The Enlightenment: History of an Idea
The Enlightenment: History of an Idea
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Abstract
In this 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, the author 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. The book 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 the author's argument challenges the work of Anglophone interpreters including Jonathan Israel, the book provides a fascinating reevaluation of the true nature and legacy of one of the most important and contested periods in Western history.
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Front Matter
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Part I The Philosophers’ Enlightenment: Thinking the Centaur
Vincenzo Ferrone- 1 Historians and Philosophers: The Peculiarity of the Enlightenment as Historical Category
- 2 Kant: Was ist Aufklärung? The Emancipation of Man through Man
- 3 Hegel: The Dialectics of the Enlightenment as Modernity’s Philosophical Issue
- 4 Marx and Nietzsche: The Enlightenment from Bourgeois Ideology to Will to Power
- 5 Horkheimer and Adorno: The Totalitarian Face of the Dialectic of Enlightenment
- 6 Foucault: The Return of the Centaur and the Death of Man
- 7 Postmodern Anti-Enlightenment Positions: From the Cassirer-Heidegger Debate to Benedict XVI’s katholische Aufklärung
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Part II The Historians’ Enlightenment: The Cultural Revolution of the Ancien Régime
Vincenzo Ferrone- 8 For a Defense of Historical Knowledge: Beyond the Centaur
- 9 The Epistemologia Imaginabilis in Eighteenth-Century Science and Philosophy
- 10 The Enlightenment–French Revolution Paradigm: Between Political Myth and Epistemological Impasse
- 11 The Twentieth Century and the Enlightenment as Historical Problem: From Political History to Social and Cultural History
- 12 What Was the Enlightenment? The Humanism of the Moderns in Ancien Régime Europe
- 13 The Chronology and Geography of a Cultural Revolution
- 14 Politicization and Natura Naturans: The Late Enlightenment Question and the Crisis of the Ancien Régime
- Afterword: The Enlightenment: A Revolution of the Mind or the Ancien Régime’s Cultural Revolution?
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End Matter
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