The Anti-enlightenment Tradition
The Anti-enlightenment Tradition

Author: Zeev Sternhell

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 0300135548

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In this masterful work of historical scholarship, Zeev Sternhell, an internationally renowned Israeli political scientist and historian, presents a controversial new view of the fall of democracy and the rise of radical nationalism in the twentieth century. Sternhell locates their origins in the eighteenth century with the advent of the Anti-Enlightenment, far earlier than most historians. The thinkers belonging to the Anti-Enlightenment (a movement originally identified by Friederich Nietzsche) represent a perspective that is antirational and that rejects the principles of natural law and the rights of man. Sternhell asserts that the Anti-Enlightenment was a development separate from the Enlightenment and sees the two traditions as evolving parallel to one another over time. He contends that J. G. Herder and Edmund Burke are among the real founders of the Anti-Enlightenment and shows how that school undermined the very foundations of modern liberalism, finally contributing to the development of fascism that culminated in the European catastrophes of the twentieth century.

The Enlightenment Tradition
The Enlightenment Tradition

Author: Robert Anchor

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 0520341287

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This synoptic survey examines critically the origins, development, decline, and historical significance of the European Enlightenment. The underlying theme of the inquiry is the real and possible relevance of the Enlightenment tradition to contemporary Western society. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979. This synoptic survey examines critically the origins, development, decline, and historical significance of the European Enlightenment. The underlying theme of the inquiry is the real and possible relevance of the Enlightenment tradition to contemporary We

Critics of the Enlightenment
Critics of the Enlightenment

Author: Christopher Olaf Blum

Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13:

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For the Anglo-American world, Edmund Burke is the touchstone of counter-revolutionary thought, but in this volume, Christopher Olaf Blum shows that in attempting to vindicate the principles that had, at its best, animated the Old Regime, and in critiquing the institutions and beliefs associated with the New Regime, the French counter-revolutionary tradition is unparalleled. To understand adequately what Georges Bernanos called the spiritual drama of Europe, it is a tradition that must be grappled with. Critics of the Enlightenment makes available new translations of representative selections from some of the leading French conservative thinkers of the nineteenth century: Franois de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, Frederic Le Play, Emile Keller, and Rene de La Tour du Pin. The selections span much of the nineteenth century, from Chateaubriand's 1814 pamphlet against Bonaparte to La Tour du Pin's 1883 essay on the theory of the corporate state. The volume, therefore, not only includes responses of the French conservatives to the French Revolutions of 1789 through 1815, but also testifies to the continuing elaboration of this critique against the background of the troubled nineteenth century. Blum's introduction sets these selections within the contexts of the events giving rise to them and the lives of their authors. The French political philosopher Philippe Beneton supplies the book's foreword. Blum's elegant translations of texts heretofore difficult or impossible to find in English allow Anglophone readers to profit from the counter-revolutionaries' insights about social and cultural matters of perennial importance, such as the necessary roles of religion, family, and local communities within any larger political society--matters of pressing concern to the counter-revolutionaries of our own time

The Enlightenment and the Book
The Enlightenment and the Book

Author: Richard B. Sher

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-09-15

Total Pages: 842

ISBN-13: 0226752542

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The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits. The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.

Placing the Enlightenment
Placing the Enlightenment

Author: Charles W. J. Withers

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-09-15

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0226904075

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The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions to its content and concerns. Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world.

The Enlightenment of Vairocana
The Enlightenment of Vairocana

Author: Alex Wayman

Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ.

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13:

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The Enlightenment of Vairocana is a covering for two books that study a famous Buddhist scripture with given Sanskrit titles of Vairocanabhisambodhitantra or Mahavairocanasutra. The first book, by Alex Wayman, translates the second chapter, which contains the body mandala of Vairocana's Compassion, copiously using Buddhaguhya's commentary, study of some other chapters such as the final one on fire lineage, and includes much introductory material, stressing the Indo-Tibetan approach, on such topics as the Dharmadhatu and the deities of the second chapter. The second book, by Ryujun Tajima, translates the first chapter, with the scripture's theory of becoming a Buddha in one life, copiously using Subhakarasimha's commentary, summary of the remaining chapters, and includes introductory material stressing the Sino-Japanese approach, especially introducing the reader to the positions of the Shingon sect. The two books complement each other, and provide the interested reader with a veritable feast of information. Hopefully the reader will appreciate the beauty of religious message, and the efforts of the two authors to render the words of the scripture sensitively and carefully. It should be admitted that this is a profound Buddhist scripture with numerous well-crafted verses, and that it is resistent to the understanding, requiring lengthy attention for its penetration.

Counter-Enlightenments
Counter-Enlightenments

Author: Graeme Garrard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-08-02

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1134662246

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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 Enlightenment
The Enlightenment

Author: Ritchie Robertson

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2021-02-23

Total Pages: 1008

ISBN-13: 0062410679

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A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.

The Enlightenment and Religion
The Enlightenment and Religion

Author: S. J. Barnett

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780719067419

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This publication offers a critical survey of religious change and its causes in 18th-century Europe. Focusing on the Enlightenment in Italy, France and England, the text illustrates how the canonical view of 18th-century religious change has in reality been constructed upon scant evidence and assumption.