Anthony Pagden

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS One of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world. Liberty and equality. Human rights. Freedom of thought and expression. Belief in reason and progress. The value of scientific inquiry. These are just some of the ideas that were conceived and developed during the Enlightenment, and which changed forever the intellectual landscape of the Western world. Spanning hundreds of years of history, Anthony Pagden traces the origins of this seminal movement, showing how Enlightenment concepts directly influenced modern culture, making possible a secular, tolerant, and, above all, cosmopolitan world. Everyone can agree on its impact. But in the end, just what was Enlightenment? A cohesive philosophical project? A discrete time period in the life of the mind when the superstitions of the past were overthrown and reason and equality came to the fore? Or an open-ended intellectual process, a way of looking at the world and the human condition, that continued long after the eighteenth century ended? To address these questions, Pagden introduces us to some of the unforgettable characters who defined the Enlightenment, including David Hume, the Scottish skeptic who advanced the idea of a universal “science of man”; François-Marie Arouet, better known to the world as Voltaire, the acerbic novelist and social critic who challenged the authority of the Catholic Church; and Immanuel Kant, the reclusive German philosopher for whom the triumph of a cosmopolitan world represented the final stage in mankind’s evolution. Comprehensive in his analysis of this heterogeneous group of scholars and their lasting impact on the world, Pagden argues that Enlightenment ideas go beyond the “empire of reason” to involve the full recognition of the emotional ties that bind all human beings together. The “human science” developed by these eminent thinkers led to a universalizing vision of humanity, a bid to dissolve the barriers past generations had attempted to erect between the different cultures of the world. A clear and compelling explanation of the philosophical underpinnings of the modern world, The Enlightenment is a scintillating portrait of a period, a critical moment in history, and a revolution in thought that continues to this day. Praise for The Enlightenment “Sweeping . . . Like being guided through a vast ballroom of rotating strangers by a confiding insider.”—The Washington Post “Fascinating.”—The Telegraph (London) “A political tract for our time.”—The Wall Street Journal “For those who recognize the names Hegel, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Voltaire, and Diderot but are unfamiliar with their thought, [Anthony] Padgen provides a fantastic introduction, explaining the driving philosophies of the period and placing their proponents in context. . . . Padgen’s belief that the Enlightenment ‘made it possible for us to think . . . beyond the narrow worlds into which we are born’ is clearly and cogently presented.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The Enlightenment really does still matter, and with a combination of gripping storytelling about colorful characters and lucid explanation of profound ideas, Anthony Pagden shows why.”—Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Blank Slate

And Why It Still Matters

The Enlightenment

Describes the history and influence of European contact with other regions of the world, discussing the role of migration, exploration, and conquest in shaping world political boundaries, culture, and society. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present

Peoples and Empires

The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West

Worlds at War

A History

The Pursuit of Europe

The perception of Europeans of the world and of the peoples beyond Europe has become in recent years the subject of intense scholarly interest and heated debate both in and outside the academy. So, too, has the concern with how it was that those peoples who were variously ’discovered’, and then, as often as not, colonised, understood the strangers in their midst. This volume attempts to cover both these topics, as well as to provide a number of crucial articles on the difficulties faced by modern historians in understanding the complex, relationship between ’them’ and ’us’. Inevitably such relationships not only changed over time, they also varied greatly from culture to culture. The articles, therefore cover most of the areas with which the European world came into contact from the earliest Portuguese incursions into Africa in the mid fifteenth century until the explorations of Cook and Bougainville in the Pacific in the late eighteenth. It ranges, too, from Brazil to Russia, from Tahiti to China.

The World’s Perception of Europe and Europe’s Perception of the World

Facing Each Other (2 Volumes)

Nicholas Canny

The description for this book, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, will be forthcoming.

Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800

A history of the conflict between East and West, from the struggles between the Greeks and the Persians in classical antiquity, through the wars between Islam and Christendom in the Crusades, to the modern clash of European Enlightenment and then colonialism with the Islamic societies of the East, culminating in the continuing tensions of the twenty-first century.

