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Author: Christopher Britt
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319707841
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
This book is about the ways in which modern enlightenment, rather than liberating humanity from tyranny, has subjected us to new servitude imposed by systems of mass manipulation, electronic vigilance, compulsive consumerism, and the horrors of a seemingly unending global war on terror. The main intellectual aims of this title are the following: the analysis of spectacle, the criticism of providential enlightenment, and the examination of positive dialectics. The spectacle, in this case, is the apotheosis of the culture industries, a total inversion of reality and of our existences. Providential enlightenment is not only a critique of the failure of enlightenment, but of the mutilation of historical enlightenments. Positive dialectics signal a new era of intellectual engagement in the construction of our historical future. During a time in which national democracies seem an imperial farce, it is not enough for intellectuals faced with all this destruction to blithely recommend resistance. The book thus ties American, British, French and German theoretical traditions into a reflexive challenge to the notion of intellectual as critic, and argues instead for a trespassive tradition of cultural leadership.
Author: Christopher Britt
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319707841
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book is about the ways in which modern enlightenment, rather than liberating humanity from tyranny, has subjected us to new servitude imposed by systems of mass manipulation, electronic vigilance, compulsive consumerism, and the horrors of a seemingly unending global war on terror. The main intellectual aims of this title are the following: the analysis of spectacle, the criticism of providential enlightenment, and the examination of positive dialectics. The spectacle, in this case, is the apotheosis of the culture industries, a total inversion of reality and of our existences. Providential enlightenment is not only a critique of the failure of enlightenment, but of the mutilation of historical enlightenments. Positive dialectics signal a new era of intellectual engagement in the construction of our historical future. During a time in which national democracies seem an imperial farce, it is not enough for intellectuals faced with all this destruction to blithely recommend resistance. The book thus ties American, British, French and German theoretical traditions into a reflexive challenge to the notion of intellectual as critic, and argues instead for a trespassive tradition of cultural leadership.
Author: S. Frederick Starr
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691165858
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 694
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Book Description
The forgotten story of Central Asia's enlightenment—its rise, fall, and enduring legacy In this sweeping and richly illustrated history, S. Frederick Starr tells the fascinating but largely unknown story of Central Asia's medieval enlightenment through the eventful lives and astonishing accomplishments of its greatest minds—remarkable figures who built a bridge to the modern world. Because nearly all of these figures wrote in Arabic, they were long assumed to have been Arabs. In fact, they were from Central Asia—drawn from the Persianate and Turkic peoples of a region that today extends from Kazakhstan southward through Afghanistan, and from the easternmost province of Iran through Xinjiang, China. Lost Enlightenment recounts how, between the years 800 and 1200, Central Asia led the world in trade and economic development, the size and sophistication of its cities, the refinement of its arts, and, above all, in the advancement of knowledge in many fields. Central Asians achieved signal breakthroughs in astronomy, mathematics, geology, medicine, chemistry, music, social science, philosophy, and theology, among other subjects. They gave algebra its name, calculated the earth's diameter with unprecedented precision, wrote the books that later defined European medicine, and penned some of the world's greatest poetry. One scholar, working in Afghanistan, even predicted the existence of North and South America—five centuries before Columbus. Rarely in history has a more impressive group of polymaths appeared at one place and time. No wonder that their writings influenced European culture from the time of St. Thomas Aquinas down to the scientific revolution, and had a similarly deep impact in India and much of Asia. Lost Enlightenment chronicles this forgotten age of achievement, seeks to explain its rise, and explores the competing theories about the cause of its eventual demise. Informed by the latest scholarship yet written in a lively and accessible style, this is a book that will surprise general readers and specialists alike.
Author: Catherine Nixey
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544800931
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373
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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Jerwood Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and named a Book of the Year by the Telegraph, Spectator, Observer, and BBC History Magazine, this bold new history of the rise of Christianity shows how its radical followers helped to annihilate Greek and Roman civilizations. The Darkening Age is the largely unknown story of how a militant religion deliberately attacked and suppressed the teachings of the Classical world, ushering in centuries of unquestioning adherence to "one true faith." Despite the long-held notion that the early Christians were meek and mild, going to their martyrs' deaths singing hymns of love and praise, the truth, as Catherine Nixey reveals, is very different. Far from being meek and mild, they were violent, ruthless, and fundamentally intolerant. Unlike the polytheistic world, in which the addition of one new religion made no fundamental difference to the old ones, this new ideology stated not only that it was the way, the truth, and the light but that, by extension, every single other way was wrong and had to be destroyed. From the first century to the sixth, those who didn't fall into step with its beliefs were pursued in every possible way: social, legal, financial, and physical. Their altars were upturned and their temples demolished, their statues hacked to pieces, and their priests killed. It was an annihilation. Authoritative, vividly written, and utterly compelling, this is a remarkable debut from a brilliant young historian.
