'A brilliant and revelatory book about the history of ideas' David Runciman 'Fascinating and
important' Ruth Scurr 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.
