Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1

Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1 PDF Author: Michael McKeon
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684484731
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
The Enlightenment has been blamed for some of the most deadly developments of modern life: racism and white supremacy, imperialist oppression, capitalist exploitation, neoliberal economics, scientific positivism, totalitarian rule. These developments are thought to have grown from principles that are rooted in the soil of the Enlightenment: abstraction, reduction, objectification, quantification, division, universalization. Michael McKeon’s new book corrects this defective view by historicizing the Enlightenment--by showing that the Enlightenment has been abstracted from its history. From its past: critics have ignored that Enlightenment thought is a reaction against deadly traditions that precede it. From its present: the Enlightenment extended its reactive analysis of the past to its own present through self-analysis and self-criticism. From its future: much of what’s been blamed amounts to the failure of its posterity to sustain Enlightenment principles. To historicize the Enlightenment requires that we conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace—society, privacy, the public, the market, experiment, secularity, representative democracy, human rights, social class, sex and gender, fiction, the aesthetic attitude. McKeon’s book argues the continuity of Enlightenment thought, its consistency and integrity across this broad range of conceptual domains. It also shows how the Enlightenment has shaped our views of both tradition and modernity, and the revisionary work that needs to be done in order to understand our place in the future. In the process, Historicizing the Enlightenment exemplifies a distinctive historiography and historical method. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1

Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1 PDF Author: Michael McKeon
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684484731
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Get Book

Book Description
The Enlightenment has been blamed for some of the most deadly developments of modern life: racism and white supremacy, imperialist oppression, capitalist exploitation, neoliberal economics, scientific positivism, totalitarian rule. These developments are thought to have grown from principles that are rooted in the soil of the Enlightenment: abstraction, reduction, objectification, quantification, division, universalization. Michael McKeon’s new book corrects this defective view by historicizing the Enlightenment--by showing that the Enlightenment has been abstracted from its history. From its past: critics have ignored that Enlightenment thought is a reaction against deadly traditions that precede it. From its present: the Enlightenment extended its reactive analysis of the past to its own present through self-analysis and self-criticism. From its future: much of what’s been blamed amounts to the failure of its posterity to sustain Enlightenment principles. To historicize the Enlightenment requires that we conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace—society, privacy, the public, the market, experiment, secularity, representative democracy, human rights, social class, sex and gender, fiction, the aesthetic attitude. McKeon’s book argues the continuity of Enlightenment thought, its consistency and integrity across this broad range of conceptual domains. It also shows how the Enlightenment has shaped our views of both tradition and modernity, and the revisionary work that needs to be done in order to understand our place in the future. In the process, Historicizing the Enlightenment exemplifies a distinctive historiography and historical method. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Historicizing the Enlightenment (2 Vol Set)

Historicizing the Enlightenment (2 Vol Set) PDF Author: Michael McKeon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781684484867
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book "historicizes" the British Enlightenment, 1650-1800, as the beginning of the modern world by reconstructing what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that have come to define the character of daily existence.

Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 2

Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 2 PDF Author: Michael McKeon
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684484774
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Enlightenment critics from Dryden through Johnson and Wordsworth conceived the modern view that art and especially literature entails a double reflection: a reflection of the world, and a reflection on the process by which that reflection is accomplished. Instead “neoclassicism” and “Augustanism” have been falsely construed as involving a one-dimensional imitation of classical texts and an unselfconscious representation of the world. In fact these Enlightenment movements adopted an oblique perspective that registers the distance between past tradition and its present reenactment, between representation and presence. Two modern movements, Romanticism and modernism, have appropriated as their own these innovations, which derive from Enlightenment thought. Both of these movements ground their error in a misreading of “imitation” as understood by Aristotle and his Enlightenment proponents. Rightly understood, neoclassical imitation, constitutively aware of the difference between what it knows and how it knows it, is an experimental inquiry that generates a range of prefixes—“counter-,” “mock-,” “anti-,” “neo-”—that mark formal degrees of its epistemological detachment. Romantic ideology has denied the role of the imagination in Enlightenment imitation, imposing on the eighteenth century a dichotomous periodization: duplication versus imagination, the mirror versus the lamp. Structuralist ideology has dichotomized narration and description, form and content, structure and history. Poststructuralist ideology has propounded for the novel a contradictory “novel tradition”—realism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism—whose stages both constitute a sequence and collapse it, each stage claiming the innovation of the stage that precedes it. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Historicizing the Enlightenment: Literature, the Arts, and the Aesthetic in Britain

