The Enlightenment : an idea and its history /
"Many books claim to explain the Enlightenment, but they all assume that it was a thing. This is the first book to show what it actually was, namely an historiographical concept. It is a critical historical analysis of the Enlightenment in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United Stat...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, United States of America :
Oxford University Press,
[2024]
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| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "Many books claim to explain the Enlightenment, but they all assume that it was a thing. This is the first book to show what it actually was, namely an historiographical concept. It is a critical historical analysis of the Enlightenment in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United States, from c.1650 to the present. It argues that the degree of commonality between social and intellectual movements in each, and between the five societies, has been overstated for polemical purposes, some of which it explores. It contends that the concept of ‘the Enlightenment' was not widely adopted in those societies until the mid twentieth century; indeed it was unknown in the eighteenth. Without the concept, people at the time were unable to act in ways that would have created the Enlightenment as a movement. Since the conventional account has been that the Enlightenment was a phenomenon, the idea could be used as a component of what has been called a ‘civil religion', a summing up of the myths of origin, aims, and essential values of a society from which dissent is not permitted. An appreciation that it was instead an historiographical concept in turn undermines the idea that there was, in these societies, a great transition to what came to be called ‘modernity'. Currently ‘the Enlightenment' is a term widely accepted across popular culture and in many academic disciplines, notably history, philosophy, political theory, political science, literary studies, and theology; this book calls for fundamental reconsiderations in each"--Publisher's description. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xviii, 561 pages) : illustrations |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780198916314 0198916310 9780198916307 0198916302 9780198916291 0198916299 |