Description
Book Synopsis"Arguing that philosophical and historical views of the era have long been hopelessly confused, Vincenzo Ferrone makes the case that it is only by separating these views and taking an approach grounded in social and cultural history that we can begin to grasp what the Enlightenment was--and why it is still relevant today"--Dust jacket flap.
Trade Review"Ferrone's familiarity with the primary literature is impressive, covering thinkers from France and Italy to Germany and Scotland. His grasp of the historiography is just as sure, encompassing both Anglophone and European research. This makes for a book that is far more than just a synthesis."--Richard Bourke, Times Literary Supplement "Compelling."--New Republic "Ferrone's command of his material is impressive... There is something for us to learn, or be reminded of, on nearly every page of this dense but often enlightened work."--John Toren, Rain Taxi Review of Books "[The Enlightenment] offers a novel and provocative interpretation of the Enlightenment that effectively challenges scholars of the movement to rethink their own understandings of the intellectual turmoil and upheaval of the eighteenth century."--Review of Politics "How welcome it is to have Vincenzo Ferrone's Lezioni illuministiche available in English... No brief summary can convey all the pleasures, and instruction, that accompany a reading of The Enlightenment: History of an Idea. Not the least of its attractions is the fact that Ferrone wears his immense erudition lightly, expressing himself in a prose that is as ludic as it is lucid, joining clarity to wit in classic Enlightenment fashion."--Johnson Kent Wright, H-France Review
Table of ContentsIntroduction - Living the Enlightenment vii Acknowledgments xvi Part I The Philosophers' Enlightenment: Thinking the Centaur 1 1 Historians and Philosophers: The Peculiarity of the Enlightenment as Historical Category 3 2 Kant: Was ist Aufklarung? The Emancipation of Man through Man 7 3 Hegel: The Dialectics of the Enlightenment as Modernity's Philosophical Issue 12 4 Marx and Nietzsche: The Enlightenment from Bourgeois Ideology to Will to Power 23 5 Horkheimer and Adorno: The Totalitarian Face of the Dialectic of Enlightenment 30 6 Foucault: The Return of the Centaur and the Death of Man 34 7 Postmodern Anti-Enlightenment Positions: From the Cassirer-Heidegger Debate to Benedict XVI's katholische Aufklarung 43 Part II The Historians' Enlightenment: The Cultural Revolution of the Ancien Regime 55 8 For a Defense of Historical Knowledge: Beyond the Centaur 57 9 The Epistemologia imaginabilis in Eighteenth-Century Science and Philosophy 67 10 The Enlightenment-French Revolution Paradigm Between Political Myth and Epistemological Impasse 79 11 The Twentieth Century and the Enlightenment as Historical Problem: From Political History to Social and Cultural History 87 12 What Was the Enlightenment? The Humanism of the Moderns in Ancien Regime Europe 95 13 Chronology and Geography of a Cultural Revolution 120 14 Politicization and Natura naturans: The Late Enlightenment Question and the Crisis of the Ancien Regime 140 Afterword The Enlightenment: A Revolution of the Mind or the Ancien Regime's Cultural Revolution? 155 Notes 173 Index 203
