The Enlightenment was a movement of intellectual change that penetrated every European country as well as North America during the eighteenth century. This wide-ranging introduction describes the origins and development of Enlightenment ideas, and traces their effects on European and American thought, politics and society.

It begins with an account of eighteenth-century European and American intellectual, political, and social life. He describes the universities, academies, salons, and reading societies from which the principal ideas of the Enlightenment emerged and examines their diffusion, interaction, and influence. Enlightenment ideas provided a basis at once for democracy, enlightened despotism, and anarchy; they informed the great revolutions in France and America and the regimes that followed them; they were the center and the cause of the great flowering of learning that took place throughout the European world.

In conclusion the book examines the progress of Enlightenment thought in the nineteenth century, the counter-movement of Romanticism, and the degree to which reason and rationality continue to hold sway at the turn of the twentieth century.

"The great merit of the book is that the author's wide erudition informs and drives the narrative without ever encumbering it. One reads it with both pleasure and attention." Liberation

The Enlightenment was a movement of intellectual change that penetrated every European country as well as North America during the eighteenth century.

Ulrich Im Hof studied at the University of Basle, and since 1965 has been lecturer in Swiss history and general modern History at the University of Bonn, as well as the Director of the Department of Swiss History at the University of Bern. Among his publications are Das gesellige Jahrhundert. Gesellschaft und Gesellschaften in Seitalter der Aufklarung(1982) and Geschichte der Schweiz(1987).

Series Editor's Preface.

Part I: The