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  • 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
Enlightenment Controversies: Literary Self-Critique and Present-Day Debates

Enlightenment Controversies: Literary Self-Critique and Present-Day Debates

Gurr, Jens Martin

Hardcover

Series: Concrede - Studies in Conflict Analysis, Conflict Regulation and Democratic Education, Book 3

General European HistoryGeneral Political Science

ISBN10: 3111681009
ISBN13: 9783111681009
Publisher: de Gruyter Oldenbourg
Published: Aug 17 2026
Pages: 334
Weight: 1.42
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

The Enlightenment and its legacy have long been highly contested: Did it provide the foundations for modern plural democracies, including concepts for the key challenge of dealing with deep disagreements and fundamental conflicts - or is it to blame for Eurocentrism, racism and imperialism, for excessive, uncritical rationality, instrumental reason and the exploitation of nature, and for various forms of totalitarianism? In readings of about a dozen texts - mainly British, but also French and German - from the 1710s to the 1790s, this book shows that the major objections later voiced against the Enlightenment were already raised in remarkably subtle ways in discussions within the Enlightenment. Moreover, much of this Enlightenment self-critique took place in literary rather than in strictly philosophical texts, though the distinction is less clear than it might seem. The 'literary self-enlightenment of the Enlightenment' frequently does not spell out its assessments: These writings require readers to weigh arguments and to judge for themselves. The book thus asserts the importance of the Enlightenment for the present - an Enlightenment, to be sure, which performs its own self-enlightenment in an autocritique that is at heart a literary one.

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