A brilliant work of intellectual interpretation by our foremost historian of Enlightenment ideas. Whatmore rescues the Enlightenment from today’s circular debates and places it where it belongs: in the pulsing, chaotic era of its genesis and demise.ʼ Christopher de Bellaigue.

The Enlightenment is popularly seen as the Age of Reason, a key moment in human history when ideals such as freedom, progress, natural rights, and constitutional government prevailed. In this radical re-evaluation, historian Richard Whatmore shows why, for many at its center, the Enlightenment was a profound failure.

By the early eighteenth century, hope was widespread that the Enlightenment could be combined with toleration, the progress of commerce, and the end of the fanatic wars of religion that were destroying Europe. At its core was the battle to establish and maintain liberty in free states – and the hope that absolute monarchies like France and free states like Britain might even coexist, equally respectful of civil liberties. Yet all of this collapsed when states pursued wealth and empire through war. Xenophobia was widespread, and liberty itself turned fanatic.

The End of Enlightenment traces the changing perspectives of economists, philosophers, politicians, and polemicists around the world, including figures as diverse as David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft. They aimed to replace superstition with reason but instead witnessed terror and revolution, corruption, gross commercial excess, and the continued growth of violent colonialism.

Returning us to these turbulent events and ideas, and delving deeply into the thoughts of the men and women who defined their era, Whatmore offers a clear exploration of disillusionment and intellectual transformation, a brilliant meditation on our ongoing assumptions about the past, and a glimpse of the different ways our world might be organized – especially since the issues addressed at the end of the Enlightenment are still with us today.

Pages: 496, Dimensions: 12.8x12.8cm