By Dan Edelstein
What used to be the Enlightenment? notwithstanding many students have tried to unravel this riddle, none has made as a lot use of latest solutions as Dan Edelstein does the following. In looking to get better the place, while, and the way the concept that of “the Enlightenment” first emerged, Edelstein departs from genealogies that hint it again to political and philosophical advancements in England and the Dutch Republic. based on Edelstein, through the 1720s students and authors in France have been already using a constellation of terms—such as l’esprit philosophique—to describe what we might at the present time name the Enlightenment. yet Edelstein argues that it used to be in the French Academies, and within the context of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, that the main definition, suggestions, and ancient narratives of the Enlightenment have been crafted.A priceless corrective to lots of our modern rules concerning the Enlightenment, Edelstein’s e-book turns traditional wondering the interval on its head. Concise, transparent, and contrarian, The Enlightenment might be welcomed through all lecturers and scholars of the period.
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Additional info for The Enlightenment: A Genealogy
Sample text
This assumption that the philosophes—only the French word would do—embodied and to an extent owned the Enlightenment was enshrined in countless histories of the age, perhaps most notably in Peter Gay’s monumental study. While occasionally glancing westward to the American colonies, north to England and the United Provinces, south to Tuscany, and east to Prussia, Sweden, and Russia, Gay’s focus was firmly on the “little flock” of French thinkers who resided, for the most part, in Paris. Today the place of France has greatly dwindled on the scholarly map of the Enlightenment.
And as it turned out, defenders of the Ancients had just as much to do with defining the Enlightenment as their Modern opponents. ” In fact, this affiliation with the party of the Ancients adds an important twist to the interpretation of the Enlightenment as an age idolizing only modern progress. As we will see, the philosophes themselves ultimately owed more to the party of the Ancients, who could accommodate modern scientific achievements into their platform, than to that of the Moderns, who could not find any place for antiquity.
2 A Map of the Enlightenment: Whither France? Forty years ago, it was deemed redundant to bother qualifying the Enlightenment as French. This assumption that the philosophes—only the French word would do—embodied and to an extent owned the Enlightenment was enshrined in countless histories of the age, perhaps most notably in Peter Gay’s monumental study. While occasionally glancing westward to the American colonies, north to England and the United Provinces, south to Tuscany, and east to Prussia, Sweden, and Russia, Gay’s focus was firmly on the “little flock” of French thinkers who resided, for the most part, in Paris.