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Fire and light : how the Enlightenment transformed our world / James MacGregor Burns.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2013Edition: First editionDescription: ix, 388 pages ; 25 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 1250024897 (hbk.)
  • 9781250024893 (hbk.)
Subject(s):
Contents:
Introduction: Enlightenment as revolution? -- The revolution in ideas. The state of nature -- The triumph of reason -- The freedom of thought -- The light of experience -- Rule Britannia? The widening gap -- Imperial rulership -- The Scottish enlightenment -- Revolutionary Americans. An American enlightenment -- Creating the revolution -- Self-evident truths -- The egalitarian movement -- France: rule or ruin? Royal Paris -- The Philosophes and the people -- The unmaking of a king -- Becoming revolutionary -- The madness of the factions -- Transforming American politics. The life of the nation -- The liberty of a person -- The happiness of the people -- The first transformation? -- Britain: the rules of rulership. The inside game -- The revolution that wasn't -- The fractured debate -- Napoleonic rulership. La grande farce -- Power: the supreme value -- The abdication of the people -- Restoration? -- Britain: industrializing enlightenment. Ideas as capital -- The tyranny of the machine -- Property and poverty -- The new radicals -- France: the crowds of July. The liberal revolt -- Tribunes of the people -- Republican rivals -- The American experiment. We are all republicans -- The Democratic majority -- Liberty and equality -- The new world -- Britain: the fire for reform. Strategies of reform -- Ideas as weapons -- Stumbling toward reform -- The dawning of a liberal party -- The negative of liberty. People as property -- The canker of bondage -- The transformation. The liberal triumph -- The clash of ideas -- A new American enlightenment?
Summary: Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments.
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Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 940.25 B967 Checked out 07/15/2024 33111005221870
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"With this profound and magnificent book, drawing on his deep reservoir of thought and expertise in the humanities, James MacGregor Burns takes us into the fire's center. As a 21st-century philosopher, he brings to vivid life the incandescent personalities and ideas that embody the best in Western civilization and shows us how understanding them is essential for anyone who would seek to decipher the complex problems and potentialities of the world we will live in tomorrow." --Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989

"James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and Fire and Light is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America - for better and for worse - what it is." --Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Revolutionary Summer

Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment

In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments. Fire and Light brings to vivid life the galaxy of revolutionary leaders of thought and action who, armed with a new sense of human possibility, driven by a hunger for change, created the modern world. Burns discovers the origins of a distinctive American Enlightenment in men like the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and their early encounters with incendiary European ideas about liberty and equality. It was these thinker-activists who framed the UnitedStates as a grand and continuing experiment in Enlightenment principles.

Today the same questions Enlightenment thinkers grappled with have taken on new urgency around the world: in the turmoil of the Arab Spring, in the former Soviet Union, and China, as well as in the United States itself. What should a nation be? What should citizens expect from their government? Who should lead and how can leadership be made both effective and accountable? What is happiness, and what can the state contribute to it? Burns's exploration of the ideals and arguments that formed the bedrock of our modern world shines a new light on these ever-important questions.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Enlightenment as revolution? -- The revolution in ideas. The state of nature -- The triumph of reason -- The freedom of thought -- The light of experience -- Rule Britannia? The widening gap -- Imperial rulership -- The Scottish enlightenment -- Revolutionary Americans. An American enlightenment -- Creating the revolution -- Self-evident truths -- The egalitarian movement -- France: rule or ruin? Royal Paris -- The Philosophes and the people -- The unmaking of a king -- Becoming revolutionary -- The madness of the factions -- Transforming American politics. The life of the nation -- The liberty of a person -- The happiness of the people -- The first transformation? -- Britain: the rules of rulership. The inside game -- The revolution that wasn't -- The fractured debate -- Napoleonic rulership. La grande farce -- Power: the supreme value -- The abdication of the people -- Restoration? -- Britain: industrializing enlightenment. Ideas as capital -- The tyranny of the machine -- Property and poverty -- The new radicals -- France: the crowds of July. The liberal revolt -- Tribunes of the people -- Republican rivals -- The American experiment. We are all republicans -- The Democratic majority -- Liberty and equality -- The new world -- Britain: the fire for reform. Strategies of reform -- Ideas as weapons -- Stumbling toward reform -- The dawning of a liberal party -- The negative of liberty. People as property -- The canker of bondage -- The transformation. The liberal triumph -- The clash of ideas -- A new American enlightenment?

Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments.

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