Reclaiming the Enlightenment PDF Download

Author: Stephen Eric Bronner
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231126085
Category : Enlightenment
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
In 1947 Horkheimer and Adorno connected the Enlightenment with totalitarianism. Since when the Left has drifted into the language and imagery of the European Counter-Enlightenment, the movement against 1776 and 1789. Bronner sets out to reclaim the heritage of progressive politics.

Author: Stephen Eric Bronner
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023150098X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
This book tackles an obvious yet profound problem of modern political life: the disorientation of intellectuals and activists on the left. As the study of political history and theory has been usurped by cultural criticism, a confusion over the origins

Author: Dan Hind
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789603994
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Today, media commentators, intellectuals and politicians declare that western science and rationality are threatened by irrational enemies. Evangelicals, postmodernists, and Islamists are on the march, they say. The Rome that science built is under siege. But there's a problem with these stirring attempts to defend the truth. They aren't true. In this urgent new book, Dan Hind confronts the great machinery of deception in which we live, and which now threatens to destroy our civilization. In particular, he takes to task a group of prominent intellectuals who have exaggerated the threat posed by the so-called forces of unreason-religion, postmodernism and other "mumbo-jumbo." The commentators, says Hind, distract us from much more pressing threats to an open democratic society based on freedom of speech and inquiry. This book shows that the real threats to reason aren't wacky or foreign or stupid; they reside in our state and corporate bureaucracies - and, one way or another, they probably pay your salary. In recovering the idea of Enlightenment, Hind explores its vital importance and reveals how it can help us to achieve a truly democratic politics, in which we have a genuine say in the decisions that are taken on our behalf.

Author: Sean Takats
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421403382
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
In the eighteenth-century French household, the servant cook held a special place of importance, providing daily meals and managing the kitchen and its finances. In this scrupulously researched and witty history, Sean Takats examines the lives of these cooks as they sought to improve their position in society and reinvent themselves as expert, skilled professionals. Much has been written about the cuisine of the period, but Takats takes readers down into the kitchen and introduces them to the men and women behind the food. It is only in that way, Takats argues, that we can fully recover the scientific and cultural significance of the meals they created, and, more important, the contributions of ordinary workers to eighteenth-century intellectual life. He shows how cooks, along with decorators, architects, and fashion merchants, drove France’s consumer revolution, and how cooks' knowledge about a healthy diet and the medicinal properties of food advanced their professional status by capitalizing on the Enlightenment’s new concern for bodily and material happiness. The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France explores a unique intersection of cultural history, labor history, and the history of science and medicine. Relying on an unprecedented range of sources, from printed cookbooks and medical texts to building plans and commercial advertisements, Takats reconstructs the evolving role of the cook in Enlightenment France. Academics and students alike will enjoy this fascinating study of the invention of the professional chef, of how ordinary workers influenced emerging trends of scientific knowledge, culture-creation, and taste in eighteenth-century France.

Author: Steve Nobel
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1780284152
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Work affects most of us at some point in our lives. Work can be a source of growth, connection, and purpose, but too often it is a source of feeling aimless, bullied or manipulated. Sometimes it comes through overarching ambition, striving to climb up the corporate ladder only to find it is leaning in the wrong direction. There are degrees of emotional and physical suffering when we feel anger, misery and unhappiness with unenlightened work. The Enlightenment of Work is about ending that suffering. This book is essential for anyone wishing to: Transform your suffering at work: Suffering can come in many ways. It can come through feeling aimless and bored where the only reason for being there is to collect a salary each month. It can come through stress, overwork and burnout. This book offers a simple philosophy: suffering happens - but we can transform that suffering. Realise their innate gifts, talents and purpose: Most work disconnects us from knowing our authentic self - our essence or soul. Trust your courage, ideas, intuition, and discover your true self. Reclaim their time: Time is your most precious resource and one you cannot afford to waste. However, many of us work in busy environments that leave little time for real thinking or reflection, or for doing anything very new or interesting. Busy and idle minds can get locked into different forms of anxiety about the past and the future. The changing world of work demands emotional and spiritual intelligence. No one has to stay with work that oppresses the spirit. This new world is about choice.

