A Cultural History of Democracy in the Age of Enlightenment

A Cultural History of Democracy in the Age of Enlightenment (The Cultural Histories) edited by Michael Mosher, Anna Plassart
English | December 15, 2022 | ISBN: 1350042838 | True EPUB/PDF | 296 pages | 13.5/22.8 MB
This volume surveys the burst of political imagination that created multiple Enlightenment cultures in an era widely understood as an age of democratic revolutions. Enlightenment as precursor to liberal democratic modernity was once secular catechism for generations of readers. Yet democracy did not elicit much enthusiasm among contemporaries, while democracy as a political system remained virtually nonexistent through much of the period. If seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas did underwrite the democracies of succeeding centuries, they were often inheritances from monarchical governments that had encouraged plural structures of power competition. But in revolutions across France, Britain, and North America, the republican integration of constitutional principle and popular will established rational hope for public happiness. Nevertheless, the tragic clashes of principle and will in fraught revolutionary projects were also democratic legacies.