Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Julie Candler Hayes
SeriesCambridge Studies in French
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:260
Dimensions(mm): Height 230,Width 152
Category/GenreLiterary studies - c 1500 to c 1800
ISBN/Barcode 9780521030960
ClassificationsDewey:840.9384
Audience
Professional & Vocational
Illustrations 1 Halftones, unspecified

Publishing Details

Publisher Cambridge University Press
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publication Date 2 November 2006
Publication Country United Kingdom

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 Chatelet, the Abbe 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