The Cambridge History of French Thought

Description

French thinkers have revolutionized European thought about knowledge, religion, politics, and society. Delivering a comprehensive history of thought in France from the Middle Ages to the present, this book follows themes and developments of thought across the centuries. It provides readers with studies of both systematic thinkers and those who operate less systematically, through essays or fragments, and places them all in their many contexts. Informed by up-to-date research, these accessible chapters are written by prominent experts in their fields who investigate key concepts in non-technical language. Chapters feature treatments of specific thinkers as individuals including Voltaire, Rousseau, Descartes and Derrida, but also more general movements and schools of thought from humanism to liberalism, via the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Marxism, and feminism. Furthermore, the influence of gender, race, empire and slavery are investigated to offer a broad and fulfilling account of French thought throughout the ages.

Michael Moriarty is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Peterhouse. His publications include Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1988); Roland Barthes (1991), Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (2003); Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (2006: Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy), and Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (2011: Gapper Prize). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques. Jeremy Jennings is Professor of Political Theory and Head of the School of Politics and Economics at King's College London. He was formerly Vincent Wright Professor at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris. He has published extensively on the history of political thought and the role of intellectuals in France since the eighteenth century, most notably Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century (2011: Enid McLeod Prize). He is a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques.

'The Cambridge History of French Thought is much more than an overview of philosophy during the period since the Middle Ages ... this is a useful work that would make a valuable addition to any serious university library.' R. W. Lemmons, Choice