The Secular City Studies in the Enlightenment : Presented to Haydn Mason

The City is for the Enlightenment a central preoccupation, that social space where both the utopian and the pragmatic concerns of the eighteenth century come together in a typical tension. Unlike St Augustine's Civitas Dei, this is to be a city of men and women, planning their social geometry, interacting commercially, elaborating, as far as possible, human and secular principles of justice. This collection of specially commissioned essays, all by distinguished eighteenth-century specialists, charts the process from a variety of angles.