Enlightenment.

95 p. Leicht vergilbt, sonst guter Zustand / Slightly yellowed, otherwise in good condition. - The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was one of the most exciting and significant currents of European culture. Battling against tyranny, ignorance and superstition, it formulated the ideals which still inform our society today: a belief in reason, criticism, freedom of thought, religion and expression, the value of science, the pursuit of progress. Enlightenment thinkers undermined the ancien régime and provided the ideas for the French Revolution. Yet the Enlightenment was not a simple, unified movement. As recent in-depth scholarship has shown, its leading lights - thinkers such as Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, Rousseau and Kant - differed widely among themselves. Priorities changed during the course of the century. And Enlightenment religious outlooks and political campaigns varied from nation to nation. Furthermore, the rosy view of the Enlightenment can no longer be accepted. It had its darkside, often supporting absolutism and holding the masses in contempt And it had its doubts: was civilization after all true progress? Or should we attempt to recover the state of nature? This book sympathetically explores all these complexities of the Enlightenment. Synthesizing and evaluating modern scholarship, it offers a new and comprehensive vision of this many-faceted movement. ISBN 9780391036369