Emeritus Bookshelf

The Enlightenment has been blamed for some of the most deadly exigencies of modern life: while supremacy, imperialist oppression, capitalist exploitation, neoliberal economics, scientific positivism, totalitarian rule. These have been ascribed to the Enlightenment precepts of abstraction, reduction, objectification, quantification, division, and universalization. Michael McKeon's new book corrects this defective view by historicizing the Enlightenment. First, he shows how the Enlightenment has been abstracted from its history. Second, he challenges us to conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace--society, privacy, the public, the market, experiment, secularity, representative democracy, human rights, social class, sex and gender, fiction, and the aesthetic attitude. McKeon's book also argues the consistency and continuity of Enlightenment thought across this broad range of conceptual domains.