The Enlightenment

Catalog description

The Enlightenment is popularly seen as an “Age of Reason” that ended an early modern era marked by famine, plague, persecution, and superstition, and paved the way for a modern age of secular politics, commercial wealth, intellectual freedom, scientific progress and the inklings of liberal government. Yet the Enlightenment’s meaning, unity, extent, and significance have been debated from the eighteenth century to today: What was it? How did it begin? What did it do, and for whom? How did its ideas relate to action, in Europe or beyond? Is there an ongoing Enlightenment “project”? Rather than taking the Enlightenment as either a narrow movement or a synonym for eighteenth-century ideas, this course looks at what Enlightenment has meant thematically and as a complex historical phenomenon – exploring its origins in responses to seventeenth-century social, political, and intellectual challenges; examining the social and geographical contexts in which it took place; surveying key developments in political ideas, social thought, history, and natural science through readings of primary sources; finally, looking at the social, geographical and political limits of Enlightenment, at its ends and its legacies.