‘The Enlightenment had seemed to promise a limitless bounty of peace, prosperity, rational inquiry and mutual tolerance to a Europe long ravaged by religious fanaticism and war. Why did it come to end in the extreme violence and continental bloodshed of the French Revolution, and how could another such disaster be avoided? Whatmore’s book is panoramic in scope, always fresh and deep in its analysis, but with a polemical edge for today’s readers fearful again for our global future’
Richard Whatmore is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director of the Institute of Intellectual History. He is the author of several acclaimed contributions to intellectual history and eighteenth-century scholarship, including The History of Political Thought, Terrorists, Anarchists and Republicans and Against War and Empire.
JESSE NORMAN
‘A brilliant work of intellectual interpretation by our foremost historian of Enlightenment ideas. Whatmore rescues the Enlightenment from today’s circular debates and places it where it belongs: in the pulsing, chaotic era of its genesis and demise’ CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE
‘This intellectually exhilarating book is particularly relevant today, when liberal democracy is facing new dangers, which threaten to drag us back into the darkness once more’ ADAM SISMAN
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Cover image: Detail from Wha Wants Me, cartoon showing Tom Paine and the Rights of Man (1792) by Isaac Cruikshank. British Library, London. Photo: British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images Author photograph © Murdo MacLeod Cover design: Olga Kominek
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The End of Enlightenment
RUTH SCURR
RICHARD WHATMORE
‘In this lucid and beautifully written book, Richard Whatmore evokes the darkening vision of the eighteenth-century thinkers forced to confront the failure of Enlightenment. He carefully reconstructs the historical context and presents it as a powerful echo chamber for our own troubled times. Fascinating and important’
The End of Enlightenment EMPIRE, COMMERCE, CRISIS
The Enlightenment is popularly seen as the Age of Reason, a key moment in human history when ideals such as freedom, progress, natural rights and constitutional government prevailed. In this radical re-evaluation, historian Richard Whatmore shows why, for many at its centre, Enlightenment was a profound failure. By the early eighteenth century, hope was widespread that Enlightenment could be coupled with toleration, the progress of commerce and the end of the fanatic wars of religion that were destroying Europe. At its heart was the battle to establish and maintain liberty in free states – and the hope that absolute monarchies such as France and free states like Britain might even subsist together, equally respectful of civil liberties. Yet all of this collapsed when states pursued wealth and empire by means of war. Xenophobia was rife and liberty itself turned fanatic. The End of Enlightenment traces the changing perspectives of economists, philosophers, politicians and polemicists around the world, including figures as diverse as David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft. They had strived to replace superstition with reason, but witnessed instead terror and revolution, corruption, gross commercial excess and the continued growth of violent colonialism.
Richard Whatmore
Returning us to these tumultuous events and ideas, and digging deep into the thought of the men and women who defined their age, Whatmore offers a lucid exploration of disillusion and intellectual transformation, a brilliant meditation on our continued assumptions about the past, and a glimpse of the different ways our world might be structured – especially as the problems addressed at the end of Enlightenment are still with us today.
£25.00 17/10/2023 12:51
PENGUI N PR ESS THE END OF ENLI GHTENMENT
Date: 17/10/ 2023 Designer: Olga Prod. Controller: Katy Pub. Date: 07/12/2023 ISBN: 9780241523421 SPI NE WI DTH: 40 M M
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