Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 2

The Enlightenment has been linked to some of the most powerfully destructive developments of modern life: imperialism, racism, capitalist exploitation, scientific absolutism, totalitarian rule; and behind these developments, the domination of facts over values, quantity over quality, the abstract over the concrete, reason over humanity, division over connection. In this two-volume collection of career-spanning essays, influential literary critic Michael McKeon argues a more complicated view by practicing a different way of doing history: imagining these oppositions as the product not of the Enlightenment but of modern experience in its maturity. These essays conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace-society, privacy, the public, the market, secularity, democracy, human rights, sex and gender, fiction, the aesthetic attitude.

Volume 2 emphasizes the British Enlightenment's effects on the future rather than its break with the past. McKeon urges us to distinguish between those aspects of the Enlightenment that eventually were used to organize epistemic violence and oppression from those aspects that were-and remain today-revolutionary. Taken together, these two volumes present a formidable defense of the Enlightenment's liberating and ultimately transformative effects.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.