In Search Of Humanity: The Role Of The Enlightenment In Modern History
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
What does it mean to be truly human, and how did one of history's most radical intellectual movements attempt to answer that question? In Search of Humanity presents Alfred Cobban's masterful examination of the Enlightenment — that great 18th-century watershed of reason, science, and secular thought — and chronicles its profound and lasting influence on the political, social, and moral fabric of the modern world. Cobban argues with precision and eloquence that the Enlightenment was not merely an episode in intellectual history, but the very crucible in which modern conceptions of rights, liberty, and human dignity were forged. A distinguished historian of France and the French Revolution, Cobban brings to this work a formidable command of European intellectual tradition, illuminating the tensions between reason and passion, progress and reaction, that animated Enlightenment thinkers from Voltaire to Rousseau. His prose is measured yet urgent, carrying the authority of a scholar who understands that ideas are never merely abstract — they reshape societies and overturn thrones. For anyone seeking to understand how the modern West came to value the individual above the state, this essential work raises a question that remains as unsettling as ever: has humanity's long search for itself yet reached its end?
Author: Alfred Cobban
Format: Hardback
Published: 1960, George Braziller
Genre: History
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
What does it mean to be truly human, and how did one of history's most radical intellectual movements attempt to answer that question? In Search of Humanity presents Alfred Cobban's masterful examination of the Enlightenment — that great 18th-century watershed of reason, science, and secular thought — and chronicles its profound and lasting influence on the political, social, and moral fabric of the modern world. Cobban argues with precision and eloquence that the Enlightenment was not merely an episode in intellectual history, but the very crucible in which modern conceptions of rights, liberty, and human dignity were forged. A distinguished historian of France and the French Revolution, Cobban brings to this work a formidable command of European intellectual tradition, illuminating the tensions between reason and passion, progress and reaction, that animated Enlightenment thinkers from Voltaire to Rousseau. His prose is measured yet urgent, carrying the authority of a scholar who understands that ideas are never merely abstract — they reshape societies and overturn thrones. For anyone seeking to understand how the modern West came to value the individual above the state, this essential work raises a question that remains as unsettling as ever: has humanity's long search for itself yet reached its end?