'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' 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 centre the
Enlightenment was a profound failure. By the early eighteenth century hope was widespread
that Enlightenment could be coupled with toleration the progress of commerce and the end of
the fanatic wars of religion that were destroying Europe. At its heart was the battle to
establish and maintain liberty in free states - and the hope that absolute monarchies such as
France and free states like Britain might even subsist together equally respectful of civil
liberties. Yet all of this collapsed when states pursued wealth and empire by means of war.
Xenophobia was rife 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 had strived to replace superstition with reason but witnessed instead terror and
revolution corruption gross commercial excess and the continued growth of violent
colonialism. Returning us to these tumultuous events and ideas and digging deep into the
thought of the men and women who defined their age Whatmore offers a lucid exploration of
disillusion and intellectual transformation a brilliant meditation on our continued
assumptions about the past and a glimpse of the different ways our world might be structured -
especially as the problems addressed at the end of Enlightenment are still with us today.
