The Enlightenment (ebook)

Argumento de The Enlightenment (ebook)

In this concise and powerful book, one of the worlds leading historians of the Enlightenment provides a bracing and clarifying new interpretation of this watershed period. Arguing that philosophical and historical views of the era have long been hopelessly confused, Vincenzo Ferrone 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 wasand why it is still relevant today.

Examining Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, and Pope Benedict XVI, Ferrone shows how transhistorical, philosophical interpretations of the Enlightenment have diverged from ones based on careful historical reconstructions of the ideas, practices, and institutions of eighteenth-century Europe. He then offers a new reading of the Enlightenment, arguing that it was "the laboratory of modernity," 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. Not confined to a group of radical elites, these new ways of thinking gave birth to new values that spread throughout society and changed how everyday life was lived and thought of.

Original and provocative, The Enlightenment provides a compelling reevaluation of the true nature and legacy of one of the most important and contested periods in Western history. And, in a new afterword, Ferrone describes how his argument challenges the work of Anglophone interpreters of the Enlightenment, including Jonathan Israel.

The translation of this work has been funded by SEPSSegretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche.

"Ferrones command of his material is impressive. . . . There is something for us to learn, or be reminded of, on nearly every page of this dense but often enlightened work."--John Toren, Rain Taxi Review of Books

"Ferrones familiarity with the primary literature is impressive, covering thinkers from France and Italy to Germany and Scotland. His grasp of the historiography is just as sure, encompassing both Anglophone and European research. This makes for a book that is far more than just a synthesis."--Richard Bourke, Times Literary Supplement

Vincenzo Ferrone is professor of modern history at the University of Turin. He has been a visiting scholar at the Collège de France and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His books include The Politics of Enlightenment.

"Ferrone's compelling and courageous effort to disentangle the conceptions of the Enlightenment advanced by historians and philosophers since the eighteenth century results in a volume indispensable to historians and philosophers alike--and especially all those interested in how the late Enlightenment's 'laboratory of modernity' gave rise to and continues to shape our understanding of humanism today."--Ryan Patrick Hanley, author of Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue

"There will probably never be any agreement over the Enlightenment--whether it was a philosophical project, social movement, or both, and how it changed, if it did, our ways of thinking. But, as Vincenzo Ferrone shows, the struggle to answer these questions has long dominated the intellectual agenda of the West. His book, the first exhaustive account of the idea of Enlightenment itself, is both a history and a critical reflection on how the indisputable origin of the modern world has been conceived, defended, and abused over the centuries. It is both enlightening and enlightened."--Anthony Pagden, author of The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

"This book shines. A fine and concise work by a highly respected scholar, it puts a lifetime of learning and a pan-European sweep into comparatively few pages, and offers nicely turned set pieces--about the Enlightenments relationship to the French Revolution, for example--in addition to its original insights and reflections."--Darrin M. McMahon, author of Enemies of the Enlightenment

"A novel and provocative interpretation of the Enlightenment that effectively challenges scholars of the movement to rethink their own understandings of the intellectual turmoil and upheaval of the eighteenth century."--Sharon Stanley, Review of Politics0Introduction - Living the Enlightenment vii
Acknowledgments xvi
Part I The Philosophers' Enlightenment: Thinking the Centaur 1
1 Historians and Philosophers: The Peculiarity of the Enlightenment as Historical Category 3
2 Kant: Was ist Aufklärung? The Emancipation of Man through Man 7
3 Hegel: The Dialectics of the Enlightenment as Modernity's Philosophical Issue 12
4 Marx and Nietzsche: The Enlightenment from Bourgeois Ideology to Will to Power 23
5 Horkheimer and Adorno: The Totalitarian Face of the Dialectic of Enlightenment 30
6 Foucault: The Return of the Centaur and the Death of Man 34
7 Postmodern Anti-Enlightenment Positions: From the Cassirer-Heidegger Debate to Benedict XVI's katholische Aufklärung 43
Part II The Historians' Enlightenment: The Cultural Revolution of the Ancien Régime 55
8 For a Defense of Historical Knowledge: Beyond the Centaur 57
9 The Epistemologia imaginabilis in Eighteenth-Century Science and Philosophy 67
10 The Enlightenment?French Revolution Paradigm Between Political Myth and Epistemological Impasse 79
11 The Twentieth Century and the Enlightenment as Historical Problem: From Political History to Social and Cultural History 87
12 What Was the Enlightenment? The Humanism of the Moderns in Ancien Régime Europe 95
13 Chronology and Geography of a Cultural Revolution 120
14 Politicization and Natura naturans: The Late Enlightenment Question and the Crisis of the Ancien Régime 140
Afterword
The Enlightenment: A Revolution of the Mind or the Ancien Régime's Cultural Revolution? 155
Notes 173
Index 203