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  1. Home
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  3. Reading the French Enlightenment
  • Cited by 10
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2009
Print publication year:
1999
Online ISBN:
9780511485800
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511485800
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, Literary Theory, European Literature, History, European Studies, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Series:
Cambridge Studies in French (60)
Information

Book description

In this 1999 book, Julie Candler Hayes offers an ambitious reinterpretation of a crucial aspect of Enlightenment thought, the rationalizing and classifying impulse. Taking issue both with traditional liberal and contemporary critical accounts of the Enlightenment, she analyses the writings of Denis Diderot, Emilie Du Châtelet, the Abbé de Condillac, Buffon, d'Alembert and numerous others, to argue for a new understanding of 'systematic reason' as complex, paradoxical and ultimately liberating. Hayes examines the tensions between freedom and constraint, abstraction and materialism, linear and synoptic order, that pervade not only philosophic and scientific discourse, but also epistolary writing, fiction and criticism. Drawing on the insights of a wide range of theorists from Adorno, Habermas and Foucault to Deleuze and Derrida, she offers a dialogue between the eighteenth century and our own, an ongoing exploration of the question, 'what is Enlightenment?'.

Reviews

"readers, especially intellectual historians of science, will find her treatment of Enlightenment text rewarding." The Historian

"This is a rich and impressive study." International Studies in Philosophy, Harvey Chisick

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