9780062984791
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The Enlightenment audiobook

  • By: Ritchie Robertson
  • Narrator: Jonathan Keeble
  • Category: General, History, Modern
  • Length: 40 hours 9 minutes
  • Publisher: HarperAudio
  • Publish date: February 23, 2021
  • Language: English
  • (259 ratings)
(259 ratings)
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The Enlightenment Audiobook Summary

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.

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The Enlightenment Audiobook Narrator

Jonathan Keeble is the narrator of The Enlightenment audiobook that was written by Ritchie Robertson

Ritchie Robertson is Professor of German at Oxford University, a fellow of the British Academy, and a lead reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.

About the Author(s) of The Enlightenment

Ritchie Robertson is the author of The Enlightenment

More From the Same

The Enlightenment Full Details

Narrator Jonathan Keeble
Length 40 hours 9 minutes
Author Ritchie Robertson
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date February 23, 2021
ISBN 9780062984791

Subjects

The publisher of the The Enlightenment is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is General, History, Modern

Additional info

The publisher of the The Enlightenment is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062984791.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

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