Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1: Politics, Religion, Economy, and Society in Britain

The Enlightenment has been blamed for some of the most deadly developments of modern life: racism and white supremacy, imperialist oppression, capitalist exploitation, neoliberal economics, scientific positivism, totalitarian rule. These developments are thought to have grown from principles that are rooted in the soil of the Enlightenment: abstraction, reduction, objectification, quantification, division, universalization. Michael McKeon's new book corrects this defective view by historicizing the Enlightenment--by showing that the Enlightenment has been abstracted from its history. From its past: critics have ignored that Enlightenment thought is a reaction against deadly traditions that precede it. From its present: the Enlightenment extended its reactive analysis of the past to its own present through self-analysis and self-criticism. From its future: much of what's been blamed amounts to the failure of its posterity to sustain Enlightenment principles. To historicize the Enlightenment requires that we conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace-society, privacy, the public, the market, experiment, secularity, representative democracy, human rights, social class, sex and gender, fiction, the aesthetic attitude. McKeon's book argues the continuity of Enlightenment thought, its consistency and integrity across this broad range of conceptual domains. It also shows how the Enlightenment has shaped our views of both tradition and modernity, and the revisionary work that needs to be done in order to understand our place in the future. In the process, Historicizing the Enlightenment exemplifies a distinctive historiography and historical method. Published by Bucknell University Press.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Periodizing the Enlightenment  Understanding Enlightenment Thought  Enlightenment Separation and Conflation  Experimental Method  Quantification  Politics (Civil) Society  The Public Sphere  Capitalist and Enlightenment Universality  Imperialism  Macro-pastoralism Conjectural History  Slavery  1 Tradition as Tacit Knowledge  Tradition  Ideology  The Aesthetic  2 Civil and Religious Liberty: A Case Study in Secularization  Accommodation  Civil Society The Empirical Criterion  The Sociology of Group Formation  Accommodating God’s Will: Thoughts, Speech, Actions  Defining Spheres of Discourse  The Three Negative Liberties  Secularization  3 Virtual Reality Religion  Corporation  Polity and Economy  Capitalist Universality  False Consciousness and Uneven Development  The Commodity Form  The Trope of the Fetish  Parody  The Trope of the Invisible Hand  Conceptual Abstraction  Capitalist and Enlightenment Universality  Superstructure and Dialectics  Conjectural History  Polity and Society  The Public Sphere  The Two Publics  Print  Experimental Science  Experience and Experiment  Instruments: Experimental versus Artful  Extending Experiment I: Political Philosophy  Extending Experiment II: Beyond Observables The Imagination  4 Gender and Sex, Status and Class  From Patriarchalism to Modern Patriarchy  From Domestic Economy to Domestic Ideology  Separate Spheres?  Sex and Sex Consciousness  The Two-Sex Model?  The Three-Gender System: Conflation I  Gender as Culture: Conflation II  The Dialectic of Sexuality and Class  The Common Labor of Sexuality and Class  Sodomy and Aristocracy  Types of Masculinity  5 Biography, Fiction, Personal Identity  Biography, Fiction, and the Common  Biography, Fiction, and the Actual  Biography, Fiction, and the Virtual  The Self behind Self-Fashioning From Secret History to Novel  The Rise of Personal Identity  6 Historical Method  Distance and Proximity  Historicizing Empiricism  Historical Method: Matching Particulars and Generals  Dialectical Opposition I: History as Focalizations of Perspective Dialectical Opposition II: History as Moments of Temporality  Dialectical Opposition III: History as Levels of Structure Acknowledgments  Notes   Source Notes  Index 

About the Author :
MICHAEL MCKEON is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University–New Brunswick in New Jersey. He is the author of Politics and Poetry in Restoration England, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge, and many articles, as well as the editor of Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach.  

Review :
"Unparalleled in its range and erudition, McKeon’s far-reaching and boldly synthetic intellectual history challenges critical accounts that abstract the conceptual and methodological innovations of Enlightenment from the moment of their emergence. Essential reading for anyone interested in ongoing debates over the role of the Enlightenment in global modernity." - Lynn Festa (author of Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Cult) “Michael McKeon has written a deeply learned history of the English Enlightenment which draws on both literary sources and philosophical and political texts. He finds a series of repeated patterns of thought as he takes us through considerations of tradition, civil and religious liberty, secularization, the economy, and modern systems of gender and sexuality. It is an exhilarating and challenging book.” - Randolph Trumbach (coeditor of A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages)