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Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 207

Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment

Arguing that the question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's relationship to the Enlightenment has been eclipsed and seriously distorted by his association with the French Revolution, Graeme Garrard presents the first book-length case that shows Rousseau as the pivotal figure in the emergence of Counter-Enlightenment thought. Viewed in the context in which he actually lived and wrote—from the middle of the eighteenth century to his death in 1778—it is apparent that Rousseau categorically rejected the Enlightenment "republic of letters" in favor of his own "republic of virtue." The philosophes, placing faith in reason and natural human sociability and subjecting religion to systematic criticism and doubt, naively minimized the deep tensions and complexities of collective life and the power disintegrative forces posed to social order. Rousseau believed that the ever precarious social order could only be achieved artificially, by manufacturing "sentiments of sociability," reshaping individuals to identify with common interests instead of their own selfish interests.

How to Think Politically
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 321

How to Think Politically

A one-stop guide to the "Essential Thinkers" in political philosophy, from Confucius to Marx; this book shines the light of political reason into the darkest corners of our troubled modern times.

Counter-Enlightenments
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 209

Counter-Enlightenments

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2004-08-02
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  • Publisher: Routledge

This book discusses the Counter-Enlightenment, from its origins in Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences through to contemporary debates about postmodernism and the relationship between liberalism and Enlightenment.

The Return of the State
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 239

The Return of the State

A vigorous and timely defense of the state as a force for good For decades now wealth and power have been shifting from states to markets. This experiment has been a failure for all but a privileged few. But this trend is beginning to reverse, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen the state play the most direct and positive role in citizens' everyday lives in living memory. Graeme Garrard makes a powerful case for the state as our only realistic hope of countering the rising power of multinational corporations, organized crime, and international organizations that will always put their own interests first. Today the state is essential to the health and welfare of everyone except the rich and powerful. Yet it is being rolled back and whittled away, leaving the well-being of most of us at the mercy of unaccountable private powers that are increasingly free from external control. As Garrard shows, the state is the only realistic way of promoting the public good in our time.

Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 352

Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence

In Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence leading Maistre scholars offer interpretations of his thought and make available in English recent French scholarship on his life and work. They provide a portrait of Maistre as a significant thinker in numerous fields, upsetting the image of him as a backward-looking "reactionary," a reinterpretation furthered by contemporary interest in Counter-Enlightenment thought in general.

Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 349

Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence

Joseph de Maistre (1753B1821) was an extraordinarily gifted and insightful commentator on foundational developments that have shaped our modern world. His reaction to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, though hostile, was remarkably open and included innovative and still-valuable theorizing about such human phenomena as violence and unreason. The political and theoretical issues he addressed continue to challenge us today. In Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence leading Maistre scholars offer interpretations of his thought and make available in English recent French scholarship on his life and work. They provide a portrait of Maistre as a significant thinker in numerous...

Enlightenment Aberrations
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 280

Enlightenment Aberrations

In Enlightenment Aberrations, David W. Bates shows that error was a complex, important, and by no means entirely negative concept in Enlightenment thought, one that had a decisive influence in revolutionary debates on political identity and national history. What can it mean to write a history of error? In Bates's view all philosophy, insofar as its project is the search for truth, begins in error. If truth is posited as a goal to be attained, not as a given of some kind, then error assumes a central role in the quest for truth. Going beyond both liberal celebrations and postmodern critiques of Enlightenment reason, Bates reveals just how crucial the problematic relation between human "wande...

Judaism and Enlightenment
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 350

Judaism and Enlightenment

This study investigates the philosophical and political significance of Judaism in the intellectual life of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. Adam Sutcliffe shows how the widespread and enthusiastic fascination with Judaism prevalent around 1650 was largely eclipsed a century later by attitudes of dismissal and disdain. He argues that Judaism was uniquely difficult for Enlightenment thinkers to account for, and that their intense responses, both negative and positive, to Jewish topics are central to an understanding of the underlying ambiguities of the Enlightenment itself. Judaism and the Jews were a limit case, a destabilising challenge, and a constant test for Enlightenment rationalism. Erudite and highly broad-ranging in its sources, and yet extremely accessible in its argument, Judaism and Enlightenment is a major contribution to the history of European ideas, of interest to scholars of Jewish history and to those working on the Enlightenment, toleration and the emergence of modernity itself.

Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 1024

Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2021-11-30
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  • Publisher: Routledge

The Routledge Handbook of IIliberalism is the first authoritative reference work dedicated to illiberalism as a complex social, political, cultural, legal, and mental phenomenon. Although illiberalism is most often discussed in political and constitutional terms, its study cannot be limited to such narrow frames. This Handbook comprises sixty individual chapters authored by an internationally recognized group of experts who present perspectives and viewpoints from a wide range of academic disciplines. Chapters are devoted to different facets of illiberalism, including the history of the idea and its competitors, its implications for the economy, society, government and the international order, and its contemporary iterations in representative countries and regions. The Routledge Handbook of IIliberalism will form an important component of any library's holding; it will be of benefit as an academic reference, as well as being an indispensable resource for practitioners, among them journalists, policy makers and analysts, who wish to gain an informed understanding of this complex phenomenon.

Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 212

Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment

As the essays in this collection make plain, Isaiah Berlin invented neither the term "Counter-Enlightenment" nor the concept. However, more than any other figure since the eighteenth century, Berlin appropriated the term, made it the heart of his own political thought, and imbued his interpretations of particular thinkers with its meanings and significance. His diverse treatment of writers at the margins of the Enlightenment, who themselves reflected upon what they took to be its central currents, were at once historical and philosophical. Berlin sought to show that our patterns of culture, manufactured by ourselves, must be explained differently from the ways in which we seek to fathom laws of nature. Many of the essays in this volume were prepared for the International Seminar in memory of Sir Isaiah Berlin, held at the School of History in Tel Aviv University during the academic year 1999-2000.