The work of David Bien, one of America's foremost historians of eighteenth-century France, transformed our understanding of the ancien regime and the origins of the French Revolution. The editors bring together for the first time his most important articles, other previously unpublished essays and an interview transcript. Bien's empirically-grounded approach made him a central figure in the 'revisionist' debates on the origins of the French Revolution. His re-reading of the Calas affair as an anomaly in a growing trend of tolerance (rather than a sign of widespread bigotry among an entire class of magistrates) opened up significant new insights into the history of religious persecution, long influenced by Voltaire. Bien's ground-breaking research on the army and the sale of offices revealed the surprising extent of social mobility at the time and challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that it was frustration of the bourgeoisie which contributed to the outbreak of the Revolution. With a preface by Keith Baker and an introduction by Michael Christofferson, Interpreting the 'ancien regime'underlines the seminal importance of David Bien's work for contemporary debates about the social and political history of late-eighteenth-century France. It will be an indispensible resource for historians and historiographers alike.

The essays in this volume seek to examine the uses to which concepts of genius have been put in different cultures and times. Collectively, they are designed to make two new statements. First, seen in historical and comparative perspective, genius is not a natural fact and universal human constant that has been only recently identified by modern science, but instead a categorical mode of assessing human ability and merit. Second, as a concept with specific definitions and resonances, genius has performed specific cultural work within each of the societies in which it had a historical presence.

The essays in this volume seek to examine the uses to which concepts of genius have been put in different cultures and times. Collectively, they are designed to make two new statements. First, seen in historical and comparative perspective, genius is not a natural fact and universal human constant that has been only recently identified by modern science, but instead a categorical mode of assessing human ability and merit. Second, as a concept with specific definitions and resonances, genius has performed specific cultural work within each of the societies in which it had a historical presence.

Darrin M. McMahon's sweeping new book, chronicling the evolution of happiness over two thousand years of Western culture and thought, argues that our modern belief in happiness -- that happiness is a natural right -- is a relatively recent development. It is a product of a dramatic revolution in human expectations carried out since the eighteenth century. Central to the development of Christianity, ideas of happiness assumed their modern form during the Enlightenment, when men and women were first introduced to the novel prospect that they could -- in fact should -- be happy in this life as opposed to the hereafter. Ultimately, the Enlightenment's recognition of happiness as a motivating ideal led to its consecration in the Declaration of Independence and France's Declaration of the Rights of Man. McMahon follows this great pursuit through to the present day, showing how our modern search for happiness continues to generate new forms of pleasure, but also, paradoxically, new forms of pain. In the tradition of works by Peter Gay and Simon Schama, "Happiness" draws on numerous sources, including art and architecture, poetry and scripture, music and theology, literature and myth to offer a sweeping intellectual history of man's most elusive yet coveted goal.

The Humanities and Human Flourishing series publishes edited volumes that explore the role of human flourishing in the central disciplines of the humanities, and to what degree the humanities can increase human happiness. This volume examines the relationship between history and human flourishing and, more broadly, investigates the ways in which the arts and humanities are related to human well-being. The essays here represent the efforts of a varied and distinguished group of professional historians to consider a deceptively simple question: what is the value of history for life? Each author asks in what ways historians, their work, and the objects of their inquiry might contribute to human well-being and how they might be encouraged to do so. History, in this volume, refers not just to the past writ large, but also to the discipline and practice of historical inquiry, along with the production and consumption of works of historical representation. Thinking of history in these ways, the contributors address a wide variety of subjects in connection to issues of well-being, considering history across time and place as a vocation, a source of the sublime, a site of play, and a repository of meaning with surprising analogues to religious experience. Overall, History and Human Flourishing uses personal experience, insight into the professional and scholarly world of historians, and a variety of historical periods and approaches to highlight the value of studying history in discussions of human flourishing. The essays in this volume identify history and the historical craft as tremendous potential resources for human well-being and of vital importance for our times.

This book examines the Enlightenment from the perspective of its contemporary opponents. Born in France but spread throughout the world, the Counter-Enlightenment was a major cultural force at the intersection of the development of modern politics and thought about religion, gender, the French Revolution, and the course of history.

In relative terms, intellectual history is currently enjoying a moment of prominence and self-confidence greater than it has known in decades. Yet surprisingly for a field whose practitioners pride themselves on intellectual self-awareness, its star may have risen along with a decline in self-reflection. Few recent theoretical statements have attempted to "justify" intellectual history, to explain what makes its practice worthwhile and methodologically sound. This situation is ironic. The time of bitter and divisive disputes about the place of intellectual history in the humanities may be a living memory, but it is an improbably distant one. Everyone seems to be getting along these days: intellectual historians with other kinds of historians, and intellectual historians with one another. Yet only a generation ago, the field was faced with marginalization - if not extinction - by powerful external forces, which imposed a kind of exile, prompting a period of intense theoretical self-examination and contention. Now intellectual history is ascendant in the profession, and a kind of mutual admiration, almost to the point of complacency, flourishes where bitter polemics once festered. To reflect on this extraordinary reversal and to chart future directions in the field are the purposes of this collection of essays. They appear at an "interim " moment because the field of European intellectual history stands at a critical juncture. Despite recent successes, intellectual historians can claim today no widespread agreement about how to conduct their work, and they often seem to lack the will to argue out the alternatives. The situation is comfortable. Yet the absence of self-reflection and theoretical contest - which were once compulsory, and arguably taken to excess - risks devolving into a celebration of eclecticism under a large and cozy tent. If eclecticism is a risk, it is also an opportunity, which offers to intellectual historians the prospect of enriching their own field and the broader practice of history through novel openings and exchange. A wider disciplinary world beckons, as does a frequently elusive interdisciplinary (and international) space. Intellectual historians have an important role to play in fostering such spaces, and European intellectual historians, in particular, have an interest in doing so at a moment when the study of "Europe" seems increasingly parochial to many when not connected to the faraway lands Europeans once ruled and where their ideas have long traveled. In this global and globalizing age, at this juncture for the field, it is appropriate to step back from practice to engage in a bout of theoretical reflection. The time is right to take stock of where European intellectual history has been, to assess where it is now, and to reflect on future possibilities.