“This study articulates a resolutely innovative argument for a narrative as opposed to a epistemological understanding of the Enlightenment. Edelstein’s careful attention to how the Enlightenment itself imagined its origins and objectives clears away layers of obfuscating accretions. User-friendly and eminently well informed, this critical synthesis becomes a manifesto reorienting Enlightenment studies in new and provocative directions. Those who would understand what the Enlightenment was and is could not find a better guide.”

Thomas M. Kavanagh, Yale University

“Dan Edelstein’s incisive book argues that before we define the Enlightenment as an historical period or debate it as a philosophical project we need to appreciate it as a story told by a set of self-conscious French moderns about the emergence of new social forms shaped by the methods and mentality of scientific reason. Reconstructing the chapters of this story in his own vivid style, Edelstein sets students on a sure path through the thicket of scholarly commentary while challenging specialists to re-examine their own understanding of this key episode in intellectual history.”

Patrick Coleman, University of California, Los Angeles

“Dan Edelstein, one of the very best contemporary scholars of eighteenth-century French culture, has produced another tour-de-force of a book with this brilliant, provocative study of how, when, and where the Enlightenment was first defined.”

David A. Bell, Princeton University

“Edelstein provides both novice and expert readers with an accomplished work, recapitulating the encyclopedic ambitions of the philosophes, and giving peripheral attention to foreign reactions, such as the Scottish and Italian Enlightenments….Highly recommended.”

Choice

“This book is few in pages, and its author is comparatively few in years. But it possesses more force than far weightier tomes and more learning and intelligence than most can muster in a career. Put simply, Dan Edelstein’s The Enlightenment: A Genealogy is a daring and provocative work. . . . Unlike so many of Nietzsche and Foucault’s world-be literary acolytes, Edelstein is deeply versed in the past. When coupled with his no less impressive erudition in literary studies, that deep historical and historiographical knowledge allows him to make a contribution of great importance. The Enlightenment Project, Edelstein contends, was first and foremost a ‘story’ that eighteenth-century men and women told about themselves. . . . Edelstein’s book . . . should sit, in good company, on the shelves of all students, regardless of discipline, who are interested in the period.”

Journal of Modern History