The 2,500 - Year Struggle Between East and West

Primeiro, Alexandre, o Grande, e depois os Romanos tentaram unir a Europa e a Ásia numa única civilização. Com a conversão do Ocidente ao cristianismo e grande parte do Oriente ao Islão, teve início uma contenda feroz entre estas religiões. Séculos mais tarde, o conflito passara para a esfera do pensamento: a racionalidade do pensamento científico ocidental vs. a orientação na palavra de Deus. A oposição entre o Ocidente e o Oriente não só dura há mais tempo do que qualquer outra, como a sua mera existência moldou a própria perceção de si mesmo do Ocidente, livre, secular e democrático, que vê no Outro o inverso destes valores.

Mundos em Guerra - 2a Edição

The story of the evolution of the 'European project', from the end of the Napoleonic Wars through to Brexit, this is also the story of how, and why, it become possible to imagine that the diverse peoples of Europe might be united in a single political community.

This book, the first to compare theories of empire as they emerged in, and helped to define, the great colonial powers-Spain, Britain, and France-describes the different ways and arguments these countries used to legitimate the seizure and subjugation of aboriginal lands and peoples."Learned, wide-ranging and important. . . . Pagdens willingness to examine the three empires in tandem is as rewarding as it is innovative."-Linda Colley, London Review of Books"An impressive book, erudite and lively. . . .The book succeeds as an exercise in drawing together the interpretive treatises of three empires over three centuries and showing, often subtly but at times explicitly, their similarity."-William D. Phillips, Jr., American Historical Review"This volume . . . provides an excellent commentary on the imperial ideologies of three major European powers during the early modern era. . . . This is a book to which scholars will return time and again. I certainly found it intellectually stimulating."-Chandra R. de Silva, Sixteenth Century JournalAnthony Pagden is Harry C. Black professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He is also the author of European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism and Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination, both published by Yale University Press.

Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France C.1500-c.1800

Lords of All the World

Cambridge University Press

Lee H. Hamilton

Woodrow Wilson Center Press

Discusses how a distinctive 'European' identity has grown over the centuries, especially with the EU.

From Antiquity to the European Union

The Idea of Europe

For review see: J.W. Schulte Nordholt, in Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis, jrg. 107, nr. 4 (1994); p. 591-592.

From Renaissance to Romanticism

European Encounters with the New World

the language of Spanish Thomism and the debate over the property rights of the American Indians

Dispossessing the barbarian

The differences that divide West from East go deeper than politics, deeper than religion, argues Anthony Pagden. To understand this volatile relationship, and how it has played out over the centuries, we need to go back before the Crusades, before the birth of Islam, before the birth of Christianity, to the fifth century BCE. Europe was born out of Asia and for centuries the two shared a single history. But when the Persian emperor Xerxes tried to conquer Greece, a struggle began which has never ceased. This book tells the story of that long conflict. First Alexander the Great and then the Romans tried to unite Europe and Asia into a single civilization. With the conversion of the West to Christianity and much of the East to Islam, a bitter war broke out between two universal religions, each claiming world dominance. By the seventeenth century, with the decline of the Church, the contest had shifted from religion to philosophy: the West's scientific rationality in contrast to those sought ultimate guidance it in the words of God. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the disintegration of the great Muslim empires - the Ottoman, the Mughal, and the Safavid in Iran - and the increasing Western domination of the whole of Asia. The resultant attempt to mix Islam and Western modernism sparked off a struggle in the Islamic world between reformers and traditionalists which persists to this day. The wars between East and West have not only been the longest and most costly in human history, they have also formed the West's vision of itself as independent, free, secular, and now democratic. They have shaped, and continue to shape, the nature of the modern world.

The entire course of modern Western history has been shaped by the rise and fall of the great European empires. The Burdens of Empire examines different aspects of this long history, focusing on how political theorists, jurists, historians and others sought to explain what an empire is and to justify its very existence.

Anthony Pagden

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