The End of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is typically seen as a time of progress and rationality, as a great leap forward in our capacity to control nature, generate wealth and direct our own destinies. The underlying assumption is that unparalleled optimism was the dominant register of Enlightenment thought; that for the writers and philosophers of the eighteenth century - for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for David Hume, for Immanuel Kant - there was confidence in a radiant future.In The End of Enlightenment, historian Richard Whatmore debunks this triumphant story. In order to truly understand the Enlightenment, he shows, we must go beyond the assumptions of Marxist and Liberal thought and return to the perspective of those who lived through its rise and fall. In doing so, he argues, we will see an age that believed itself to be in a near-perpetual crisis, on the cusp of political ruin, at the edge of bankruptcy or civil war, or moments away from being eaten up by a rival state. The fanatic violence that enlightenment thinkers had sought to contain exploded into war, terror and revolution, show trials and guillotines. Profit-oriented global trading companies and dedicated advocates of order and liberty battled to take control of radically altered circumstances, demonising each another as fanatic and extremist exponents of chaos.Lucid and illuminating, The End of Enlightenment is a defining new exploration of one of the most important moments in human history.>

Auteur
Richard Whatmore is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director of the Institute of Intellectual History. He is the author of several acclaimed contributions to intellectual history and eighteenth-century scholarship, including The History of Political Thought, Terrorists, Anarchists and Republicans and Against War and Empire.

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'A brilliant and revelatory book about the history of ideas' David Runciman 'Fascinating and important' Ruth Scurr The Enlightenment is popularly seen as the Age of Reason, a key moment in human history when ideals such as freedom, progress, natural rights and constitutional government prevailed. In this radical re-evaluation, historian Richard Whatmore shows why, for many at its centre, the Enlightenment was a profound failure. By the early eighteenth century, hope was widespread that Enlightenment could be coupled with toleration, the progress of commerce and the end of the fanatic wars of religion that were destroying Europe. At its heart was the battle to establish and maintain liberty in free states - and the hope that absolute monarchies such as France and free states like Britain might even subsist together, equally respectful of civil liberties. Yet all of this collapsed when states pursued wealth and empire by means of war. Xenophobia was rife and liberty itself turned fanatic. The End of Enlightenment traces the changing perspectives of economists, philosophers, politicians and polemicists around the world, including figures as diverse as David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft. They had strived to replace superstition with reason, but witnessed instead terror and revolution, corruption, gross commercial excess and the continued growth of violent colonialism. Returning us to these tumultuous events and ideas, and digging deep into the thought of the men and women who defined their age, Whatmore offers a lucid exploration of disillusion and intellectual transformation, a brilliant meditation on our continued assumptions about the past, and a glimpse of the different ways our world might be structured - especially as the problems addressed at the end of Enlightenment are still with us today.