The Enlightenment-era concerns that gave rise to the modern research university can illuminate contemporary debates about knowledge in the digital age. Since its inception, the research university has been the central institution of knowledge in the West. Today its intellectual authority is being challenged on many fronts, above all by radical technological change. Organizing Enlightenment tells the story of how the university emerged in the early nineteenth century at a similarly fraught moment of cultural anxiety about revolutionary technologies and their disruptive effects on established institutions of knowledge. Drawing on the histories of science, the university, and print, as well as media theory and philosophy, Chad Wellmon explains how the research university and the ethic of disciplinarity it created emerged as the final and most lasting technology of the Enlightenment. Organizing Enlightenment reveals higher education’s story as one not only of the production of knowledge but also of the formation of a particular type of person: the disciplinary self. In order to survive, the university would have to institutionalize a new order of knowledge, one that was self-organizing, internally coherent, and embodied in the very character of the modern, critical scholar.

This volume investigates the impact of Radical Enlightenment thought on German culture during the eighteenth century. It takes recent work by Jonathan Israel as its point of departure and debates the precise nature of Enlightenment.

A study of English semantics during the Enlightenment. New words 1650–1800 reflect the new middle-class culture of sociability, commerce, and science. Old mostly obsolete words illuminate the realities of working-class life, exhausting labor, dirt, outrageous sexism, magic, horses, bizarre food.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.

Matytsin, Darrin M. McMahon, James Schmidt, Céline Spector, Jo Van Cauter

Based on the most recent scholarship, this book provides students and interested lay readers with a basic introduction to key facts and current controversies concerning the Enlightenment. One of the most significant developments in world history, the Enlightenment transformed Europe by promoting reason over faith and advancing skepticism, the scientific method, and intellectual inquiry. It reshaped political and cultural history and formed the foundation for many of today's institutions. The Enlightenment: History, Documents, and Key Questions is a one-stop reference that serves high school and undergraduate students in learning about the background of the Enlightenment. The book also provides readers with key insights into the distant origins of American democracy and technology-based innovation. The text's coverage of the Enlightenment from the late 17th century to the late 18th century in both Europe and its American colonies supports Common Core critical thinking skills for English Language Arts/World History and Social Studies. The inclusion of primary source documents and original argumentative essays work in conjunction with secondary material such as topical entries to engage readers' minds and to give them a fuller understanding the myriad factors that led to the Enlightenment as well as its lasting effects.

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. This book shows in detail the Enlightenment origin of the US Constitution. It provides vivid analysis of how the Enlightenment's basic ideas were reformulated in the context of America.