Author: Damien Tricoire
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331954280X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
This book further qualifies the postcolonial thesis and shows its limits. To reach these goals, it links text analysis and political history on a global comparative scale. Focusing on imperial agents, their narratives of progress, and their political aims and strategies, it asks whether Enlightenment gave birth to a new colonialism between 1760 and 1820. Has Enlightenment provided the cultural and intellectual origins of modern colonialism? For decades, historians of political thought, philosophy, and literature have debated this question. On one side, many postcolonial authors believe that enlightened rationalism helped delegitimize non-European cultures. On the other side, some historians of ideas and literature are willing to defend at least some eighteenth-century philosophers whom they consider to have been “anti-colonialists”. Surprisingly enough, both sides have focused on literary and philosophical texts, but have rarely taken political and social practice into account.

Author: Michael Schacker
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 159477515X
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
Shows how we must make deep changes to complete our paradigm shift from the old mechanistic worldview to the new organic worldview • Reveals the distinct stages of paradigm shifts through the ages, including the 18th-century Enlightenment and the critical stage of our current shift • Explains how the new organic worldview began with Goethe and Kant • Offers solutions for each of us to be able to realize and make the deep changes needed for global regeneration In Global Awakening, Michael Schacker shows that hidden within our global crises is a positive future for the planet. Sharing his 30 years of intensive research into the history of change as well as the evolution of consciousness and regenerative science, Schacker explains how our current shift from the old mechanistic worldview to a new organic worldview based on biological models follows the same pattern as other paradigm shifts across history, including the 18th-century Enlightenment and the American Revolution. He reveals the creative geniuses who have contributed to the birth of the organic worldview, beginning with Goethe, Kant, and Hahnemann. Exposing the scientific and social forces that drive paradigm shifts, he details the stages every paradigm shift progresses through: the early Enlightenment, the conservative backlash, the intensive phase, and and the transformational phase leading to the Organic Shift. Explaining that we are currently in the throes of the paradigm flip, the critical last phase of our paradigm shift, Schacker shows how the mechanistic worldview is crumbling around us and nothing but a complete transformation in the way we think will keep us from the path of total self-destruction. Providing a map to overcome the allure of the simplistic mechanical model that has spawned countless unsustainable practices and problems--from global warming to intense economic disparities--the author offers concrete solutions showing how each of us can use our talents, skills, and time to make the deep changes needed for global regeneration.

Author: Ritchie Robertson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062410679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1008

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Book Description
A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.

Author: Kieron O'Hara
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1780741537
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Blamed for the bloody disasters of the 20th century: Auschwitz, the Gulags, globalisation, Islamic terrorism; heralded as the harbinger of reason, equality, and the end of arbitrary rule, the Enlightenment has been nothing if not divisive. To this day historians disagree over when it was, where it was, and what it was (and sometimes, still is). Kieron O'Hara deftly traverses these conflicts, presenting the history, politics, science, religion, arts, and social life of the Enlightenment not as a simple set of easily enumerated ideas, but an evolving conglomerate that spawned a very diverse set of thinkers, from the radical Rousseau to the conservative Burke.

Author: Ira Katznelson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552394
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
During and especially after World War II, a group of leading scholars who had been perilously close to the war’s devastation joined others fortunate enough to have been protected by distance in an effort to redefine and reinvigorate liberal ideals for a radically new age. Treating evil as an analytical category, they sought to discover the sources of twentieth-century horror and the potentialities of the modern state in the wake of desolation. In the process, they devised strikingly new ways to understand politics, sociology, and history that reverberate still. In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West’s moral bearing. In light of their epoch’s calamities, these intellectuals insisted that the tradition of Enlightenment thought required a new realism, a good deal of renovation, and much recommitment. This array of historians, political philosophers, and social scientists understood that a simple reassertion of liberal modernism had been made radically insufficient by the enormities and moral catastrophes of war, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. Confronting dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity but also which Enlightenment we should wish to have.