as Social Criticism written by Paschalis M. Kitromilides and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In eighteenth-century Greek culture, Iosipos Moisiodax (c.1725-1800) was a controversial figure, whose daring pronouncements in favor of cultural change embroiled him in ideological conflicts and made him a target of persecution. The first intellectual in Southeastern Europe to voice the ideas of the Enlightenment in public and without qualification, he advocated the use of vernacular Greek in education and aspired to see the backward and intellectually conservative Balkan societies remodeled along European lines. In the first modern book-length treatment of this passionate reformer, Paschalis Kitromilides skillfully retraces Moisiodax's career and contrasts the Greek Enlightenment with the Western Enlightenment as a whole, enriching our understanding of each tradition in the process. Moisiodax's efforts failed tragically in his own lifetime, but his vision of the Enlightenment was an impressive project of intellectual reconstruction that had a considerable effect after his death, both in the promotion of modern scientific ideas and in the enunciation of republican politics in Southeastern Europe. The methodology of literary history has traditionally dominated inquiries about his life and about the Greek Enlightenment in general, but here both man and movement are examined from an interdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on a broad range of sources and combining insights from the social sciences, cultural history, and political theory, this work reveals Moisiodax as a figure of major significance in the ideological tradition of Southeastern Europe. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

What is Enlightenment?

Author : Samuel Fleischacker
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0415486068
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (154 download)

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Book Synopsis What is Enlightenment? by : Samuel Fleischacker

Download or read book What is Enlightenment? written by Samuel Fleischacker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging and lucid book explains and assesses Kant's philosophy of Enlightenment. Including helpful chapter summaries and guides to further reading, it is ideal for anyone studying Kant or the Enlightenment, as well students of politics, history and religious studies.

Enemies of the Enlightenment

Author : Darrin M. McMahon
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0195158938
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (951 download)

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Book Synopsis Enemies of the Enlightenment by : Darrin M. McMahon

Download or read book Enemies of the Enlightenment written by Darrin M. McMahon and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Darrin M. McMahon shows that well before the French Revolution, enemies of the Enlightenment were warning that the secular thrust of modern philosophy would give way to horrors of an unprecedented kind. Greeting 1789, in turn, as the realization of their worst fears, they fought the Revolution from its onset, profoundly affecting its subsequent course. The radicalization - and violence - of the Revolution was as much the product of militant resistance as any inherent logic."--BOOK JACKET.

The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment

Author : Christian Thorne
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674054738
Total Pages : 398 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (547 download)

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Book Synopsis The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment by : Christian Thorne

Download or read book The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment written by Christian Thorne and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging, ambitious, and engaging study, Christian Thorne confronts the history and enduring legacy of anti-foundationalist thought. Anti-foundationalism--the skeptical line of thought that contends our beliefs cannot be authoritatively grounded and that most of what passes for knowledge is a sham--has become one of the dominant positions in contemporary criticism. Thorne argues that despite its ascendance, anti-foundationalism is wrong. In The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment, he uses deft readings of a range of texts to offer new perspectives on the ongoing clash between philosophy and comprehensive doubt. The problem with anti-foundationalism is not, as is often thought, that it radiates uncertainty or will unglue the university, but instead that it is a system of thought--with set habits that generate unearned certainties. The shelves are full of histories of modern philosophy, but the history of the resistance to philosophical thought remains to be told. At its heart, The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment is a plea not to take doubt at its word--a plea for the return of a vanished philosophical intelligence and for the retirement of an anti-Enlightenment thinking that commits, over and over again, the very crimes that it lays at Enlightenment's door.

The Enlightenment

Author : John Robertson
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0199591784
Total Pages : 169 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (995 download)

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Book Synopsis The Enlightenment by : John Robertson

Download or read book The Enlightenment written by John Robertson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction explores the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment movement. Considering its intellectual commitments, Robertson then turns to their impact on society, and the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers sought to further the goal of human betterment, by promoting economic improvement and civil and political justice.

Democratic Enlightenment

Author : Jonathan Israel
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199668094
Total Pages : 1083 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (996 download)

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Book Synopsis Democratic Enlightenment by : Jonathan Israel

Download or read book Democratic Enlightenment written by Jonathan Israel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 1083 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: That the Enlightenment shaped modernity is uncontested. Yet remarkably few historians or philosophers have attempted to trace the process of ideas from the political and social turmoil of the late eighteenth century to the present day. This is precisely what Jonathan Israel now does. In Democratic Enlightenment, Israel demonstrates that the Enlightenment was an essentially revolutionary process, driven by philosophical debate. The American Revolution and its concerns certainly acted as a major factor in the intellectual ferment that shaped the wider upheaval that followed, but the radical philosophes were no less critical than enthusiastic about the American model. From 1789, the General Revolution's impetus came from a small group of philosophe-revolutionnaires, men such as Mirabeau, Sieyes, Condorcet, Volney, Roederer, and Brissot. Not aligned to any of the social groups represented in the French National assembly, they nonetheless forged "la philosophie moderne"-in effect Radical Enlightenment ideas-into a world-transforming ideology that had a lasting impact in Latin America, Canada and Eastern Europe as well as France, Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. In addition, Israel argues that while all French revolutionary journals powerfully affirmed that la philosophie moderne was the main cause of the French Revolution, the main stream of historical thought has failed to grasp what this implies. Israel sets the record straight, demonstrating the true nature of the engine that drove the Revolution, and the intimate links between the radical wing of the Enlightenment and the anti-Robespierriste "Revolution of reason."

Ends of Enlightenment

Author : John Bender
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804784612
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (47 download)

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Book Synopsis Ends of Enlightenment by : John Bender

Download or read book Ends of Enlightenment written by John Bender and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-08 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ends of Enlightenment explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy. The European Enlightenment was a state of being, a personal stance, and an orientation to the world. Ways of probing experience and knowledge in the novel and in the visual arts were interleaved with methods of experimentation in science and philosophy. This book's fresh perspective considers the novel as an art but also as a force in thinking. The critical distance afforded by a view back across the centuries allows Bender to redefine such novelists as Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Godwin, and Laclos by placing them along philosophers and scientists like Newton, Locke, and Hume but also alongside engravings by Hogarth and by anatomist William Hunter. His book probes the kinship among realism, hypothesis, and scientific fact, defining in the process the rhetorical basis of public communication during the Enlightenment.