The Enlightenment of the long 18th century was an era of awesome intellectual and cultural transformation.
My Enlightenment Vision flowchart [pdf] is pitched at a high level of abstraction, showing schematically how the philosophical revolution of the 17th century led to the 18th-century revolutions in science, technology, politics, and economics — which in turn led to the dramatic increase in health, wealth, freedom, and goods in the 19th century.
To put it another way, the chronology shows how the ideas played out as philosophy, then as an intellectual movement, then as activism, then as the working technology of culture.
I use the chart in my classes and published a version of it in my 2004 Explaining Postmodernism. It’s here as a PDF and as an Excel file, in case you’d like to adapt it for your own purposes.
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
Posted 2 years, 7 months ago at 6:28 pm. Add a comment
At the Explaining Postmodernism page, Chapter Four of my book is now available online. This chapter chronicles the rise of Counter-Enlightenment, collectivized social and political thought on the European continent, from Rousseau and Kant in the eighteenth century, through Fichte and Hegel in the nineteenth (Marx is treated separately in Chapter 5), setting the stage for the great battle between Right and Left versions of collectivism early in the twentieth century.
Here are the chapter’s sections and page numbers:
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [pdf]
From postmodern epistemology to postmodern politics 84
The argument of the next three chapters 86
Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence 89
Back to Rousseau 91
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment 92
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism 96
Rousseau and the French Revolution 100
Counter-Enlightenment Politics: Right and Left collectivism 104
Kant on collectivism and war 106
Herder on multicultural relativism 110
Fichte on education as socialization 113
Hegel on worshipping the state 120
From Hegel to the twentieth century 124
Right versus Left collectivism in the twentieth century 126
The Rise of National Socialism: Who are the real socialists? 131
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
Posted 2 years, 7 months ago at 9:53 am. 3 comments
