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Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1
Politics, Religion, Economy, and Society in Britain
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2023
About this book
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. These developments are thought to have grown from principles that are rooted in the soil of the Enlightenment: abstraction, reduction, objectification, quantification, division, universalization. Michael McKeon’s new book corrects this defective view by historicizing the Enlightenment--by showing that the Enlightenment has been abstracted from its history. From its past: critics have ignored that Enlightenment thought is a reaction against deadly traditions that precede it. From its present: the Enlightenment extended its reactive analysis of the past to its own present through self-analysis and self-criticism. From its future: much of what’s been blamed amounts to the failure of its posterity to sustain Enlightenment principles. 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. McKeon’s book argues the continuity of Enlightenment thought, its consistency and integrity across this broad range of conceptual domains. 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. In the process, Historicizing the Enlightenment exemplifies a distinctive historiography and historical method.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Author / Editor information
MICHAEL MCKEON is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University–New Brunswick in New Jersey. He is the author of Politics and Poetry in Restoration England, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge, and many articles, as well as the editor of Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach.
Reviews
“Michael McKeon has written a deeply learned history of the English Enlightenment which draws on both literary sources and philosophical and political texts. He finds a series of repeated patterns of thought as he takes us through considerations of tradition, civil and religious liberty, secularization, the economy, and modern systems of gender and sexuality. It is an exhilarating and challenging book.”— Randolph Trumbach, coeditor of A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages
"Unparalleled in its range and erudition, McKeon’s far-reaching and boldly synthetic intellectual history challenges critical accounts that abstract the conceptual and methodological innovations of Enlightenment from the moment of their emergence. Essential reading for anyone interested in ongoing debates over the role of the Enlightenment in global modernity."— Lynn Festa, author of Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Cult
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
v -
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Introduction
1 -
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1. Tradition as Tacit Knowledge
28 -
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2. Civil and Religious Liberty: A Case Study
49 -
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3. Virtual Reality
75 -
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4. Gender and Sex, Status and Class
141 -
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5. Biography, Fiction, Personal Identity
167 -
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6. Historical Method
182 -
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Acknowledgments
201 -
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Notes
203 -
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Source Notes
241 -
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Index
243 -
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About the Author
248
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
September 6, 2023
eBook ISBN:
9781684484744
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781684484744
Keywords for this book
Dialectics; Parody; Virtual reality; Secularization; Periodization; The public sphere; The aesthetic; Sex and gender; Separate spheres; Homosexuality; Class consciousness; Class; Biography; Fiction; Identity; Historicizing; Historical Method; Civil liberty; Religious liberty; Tradition; Knowledge; Enlightenment; Enlightenment thought; British Enlightenment; Reason; Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels; Marxism; Max Horkheimer; Theodore Adorno; Michel Foucault; Francis Bacon; Jürgen Habermas; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; Civil society; Print culture; Realism; Domestication; Imitation; Conjectural history; Commodity fetishism
Audience(s) for this book
For universities and colleges of further and higher education