Historicizing the Enlightenment: Literature, the Arts, and the Aesthetic in Britain PDF Author: Michael McKeon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Enlightenment
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"The Enlightenment has been linked to some of the most powerfully destructive developments of modern life: imperialism, racism, capitalist exploitation, scientific absolutism, totalitarian rule; and behind these developments, the domination of facts over values, quantity over quality, the abstract over the concrete, reason over humanity, division over connection. In this two-volume collection of career-spanning essays, influential literary critic Michael McKeon argues a more complicated view by practicing a different way of doing history: imagining these oppositions as the product not of the Enlightenment but of modern experience in its maturity. These essays conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace-society, privacy, the public, the market, secularity, democracy, human rights, sex and gender, fiction, the aesthetic attitude. Volume 1 emphasizes the revolutionary break with tradition enacted by the British Enlightenment and the effects of its inversion of traditional hierarchies. With specific focus on economics and politics, religion and society, this collection amplifies the remarkable contribution McKeon has made to the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, and is an essential addition to any collection. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press"--

Enlightenment Volume 1

Enlightenment Volume 1 PDF Author: Peter Gay
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 030783137X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 702

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Book Description
The eighteenth century Enlightenment marks the beginning of the modern age when the scientific method and belief in reason and progress came to hold sway over the Western world. In the twentieth century, however, the Enlightenment has often been judged harshly for its apparently simplistic optimism. Here a master historian goes back to the sources to give us both a more sophisticated and intriguing view of the philosophes, their world and their ideas.

The Enlightenment World 1-10 Vol 1

The Enlightenment World 1-10 Vol 1 PDF Author:
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138759671
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 2912

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Book Description


The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism

The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism PDF Author: Peter H Reill
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520414535
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism traces the thought of a large and neglected group of German thinkers and their encounter with the ideas and ideal of the Enlightenment from 1740 to 1790. Concentrating on the nature of their historical consciousness, Peter Hanns Reill addresses two basic issues in the interpretation of the Enlightenment: to what degree can one speak of the unity of the Enlightenment and to what extent can the Enlightenment be characterized as "modern"? Reill attempts to revise the traditional interpretation of the Enlightenment as an age insensitive to the postulates of modern historical thought and to dissolve the alleged opposition of the Enlightenment to later intellectual developments such as Idealism. He argues that German Enlightened thinkers generated the general presuppositions upon which modern historical thought is founded. Asserting that the Enlightenment was not a unitary movement, Reill shows how each phase of it had unique elements and made contributions to Enlightenment thought as a whole. Exploring the forms of thought, the mental climate, and the different intellectual milieus in which the German thinkers operated, Reill demonstrates that they were confronted by two opposing intellectual traditions: German Pietism and rationalism. In attempting to reconcile both without submerging one into the other, these Enlightenment thinkers turned to historical speculation and learning. They discussed the relation between religious and rationalistic assumptions, the transformation of the concepts of religion and law, the interaction between aesthetic and historical thought, the creation of a theory of understanding to support the new idea of history, the use of causation in historical analysis, and the rediscovery of the Middle Ages. Reill reveals how they anticipated the work of more famous thinkers of the nineteenth century and establishes the conceptual similarities between thinkers generally thought to be more different than alike. 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 1975.

The Enlightenment World 1-10 Vol 8

The Enlightenment World 1-10 Vol 8 PDF Author:
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138759756
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 2912

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Book Description


The Enlightenment World 1-25 Vol 10

The Enlightenment World 1-25 Vol 10 PDF Author:
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138759787
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 6768

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Book Description


The Enlightenment World 1-10 Vol 7

The Enlightenment World 1-10 Vol 7 PDF Author:
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138759749
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 2912

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Book Description