THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Enlightenment studies are currently in a state of flux with unresolved arguments among its adherents about its dates its locations and the contents of the movement This book cuts the Gordian knot There are many books claiming to explain the Enlightenment but most assume that it was a thing J C D Clark shows what it actually was namely a historiographical concept Currently the Enlightenment is a term widely accepted across popular culture and in a variety of academic disciplines notably history philosophy political theory political science literary studies and theology Clark calls for a fundamental reconsideration in each The Enlightenment An Idea and Its History provides a critical historical analysis of the Enlightenment in England Scotland France Germany and the United States from c 1650 to the present It argues that the degree of commonality between social and intellectual movements in each and more broadly between the five societies has been overstated for polemical purposes Clark shows that the concept of the Enlightenment was not widely adopted in those societies until the mid twentieth century indeed that it was unknown in the eighteenth Without the concept people at the time were unable to act in ways that would ha