A Cultural History of Ideas in the Age of Enlightenment

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This volume of A Cultural History of Ideas focuses on the culture of the Enlightenment, long believed a time of enormous intellectual innovation and ferment. However elusive the precise connection between ideas and culture in this period, the emergent mixture resonated throughout the West and beyond.

This volume features essays by ten eminent scholars who consider nine different areas of intellectual investigation: knowledge, concepts of self, society and ethics, economics and politics, nature and natural law, religion, literature, the arts, and history. In all of these areas, Enlightenment culture meant the development of modern values sharply at odds with the Old Regime in which they were embedded.

These essays, with their many connections, reveal Enlightenment ideas and cultural innovations as products of a world expanded and rethought in the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of enhanced trade and exploration, new notions of sociability, a media revolution, and major political and economic developments.

The 6-volume set A Cultural History of Ideas is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available in print for individuals or for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a tangible reference for their shelves or as part of a fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access via www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com. Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available in print or digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.