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"The Enlightenment has been represented in radically opposing ways: on the one hand, as the throwing off of the chains of superstition, custom, and usurped authority; on the other hand, in the Romantic period, but also more recently, as what Michel Foucault termed "the great confinement," in which "mind-forged manacles" imprison the free and irrational spirit. The debate about the "Enlightenment project" remains a topical one, which can still arouse fierce passions. This collection of essays by distinguished scholars from various disciplines addresses the central question: "Was Enlightenment a force for emancipation?" Their responses, working from within, and frequently across the disciplinary lines of history, political science, economics, music, literature, aesthetics, art history, and film, reveal unsuspected connections and divergences even between well-known figures and texts. In their turn, the essays suggest the need for further inquiry in areas that turn out to be very far from closed. The volume considers major writings in unusual juxtaposition; highlights new figures of importance; and demonstrates familiar texts to embody strange implications."--Publisher's website.
In this work, Henry Vyverberg traces the evolution and consequences of a crucial idea in French Enlightenment thought--the idea of human nature. Human nature was commonly seen as a broadly universal, unchanging entity, though perhaps modifiable by geographical, social, and historical factors. Enlightenment empiricism suggested a degree of cultural diversity that has often been underestimated in studies of the age. Evidence here is drawn from Diderot's celebrated Encyclopedia and from a vast range of writing by such Enlightenment notables as Voltaire, Rousseau, and d'Holbach. Vyverberg explains not only the age's undoubted fascination with uniformity in human nature, but also its acknowledgment of significant limitations on that uniformity. He shows that although the Enlightenment's historical sense was often blinkered by its notions of a uniform human nature, there were also cracks in this concept that developed during the Enlightenment itself.
Harvey Chisick wrote this study after he came across the documents that form the heart of this study, the subscription lists to the the newspaper the "Ami du Roi", by accident while working on a a comparative study of the "Anne Litteraire" & "Journal Encyclopedique." Contents of this vol.: The Periodical Press in the 18th Century; The Short, Unhappy & Principled Career of the "Ami du Roi" of the Abbe Royou; The Production & Distribution of the "Ami du Roi"; The Office of the "Ami du Roi" as a Center for the Dissemination of Pamphlet Literature; The Subscribers to the "Ami du Roi": Geographical Distribution, Gender & Collective Subscriptions; The Subscribers of the "Ami du Roi": Status & Occupation; The Enlightenment & Counter-Revolution: The Contract Founding the "Ami du Roi"; Classification of Subscribers to the "Ami du Roi"; & Bibliography.
Critics have long treated the most important intellectual movement of modern history--the Enlightenment--as if it took shape in the absence of opposition. In this groundbreaking new study, Darrin McMahon demonstrates that, on the contrary, contemporary resistance to the Enlightenment was a major cultural force, shaping and defining the Enlightenment itself from the moment of inception, while giving rise to an entirely new ideological phenomenon-what we have come to think of as the "Right." McMahon skillfully examines the Counter-Enlightenment, showing that it was an extensive, international, and thoroughly modern affair.