Summary
Contents
Subject index
Enlightenment and Violence is a history of ideas that proposes a multi-centred and non-Eurocentric interpretation of the Enlightenment as a human heritage. This comparative study reconstructs how modernity was negotiated in different intellectual and political contexts as a national discourse within the broader heritage of Enlightenment.
The author has compared 16th and 20th century Indian history to the early modern histories of Persia, Turkey and Western Europe in order to ground analysis of their 20th century nation-making experiences within a common problematic.
The focus is upon an ethic of reconciliation over totalizing projects as a means to create non-violent conflict resolution in the modern context. It is suggested that an emergent ethic of reconciliation in nation-making—inspired by the Indian paradigm—harbours the potential to create more democratic and open societies, in rejection of the authoritarian patterns that too frequently shaped the experiences of the 20th century.
The European Enlightenment: Between Revenge and Reconciliation
The European Enlightenment: Between Revenge and Reconciliation
European Enlightenment as Two Competing Temporal Horizons
The 18th-century French Enlightenment notion of a “general will”—as a new theory of power—was indirectly enmeshed in newly crystalizing cosmological vistas. Underlying the choice of “light” as central imagery was the 17th-century revolution in cosmology produced by the discoveries of Copernicus (1473–1543) and Galileo (1564–1642). It established the sun at the centre of the universe, and undid the Ptolemaic system. Thus collapsed a mental horizon cherished since antiquity of man as the centre of a small cosmos where the Biblical drama of sin and redemption unfolded, i.e. Christendom. The political order based on the pre-Copernican imaginary institution of society was thereby forced onto the defensive. Members ...
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