The World of the Enlightenment

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-48958-2
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 234 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 508 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge

The Enlightenment was a laboratory of modernity that changed the history of the Western world, helping to bring about globalisation and the rise of a powerful intellectual class. It gave the scientific revolution new methods and a new purpose by ushering in the sciences of man. At the same time, it constantly interrogated these new sciences, wary of the possibility that they might lead to discrimination rather than emancipation. The late Enlightenment, the most mature and productive period, developed its values and political ideals, such as the concept of liberty and of a constitutional and “republican” government, through its confrontation with the Ancien régime, the slave trade and imperial colonialism, and the betrayal of the revolutionary ideals in the Americas.

The World of the Enlightenment is a wide-ranging discussion of one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern era. It covers topics from the scientific (such as the approaches of empiricism and humanism), the political (the rights of man, slavery and colonial independence) and the artistic (modern art and public opinion). The author discusses these topics thematically in ten chapters.

This book will appeal to scholars and students alike studying the Enlightenment and the history of intellectualism, as well as all those interested in the history of modern science, politics and culture.

Translated by Martin McLaughlin and Elisabetta Tarantino

Zielgruppe

Academic and Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ferrone, Vincenzo

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: The crisis of the humanities and the cultural history of the Enlightenment

 

1. The Enlightenment as a new humanism and a laboratory of modernity

 

2. The Encyclopédie: Critiquing the seventeenth-century scientific revolution

 

3. The foundations of a science for man: Empiricism and natura naturans

 

4. Genius and imagination: The uchronies and popular sciences of the Late Enlightenment

 

5. The Enlightenment and modern art in the age of public opinion

 

6. The rise of intellectual power and the new politics: Imagination and experimentation in the republicanism of the moderns

 

7. The political enigma of the global Enlightenment: The rights of man in the face of slavery

 

8. From the science of man to the humanism of the moderns: The equality and universalism of rights and the transformation of values

 

9. The Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions: the Haitian Revolution

 

10. The legacy of the Enlightenment: How its project stalled amid new identities and Ancien régime metamorphoses

 

Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

Vincenzo Ferrone is Full Professor of Modern History at the University of Turin. He is the author of numerous studies on the Enlightenment, including The Enlightenment: History of an Idea (2010; 2015) and The Enlightenment and the Rights of Man (2014; 2019).