About this title: Nowadays, the Enlightenment is often judged harshly for its simplistic optimism. Peter Gay revisits the sources to show that the Enlightenment's increasing scientific method and belief in reason marked the beginning of the modern age.
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Binding: Softcover
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
Date Published: 1995-09-01
ISBN-13:9780393313024ISBN:0393313026
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780393313024. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780393313024ISBN:0393313026
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Peter Smith Publisher
Date Published: 1996
ISBN-13:9780844668918ISBN:0844668915
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Description: Acceptable. "Many pages wrinkled and discoloured at the upper margins by what appears to be spilled coffee or tea (no stink, no stick! ). No markings or highlighti. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co
Date Published: 1995-07-17
ISBN-13:9780393313024ISBN:0393313026
Description: Like New. Never Owned Or Read! May Have Light Shelf Wear And Or Publisher Mark. NEW CONDITION OTHER THAN PUBLISHERS REMAINDER MARK! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780393313024ISBN:0393313026
Description: New. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment marks the beginning of the modern age, when the scientific method and belief in reason and progress came to hold sway over the Western world. read more
Edition: Reprint
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf/Borzoi, NY
Date Published: 1967
Description: Good in Good jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. 570 pages with notes; bookplate & former owner's name fr. fly; cover few marks. 3 copies avail., 1 copy no dj. read more
"Gay provides an interesting dialectical model: the philosophes opposed ancient paganism to medieval Christianity in order to create an autonomous "modern paganism" (vol. I). And his writing is beautiful.
Ultimately, though, his picture of the Enlightenment is thoroughly teleological and at times cartoonish. In Gay's account, for example, deism and natural law are just an earlier stage in the evolution of atheism and utilitarianism (I, p. 18). (Their respective exponents would have been very surprised to hear it.) And when the Enlightenment came along, it banished the darkness of Christianity with a "spectacular career of the natural sciences, advances in medicine, the improvement of manners and growth of humanitarian sentiment, the slow crumbling of traditional social hierarchies, and revolutionary changes in the production of food, the organization of industry, the pattern of population -- all pointing in the same direction" (II, 8).
So inexorable is this change, apparently -- the philosophical changes being "inevitable" results of the economic and cultural change (II, ix) -- that the New Deal was incipient in the ancien regime: "Rational public administration and rational statistics were in their infancy, but they foreshadowed the modern welfare state. While the decay of the guilds and the decline of clerical orders redounded mainly to the advantage of industrial and commercial capitalism, behind the troops of laissez-faire marched the clerks of government regulation" (II, 8)."
By Tank,
eastern central scotland, The United Kingdom
"fantastic stuff. if you are interested in how we got to the place we are in terms of thought/ideas - the individual, the idea of progress, historicism, and so on, please do yourself a fsvour and read!"
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