Book
A revolution of the mind : Radical Enlightenment and the intellectual origins of modern democracy / Jonathan Israel.
Democracy, free thought and expression, religious tolerance, individual liberty, political self-determination of peoples, sexual and racial equality--these values have firmly entered the mainstream in the decades since they were enshrined in the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. But if these ideals no longer seem radical today, their origin was very radical indeed--far more so than most historians have been willing to recognize. In A Revolution of the Mind, Jonathan Israel, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment, traces the philosophical roots of these ideas to what were the least respectable strata of Enlightenment thought--what he calls the Radical Enlightenment.Originating as a clandestine movement of ideas that was almost entirely hidden from public view during its earliest phase, the Radical Enlightenment matured in opposition to the moderate mainstream Enlightenment dominant in Europe and America in the eighteenth century.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780691142005
- ISBN: 0691142009
- ISBN: 9780691152608
- ISBN: 0691152608
- Physical Description: xiv, 276 pages ; 23 cm.
- Publisher: Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, ©2010.
Content descriptions
| Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Formatted Contents Note: | Progress and the Enlightenment's two conflicting ways of improving the world -- Democracy or social hierarchy? : the political rift -- The problem of equality and inequality : the rise of economics -- The Enlightenment's critique of war and the quest for "perpetual peace" -- Two kinds of moral philosophy in conflict -- Voltaire versus Spinoza : the Enlightenment as a basic duality of philosophical systems -- Conclusion. |
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| Subject: | Political science > Europe > History > 18th century. Enlightenment. Democracy > History > 18th century |
