The Enlightenment has been blamed for some of the most deadly developments of modern life: racism and white supremacy, imperialist oppression, capitalist exploitation, neoliberal economics, scientific positivism, totalitarian rule.
Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press..
Published by Bucknell University Press.
In the process, Historicizing the Enlightenment exemplifies a distinctive historiography and historical method.
It also shows how the Enlightenment has shaped our views of both tradition and modernity, and the revisionary work that needs to be done in order to understand our place in the future.
McKeon\'s book argues the continuity of Enlightenment thought, its consistency and integrity across this broad range of conceptual domains.
To historicize the Enlightenment requires that we conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace--society, privacy, the public, the market, experiment, secularity, representative democracy, human rights, social class, sex and gender, fiction, the aesthetic attitude.
From its future: much of what\'s been blamed amounts to the failure of its posterity to sustain Enlightenment principles.
From its present: the Enlightenment extended its reactive analysis of the past to its own present through self-analysis and self-criticism.
From its past: critics have ignored that Enlightenment thought is a reaction against deadly traditions that precede it.
Michael McKeon\'s new book corrects this defective view by Historicizing the Enlightenment--by showing that the Enlightenment has been abstracted from its history.
These developments are thought to have grown from principles that are rooted in the soil of the Enlightenment: abstraction, reduction, objectification, quantification, division, universalization.
The Enlightenment has been blamed for some of the most deadly developments of modern life: racism and white supremacy, imperialist oppression, capitalist exploitation, neoliberal economics, scientific positivism, totalitarian rule
