This collection of essays is addressed to the legacy of Enlightenment thought, with respect to 18th-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 18th-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.

This major work of academic reference provides a comprehensive overview of the development of western political thought during the European enlightenment. Written by a distinguished team of international contributors, this Cambridge History is the latest in a sequence of volumes that is now firmly established as the principal reference source for the history of political thought. Every major theme in eighteenth-century political thought is covered in a series of essays at once scholarly and accessible, and the essays are complemented by extensive guides for further reading, and brief biographical notes of the major characters in the text, including Rousseau, Montesquieu and David Hume. Of interest and relevance to students and scholars of politics and history at all levels from beginning undergraduate upwards, this volume chronicles one of the most exciting and rewarding of all periods in the development of western thinking about politics, man (and increasingly woman), and society.

This volume presents a selection of the political writings of one of the most significant figures of the French enlightenment. It contains the most important articles that Diderot contributed to the Encyclopédie, of which he was principal editor, the complete texts of his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville and Observations sur le Nakaz (translated into English here for the first time), and a substantial number of his contributions to Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes. The editors' introduction puts these works in context, showing their essential features and underlying coherence.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was one of the most significant figures of the French enlightenment. His political writings cover the period from the first volume of the Encyclopedie (1751), of which he was principal editor, to the third edition of Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes (1780), one of the most widely read books of the pre-revolutionary period. This volume contains the most important of Diderot's articles for the Encyclopedie, a substantial number of his contributions to the Histoire, the complete texts of his Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville, one of his most visionary works, and his Observations sur le Nakaz, a precise and detailed political work translated here into English for the first time. The editors' introduction sets these works in their context and shows the underlying coherence of Diderot's thought. A chronology of events and a bibliography are included as further aids to the reader.

Robert Wokler was one of the world's leading experts on Rousseau and the Enlightenment, but some of his best work was published in the form of widely scattered and difficult-to-find essays. This book collects for the first time a representative selection of his most important essays on Rousseau and the legacy of Enlightenment political thought. These essays concern many of the great themes of the age, including liberty, equality and the origins of revolution. But they also address a number of less prominent debates, including those over cosmopolitanism, the nature and social role of music and the origins of the human sciences in the Enlightenment controversy over the relationship between humans and the great apes. These essays also explore Rousseau's relationships to Rameau, Pufendorf, Voltaire and Marx; reflect on the work of important earlier scholars of the Enlightenment, including Ernst Cassirer and Isaiah Berlin; and examine the influence of the Enlightenment on the twentieth century. One of the central themes of the book is a defense of the Enlightenment against the common charge that it bears responsibility for the Terror of the French Revolution, the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth-century and the Holocaust.

This major work of academic reference provides a comprehensive overview of the development of western political thought during the European Enlightenment. Written by a distinguished team of international contributors, this Cambridge History is the latest in a sequence of volumes that is now firmly established as the principal reference source for the history of political thought. Every major theme in eighteenth-century political thought is covered in a series of essays at once scholarly and accessible, and the essays are complemented by extensive guides for further reading, and brief biographical notes of the major characters in the text, including Rousseau, Montesquieu and David Hume. Of interest and relevance to students and scholars of politics and history at all levels from beginning undergraduate upwards, this volume chronicles one of the most exciting and rewarding of all periods in the development of western thinking about politics, man (and increasingly woman), and society.

Rousseau was both a central figure of the European Enlightenment and its most formidable critic. In this compact, thought-provoking study of his works across a range of disciplines, Robert Wokler shows how his thinking and writing were all inspired by an ideal of humanity's self-realization in a condition of unfettered freedom. No other work on Rousseau provides such a readable introduction to his life and work.

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.

The human sciences--including psychology, anthropology, and social theory--are widely held to have been born during the eighteenth century. This first full-length, English-language study of the Enlightenment sciences of humans explores the sources, context, and effects of this major intellectual development.
The book argues that the most fundamental inspiration for the Enlightenment was the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Natural philosophers from Copernicus to Newton had created a magisterial science of nature based on the realization that the physical world operated according to orderly, discoverable laws. Eighteenth-century thinkers sought to cap this achievement with a science of "human" nature. Belief in the existence of laws governing human will and emotion; social change; and politics, economics, and medicine suffused the writings of such disparate figures as Hume, Kant, and Adam Smith and formed the basis of the new sciences.
A work of remarkable cross-disciplinary scholarship, this volume illuminates the origins of the human sciences and offers a new view of the Enlightenment that highlights the period's subtle social theory, awareness of ambiguity, and sympathy for historical and cultural difference.