The Ruins: Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires (with an Editor’s Introduction)

This is the first modern edition of The Ruins in English, making the work available to students, scholars and the wider reading public interested in eighteenth-century literature, travel writings, religious ideas and political thought. This edition is preceded by the editor’s introduction that covers the entire career of Volney and analyses the work from a historical perspective. The Ruins, first published in 1791, was translated into English, German, and Dutch within ten years. Volney’s writing provides an invaluable window into the historical anxieties of intellectuals at the beginning of the French Revolution. The Ruins is an exemplary Enlightenment work on history, religion and revolutions, a work of stunning erudition born within the context of anxieties built into the eighteenth-century view of the history of European ‘civilization’. It testifies to the eighteenth-century European intellectuals’ historical concerns about their society’s future during emerging modernity. This book will serve to be a handy and important primary source reading for upper-year courses on the French Revolution, history of orientalism and the Enlightenment.