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The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History

The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History

Audio Book

General World History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798228299832
Publisher: HighBridge Audio
Published: Dec 24 2024
Language: English
There are many books claiming to explain the Enlightenment, but most assume that it was a thing. J. C. D. Clark shows what it actually was, namely a historiographical concept.

The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History provides a critical historical analysis of the Enlightenment in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United States from c. 1650 to the present. It argues that the degree of commonality between social and intellectual movements in each--and, more broadly, between the five societies--has been overstated for polemical purposes. Clark shows that the concept of 'the Enlightenment' was not widely adopted in those societies until the mid-twentieth century; indeed, that it was unknown in the eighteenth. Without the concept, people at the time were unable to act in ways that would have created the Enlightenment as a coherent movement. Since the conventional account has held that the Enlightenment was a phenomenon, the idea could be used as a component of what has been called a 'civil religion' a summing up of the myths of origin, aims, and essential values of a society from which dissent is not permitted. An appreciation that it was instead a historiographical concept undermines, in turn, the idea that there was any great transition to what came to be called 'modernity'.

Also from

Clark, J. C. D.

Also in

General World History