The Enlightenment (Studies in European history)

by RoyPorter (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1990

  $3.25

  After having long been dismissed as a shallow irrelevance, the Enlightenment has now been rehabilitated as a major European movement in ideas and culture. Recent historical writing has shown how it was more than the airy philosophisings of a coterie of intellectuals - but rather a massive reorientation of thought, involving modernization, secularization and the application of science on a grand scale. These trends are surveyed and assessed in this book.

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $11.82

  For generations the traditional focus for those wishing to understand the roots of the modern world has been France on the eve of the Revolution. Porter certainly acknowledges France's importance, but here makes an overwhelming case for considering Britain the true home of modernity - a country driven by an exuberance, diversity and power of invention comparable only to twentieth-century America. Porter immerses the reader in a society which, recovering from the horrors of the Civil War and decisively reinvigorated by the revolution of 1688, had emerged as something new and extraordinary - a society unlike any other in the world.