The Enlightenment: An Introduction

What? You say, you've never given the "Swiss Enlightenment" a moment's thought? Surely you knew that Rousseau was native to - and chased from - Geneva? And that Ferney, Voltaire's estate, straddled the Swiss-French border? But there's more! Professor Ulrich Im Hof, the Swiss scholar commissioned to write the Enlightenment volume in Blackwell's The Making of Europe series, is going to make sure you hear about every bit of it. But surreptitiously, when he thinks you'll barely notice. If you would but look, you'll find more index entries under Zurich, Berne, and Geneva EACH than on Paris - yes, THAT Paris: the moral, spiritual, social, and cultural center of the Enlightenment - and Basel gets as many as London (4). Paying careful attention, you'll observe that virtually every chapter includes some type of Swiss counterpoint - the chapter on "reading societies," for example, contains two meaty examples, one on the Learned Reading Society of Mainz, Germany, admittedly "something of a backwater," and the Reformed Moral Society of Toggenberg, "a flourishing centre of rural industries in the foothills of the eastern Swiss Alps." You will also find here everything you may have wanted to know about the Economic Society of Berne, and the Swiss Helvetian Societies, and the 18th century Swiss writer Isaac Iselin (who has three more index entries than Helvetius himself), and other rarities of the age.But enough: The Making of Europe series is, after all, a collaboration between five European publishers and has a pan-European perspective. To his considerable credit, Professor Im Hof does astonishingly well to cram into a very slender volume so much information (and so much of his own original research on, ah, the Swiss Enlightenment), managing to mention every country and most personalities (including America and Ben Franklin, but without a mention in the index). He is determined to say something on everything, and offers useful discussions on aspects of society - in its many parts: kings, courts, aristocracy, clergy, urban dwellers, farmers, all manner of other common folk - states and their interactions, and, most particularly, on institutional structures - reading societies, associations, the salon, charitable and economic societies, Freemasons, etc. - through which enlightened thought was diffused throughout town and country, seeping across borders and covering the continent. Leading ideas are neatly batched and summarized, chapter by chapter, and Im Hof includes a particularly fine, multi-chapter discussion of the dimensions of "emancipation," a favored Enlightenment term. The book concludes with useful sections on the anti-Enlightenment and "the way ahead" into the 19th century, where 18th century ideational continuities and adumbrations play themselves out.The index is lazily compiled and far from comprehensive. The documentation is also thin - many too few endnotes, and often even long quotations go undocumented, although you can generally reconstruct a

The Enlightenment, written by Ulrich Im Hoff, summarizes many of the fundamental changes that occurred in Europe during the "Enlightenment" period of European history, which lasted from 1688 to 1789. Im Hoff examines the lives of everyone in society, from the royalty to the peasants, and describes how the Enlightenment affected their daily lives. Broken into nine parts, the book portrays all aspects of the Enlightenment, the pro's and con's, and the radical changes it provoked on the way people lived.