Cover image for Fire and light : how the Enlightenment transformed our world
Fire and light : how the Enlightenment transformed our world
Title:
Fire and light : how the Enlightenment transformed our world
Author:
Burns, James MacGregor, author.
Edition:
First edition.
Publication Information:
New York : Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2013.
Physical Description:
ix, 388 pages ; 25 cm
Summary:
Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments.
Language:
English
Contents:
Introduction: Enlightenment as revolution? -- Revolution in ideas. State of nature -- Triumph of reason -- Freedom of thought -- Light of experience -- Rule Britannia? Widening gap -- Imperial rulership -- Scottish enlightenment -- Revolutionary Americans. An American enlightenment -- Creating the revolution -- Self-evident truths -- Egalitarian movement -- France: rule or ruin? Royal Paris -- Philosophes and the people -- Unmaking of a king -- Becoming revolutionary -- Madness of the factions -- Transforming American politics. Life of the nation -- Liberty of a person -- Happiness of the people -- First transformation? -- Britain: the rules of rulership. Inside game -- Revolution that wasn't -- Fractured debate -- Napoleonic rulership. La grande farce -- Power: the supreme value -- Abdication of the people -- Restoration? -- Britain: industrializing enlightenment. Ideas as capital -- Tyranny of the machine -- Property and poverty -- New radicals -- France: the crowds of July. Liberal revolt -- Tribunes of the people -- Republican rivals -- American experiment. We are all republicans -- Democratic majority -- Liberty and equality -- New world -- Britain: the fire for reform. Strategies of reform -- Ideas as weapons -- Stumbling toward reform -- Dawning of a liberal party -- Negative of liberty. People as property -- Canker of bondage -- Transformation. Liberal triumph -- Clash of ideas -- A new American enlightenment?
ISBN:
9781250024893
Format :
Book