The Cambridge History Of Modern European Thought Volume 2 The Twentieth Century

An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the major themes, thinkers, and movements in modern European intellectual history.

Presents an authoritative and comprehensive survey of the major themes, thinkers, and movements in modern European intellectual history.

An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the major themes, thinkers, and movements in modern European intellectual history.

The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought is an authoritative and comprehensive exploration of the themes, thinkers and movements that shaped our intellectual world in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth century. Representing both individual figures and the contexts within which they developed their ideas, each essay is written in a clear accessible style by leading scholars in the field and offers both originality and interpretive insight. This first volume surveys late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European intellectual history, focusing on the profound impact of the Enlightenment on European intellectual life. Spanning twenty chapters, it covers figures such as Kant, Hegel, Wollstonecraft, and Darwin, major political and intellectual movements such as Romanticism, Socialism, Liberalism and Feminism, and schools of thought such as Historicism, Philology, and Decadence. Renouncing a single 'master narrative' of European thought across the period, Warren Breckman and Peter E. Gordon establish a formidable new multi-faceted vision of European intellectual history for the global modern age.

Table of contents

"It is something of a truism that each age must work through the legacy of its predecessors. In the case of the nineteenth century, this obvious statement gains poignancy when one considers the novel challenges and possibilities of the eighteenth century, which was, after all, the age of the Enlightenment. In its many guises and national variations, the Enlightenment asserted provocative and epoch-making claims about the role of reason, science, and criticism vis a vis the traditional authority of religion, state, and received knowledge. It drew new roadmaps for the conscious and reflexive reform of society and the betterment of people. At its core, it articulated a new emancipatory project - at once philosophical and political - chiefly oriented toward the ideal of individual autonomy. The cultural, social and political configuration that shaped the Enlightenment came to something of an end in the closing decade of the eighteenth century, partly through processes of internal critique but also, spectacularly, through the political collapse of the Old Regime. In the changed circumstances of the early nineteenth century, the Enlightenment fragmented into a multitude of contests over the meaning of its legacy"--

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive tothe cross-cultural entanglement of political ideas and discourses. Its principal aim is to make these cultures available for the global 'market of ideas' and revisit some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought, and modernity as such.The present volume is a sequel to Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century'. It begins with the end of the Great War, depicting the colorful intellectual landscape of the interwar period and the increasing political and ideological radicalization culminating in the SecondWorld War. Taking the war experience both as a breaking point but in many ways also a transmitter of previous intellectual traditions, it maps the intellectual paradigms and debates of the immediate postwar years, marked by a negotiation between the democratic and communist agendas, as well as thesubsequent processes of political and cultural Stalinization. Subsequently, the post-Stalinist period is analyzed with a special focus on the various attempts of de-Stalinization and the rise of revisionist Marxism and other critical projects culminating in the carnivalesque but also extremelydramatic year of 1968. This volume is followed by Volume II: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Short Twentieth Century' and Beyond, Part II: 1968-2018.