Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1: Politics, Religion, Economy, and Society in Britain

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.

Author: Michael McKeon
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 07/14/2023
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.06w x 0.71d
ISBN13: 9781684484713
ISBN10: 1684484715
BISAC Categories:
- History | Historiography
- History | Europe | Great Britain | Stuart Era (1603-1714)
- History | Europe | Great Britain | Victorian Era (1837-1901)

About the Author
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.