Enlightenment and Modernity

✍ Scribed by Norman Geras and Robert Wokler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 248
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This collection of essays is addressed to the legacy of Enlightenment thought, with respect to eighteenth-century notions of human nature, human rights, representative democracy or the nation-state, and with regard to the barbarism, including the Holocaust, allegedly unleashed by eighteenth-century ideals of civilization. Each author offers an interpretation of modern or postmodern philosophy against the background of a so-called Enlightenment Project, envisaged as the conceptual ghost that haunts modernity.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 6
Notes on Contributors......Page 8
Editors’ Preface......Page 10
Introduction......Page 11
Part I /
Interpreting Enlightenment Principles......Page 17
1 The Sceptical Enlightenment: Philosopher Travellers Look Back at Europe......Page 19
2 Education Can Do All......Page 41
3 Kant: the Arch-enlightener......Page 66
4 Kant, Property and the General Will......Page 82
5 Can Enlightenment Morality be Justified Teleologically?......Page 96
6 Ganging A’gley......Page 116
Part II /
Assessing the Enlightenment Roots of Modernity......Page 131
7 English Conservatism and Enlightenment Rationalism......Page 133
8 Four Assumptions About Human Nature......Page 151
9 The Enlightenment, the Nation-state and the Primal Patricide of Modernity......Page 177
10 Critique and Enlightenment: Michel Foucault on ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’......Page 200
11 The Enlightenment, Contractualism and the Moral Polity......Page 220
Index......Page 241