What's Left of Enlightenment?

Keith Michael Baker is Anthony P. Meier Family Professor of History and Director of the Humanities Center at Stanford University. His works include Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Peter Hanns Reill is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles and Director of the UCLA Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies. Among his works is The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism.

Introduction Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill; Part I. Enlightenment or Postmodernity? 1. The enlightenment and the genealogy of cultural conflict in the United States David A. Hollinger; 2. The continuity between the Enlightenment and 'postmodernism' Richard Rorty; Part II. Critical Confrontations: 3. The historicist enlightenment Jonathan Knudsen; 4. Heidegger and the critique of reason Hans Sluga; 5. 'A bright clear mirror' Cassirer's The Philosophy of Enlightenment Johnson Kent Wright; 6. Critique and government: Michael Foucault and the question 'what is enlightenment' Michael Meranze; Part III. A Postmodern Enlightenment? 7. Enlightenment fears, fears of enlightenment Lorraine Daston; 8. Difference: an enlightenment concept Dena Goodman; 8. Enlightenment as conversation Lawrence E. Klein; Notes; Index.

"This volume is an original and stimulating contribution to modern intellectual history and to the history of philosophy. The scholarship is superb but not in the usual sense. It is superb because it is so reflective, self-critical, and sometimes polemical and partisan. Its authors are senior scholars in philosophy, intellectual history, and cultural studies who address large questions in their fields." -Gary Kates, Trinity University "This remarkable book reexamines the intellectual history of 18th-century France and Germany in order to bring to light a richer, more nuanced view of this pivotal period in European intellectual history. . . . Every essay in this collection is of great intellectual rigor and constitutes a serious contribution to the enduring question, "What is Enlightenment?". . . . Although essays dealing with postmodernism tend to be arcane or incomprehensible, the essays in this book are difficult, challenging, and wonderfully readable."-Choice "Giorgio Agamben is perhaps one of the most important philosophers and literary critics writing in Italy today, and, given the scarcity of philosopher-critics translated into English from Italian, one should certainly be thankful to Stanford University Press for translating this important thinker."-Philosophy in Review