A Cultural History of Ideas in the Age of Enlightenment

Abstract

This volume of A Cultural History of Ideas focuses on the culture of the Enlightenment, long believed a time of enormous intellectual innovation and ferment. However elusive the precise connection between ideas and culture in this period, the emergent mixture resonated throughout the West and beyond. This volume features essays by ten eminent scholars who consider nine different areas of intellectual investigation: knowledge, concepts of self, society and ethics, economics and politics, nature and natural law, religion, literature, the arts, and history. In all of these areas, Enlightenment culture meant the development of modern values sharply at odds with the Old Regime in which they were embedded. From the explosion of knowledge, so extensive that even great libraries could not maintain their approach to cataloging, to the disruption of any stable notion of the self, to artists’ experiments with replication, to the rise of “human rights” language, change was in the air. Further, a concern for empirical evidence meant reliance on experiments, systematic observation, and public presentations. These essays, with their many connections, reveal Enlightenment ideas and cultural innovations as products of a world expanded and rethought in the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of enhanced trade and exploration, new notions of sociability, a media revolution, and major political and economic developments.