"With one party to the culture wars monumentalizing the dubious sides of imperialism and their opposition editing history to shame them, it is a welcome sign to see Michael McKeon returning to the history of the Enlightenment in order to use periodization ‘as a tool to think with.'"— Jonathan Lamb, author of Scurvy: The Disease of Recovery
"Historicizing the Enlightenment adds to intellectual history’s customary mix of political, social, economic, and religious contexts a detailed analysis of literary works, period aesthetics, and cultural commentary. These two volumes will be essential reading for scholars across a number of fields."— April London, author of The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-Century Novel
"The essays collected in these remarkable volumes offer a stirring defense of the revolutionary nature of early Enlightenment thought. McKeon reminds us—forcefully—just how much insight and reach can be achieved by an intellectual history as fearless and dialectical as his."— Wolfram Schmidgen, author of Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688-1730
"Michael McKeon’s signal achievement as an intellectual historian and literary scholar is to capture the force of concepts in the making. His account of the Enlightenment is unparalleled in its depth and breadth."— Frances Ferguson, author of Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action