Author: James MacGregor Burns
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250024900
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
"With this profound and magnificent book, drawing on his deep reservoir of thought and expertise in the humanities, James MacGregor Burns takes us into the fire's center. As a 21st-century philosopher, he brings to vivid life the incandescent personalities and ideas that embody the best in Western civilization and shows us how understanding them is essential for anyone who would seek to decipher the complex problems and potentialities of the world we will live in tomorrow." --Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989 "James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and Fire and Light is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America - for better and for worse - what it is." --Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Revolutionary Summer Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments. Fire and Light brings to vivid life the galaxy of revolutionary leaders of thought and action who, armed with a new sense of human possibility, driven by a hunger for change, created the modern world. Burns discovers the origins of a distinctive American Enlightenment in men like the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and their early encounters with incendiary European ideas about liberty and equality. It was these thinker-activists who framed the United States as a grand and continuing experiment in Enlightenment principles. Today the same questions Enlightenment thinkers grappled with have taken on new urgency around the world: in the turmoil of the Arab Spring, in the former Soviet Union, and China, as well as in the United States itself. What should a nation be? What should citizens expect from their government? Who should lead and how can leadership be made both effective and accountable? What is happiness, and what can the state contribute to it? Burns's exploration of the ideals and arguments that formed the bedrock of our modern world shines a new light on these ever-important questions.
Author: Alessa Johns
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136683895
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Throughout history, varying responses to catastrophe have revealed much about a society's cultural and philosophical character. In Dreadful Visitations , leading scholars of different disciplines examine eighteenth-century responses to natural disaster, showing how human agency played an active role in the creation of destructive circumstances, and how these disasters helped to establish national and moral identities in the Age of Reason. Contributors: David Arnold, Daniel Gordon, Carla Hesse, George Starr, Alan Taylor, Steven Tobriner and Charles Walker.
Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698177886
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 576
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Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.
Author: Shirley Elson Roessler
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742568792
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
Europe 1715-1919 explores the tumultuous period in European history between the Age of Enlightenment and World War I. By integrating political, social, economic, and cultural history, Shirley Elson Roessler and Reny Miklos provide an entertaining and comprehensive account of the emergence of modern Europe. With clear and eloquent prose, the book explains the ideas of the Enlightenment and their effect on the social fabric of Europe, the watershed of the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the advances of the Industrial Revolution, and the centrifugal forces of nationalism that led, ultimately, to the disaster of World War I. Eminently readable, Europe 1715-1919 will appeal to students, scholars, and all interested in the history of modern Europe.
Author: Hourly History
Publisher: Hourly History
ISBN: 1540742814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 44
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Book Description
From its beginnings as a loosely definable group of philosophical ideas to the culmination of its revolutionary effect on public life in Europe, the Age of Enlightenment is the defining intellectual and cultural movement of the modern world. Using reason as its core value, the Enlightenment believed that progress and the betterment of the human condition was inevitable. Inside you will read about… ✓ The Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment ✓ Engaging With Religion ✓ Morality in the Age of Enlightenment ✓ Society in the Age of Enlightenment ✓ Science and Political Economy ✓ The Enlightenment and the Public ✓ Print Culture and the Press Philosophies of the Enlightenment gave birth to the disciplines of political science, economic theory, sociology and anthropology, the disciplines that still form the basis of how we understand life in the 21st century. A bold attack on the Church, the State and the Monarchy, the Age of Enlightenment was a direct challenge to the status quo that sought freedom for all.
Author: Christy L. Pichichero
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501712292
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
The Military Enlightenment brings to light a radically new narrative both on the Enlightenment and the French armed forces from Louis XIV to Napoleon. Christy Pichichero makes a striking discovery: the Geneva Conventions, post-traumatic stress disorder, the military "band of brothers," and soldierly heroism all found their antecedents in the eighteenth-century French armed forces. Readers of The Military Enlightenment will be startled to learn of the many ways in which French military officers, administrators, and medical personnel advanced ideas of human and political rights, military psychology, and social justice.
Author: David Krus
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781453784266
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 138
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Book Description
This book is based on series of studies author carried in Soviet Union and countries of Eastern Europe during the transitory years from socialism to capitalism. When this series was published, a request for reprint came from the office of Fidel Castro.
