The Enlightenment
History of an Idea - Updated Edition
Published on 6. April 2015
Book
Hardback
232 pages
978-0-691-16145-7 (ISBN)
Description
In this concise and powerful book, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment provides a bracing and clarifying new interpretation of this watershed period. Arguing that philosophical and historical interpretations of the era have long been hopelessly confused, Vincenzo Ferrone makes the case that it is only by separating these views and taking an approach grounded in social and cultural history that we can begin to grasp what the Enlightenment was--and why it is still relevant today. Ferrone explains why the Enlightenment was a profound and wide-ranging cultural revolution that reshaped Western identity, reformed politics through the invention of human rights, and redefined knowledge by creating a critical culture. These new ways of thinking gave birth to new values that spread throughout society and changed how everyday life was lived and understood. Featuring an illuminating afterword describing how his argument challenges the work of Anglophone interpreters including Jonathan Israel, The Enlightenment provides a fascinating reevaluation of the true nature and legacy of one of the most important and contested periods in Western history.
The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS--Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche.
The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS--Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche.
Reviews / Votes
"Ferrone's familiarity with the primary literature is impressive, covering thinkers from France and Italy to Germany and Scotland. His grasp of the historiography is just as sure, encompassing both Anglophone and European research. This makes for a book that is far more than just a synthesis."--Richard Bourke, Times Literary Supplement "Compelling."--New Republic "Ferrone's command of his material is impressive... There is something for us to learn, or be reminded of, on nearly every page of this dense but often enlightened work."--John Toren, Rain Taxi Review of Books "[The Enlightenment] offers a novel and provocative interpretation of the Enlightenment that effectively challenges scholars of the movement to rethink their own understandings of the intellectual turmoil and upheaval of the eighteenth century."--Review of Politics "How welcome it is to have Vincenzo Ferrone's Lezioni illuministiche available in English... No brief summary can convey all the pleasures, and instruction, that accompany a reading of The Enlightenment: History of an Idea. Not the least of its attractions is the fact that Ferrone wears his immense erudition lightly, expressing himself in a prose that is as ludic as it is lucid, joining clarity to wit in classic Enlightenment fashion."--Johnson Kent Wright, H-France ReviewMore details
Edition
Updated Edition
Language
English
Place of publication
New Jersey
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Edition type
Revised edition
Product notice
Trade binding
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-691-16145-7 (9780691161457)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
07/2015
1st Edition
Princeton University Press
from
€51.19
Available for download
Persons
Vincenzo Ferrone is professor of modern history at the University of Turin. He has been a visiting scholar at the College de France and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Content
Introduction - Living the Enlightenment vii Acknowledgments xvi Part I The Philosophers' Enlightenment: Thinking the Centaur 1 1 Historians and Philosophers: The Peculiarity of the Enlightenment as Historical Category 3 2 Kant: Was ist Aufklarung? The Emancipation of Man through Man 7 3 Hegel: The Dialectics of the Enlightenment as Modernity's Philosophical Issue 12 4 Marx and Nietzsche: The Enlightenment from Bourgeois Ideology to Will to Power 23 5 Horkheimer and Adorno: The Totalitarian Face of the Dialectic of Enlightenment 30 6 Foucault: The Return of the Centaur and the Death of Man 34 7 Postmodern Anti-Enlightenment Positions: From the Cassirer-Heidegger Debate to Benedict XVI's katholische Aufklarung 43 Part II The Historians' Enlightenment: The Cultural Revolution of the Ancien Regime 55 8 For a Defense of Historical Knowledge: Beyond the Centaur 57 9 The Epistemologia imaginabilis in Eighteenth-Century Science and Philosophy 67 10 The Enlightenment-French Revolution Paradigm Between Political Myth and Epistemological Impasse 79 11 The Twentieth Century and the Enlightenment as Historical Problem: From Political History to Social and Cultural History 87 12 What Was the Enlightenment? The Humanism of the Moderns in Ancien Regime Europe 95 13 Chronology and Geography of a Cultural Revolution 120 14 Politicization and Natura naturans: The Late Enlightenment Question and the Crisis of the Ancien Regime 140 Afterword The Enlightenment: A Revolution of the Mind or the Ancien Regime's Cultural Revolution? 155 Notes 173 Index 203