• Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Cultural History of Democracy in the Age of Enlightenment

A Cultural History of Democracy in the Age of Enlightenment

Paperback

Series: Cultural Histories

General Political ScienceGeneral World History

ISBN10: 1350440051
ISBN13: 9781350440050
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Feb 8 2024
Pages: 296
Weight: 1.00
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.65 Depth: 9.61
Language: English

This volume surveys the burst of political imagination that created multiple Enlightenment cultures in an era widely understood as an age of democratic revolutions. Enlightenment as precursor to liberal democratic modernity was once secular catechism for generations of readers. Yet democracy did not elicit much enthusiasm among contemporaries, while democracy as a political system remained virtually nonexistent through much of the period. If seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas did underwrite the democracies of succeeding centuries, they were often inheritances from monarchical governments that had encouraged plural structures of power competition. But in revolutions across France, Britain, and North America, the republican integration of constitutional principle and popular will established rational hope for public happiness. Nevertheless, the tragic clashes of principle and will in fraught revolutionary projects were also democratic legacies.

Each chapter focuses on a distinct theme: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the common good; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and the transformations of sovereignty-a synoptic survey of the cultural entanglements of enlightenment and democracy.

Also from

Mosher, Michael

Also in

General Political Science