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A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment Hardcover | Pages: 361 pages
Rating: 4.09 | 556 Users | 71 Reviews

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Title:A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment
Author:Philipp Blom
Book Format:Hardcover
Book Edition:Anniversary Edition
Pages:Pages: 361 pages
Published:November 2nd 2010 by Basic Books (AZ) (first published 2010)
Categories:History. Philosophy. Nonfiction. Literature. 18th Century. European History

Interpretation Conducive To Books A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment

The flourishing of radical philosophy in Baron Thierry Holbach’s Paris salon from the 1750s to the 1770s stands as a seminal event in Western history. Holbach’s house was an international epicenter of revolutionary ideas and intellectual daring, bringing together such original minds as Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ferdinando Galiani, Horace Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, Guillaume Raynal, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In A Wicked Company, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom retraces the fortunes of this exceptional group of friends. All brilliant minds, full of wit, courage, and insight, their thinking created a different and radical French Enlightenment based on atheism, passion, reason, and truly humanist thinking. A startlingly relevant work of narrative history, A Wicked Company forces us to confront with new eyes the foundational debates about modern society and its future.



Mention Books During A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment

Original Title: A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment
ISBN: 0465014534 (ISBN13: 9780465014538)
Edition Language: English

Rating Containing Books A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment
Ratings: 4.09 From 556 Users | 71 Reviews

Assessment Containing Books A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment
I have quite mixed feelings about this book. Right from the Introduction, it is clear that Blom has a hobby horse to ride and it nearly ruins the book. It certainly detracts from it as I would have given it four stars otherwise. Thankfully, he gets off the horse periodically and gives the reader some excellent intellectual history with very clear expositions of different thinkers' philosophies and comparisons between them. The weird thing is that his dislike of Voltaire and Rousseau (his hobby

This book is a spectacular introduction to some of the major personalities of an era that gave birth not only to the French and American Revolutions, but also to most of modern science and philosophy. Before reading it I didn't know much about the eighteenth century Enlightenment from a French perspective, but some of the central denizens of the French Enlightenment were extremely radical for their time, and risked being exiled, imprisoned, or even executed by the church/aristocracy complex for

It is clear from the outset whom the author likes and dislikes, and whom he wants us to like. But the book strikes a chord, and confirms my biased opinion that the radical, atheistic, hedonistic Enlightenment thought with its emphasis on the individual in a social context, going back to Epicurus, and influencing amongst others Nietzsche, Shelley, and dare I even suggest it, Dawkins, is a much better guide for today than the soft, watered down and much better known version with its deistic

When you think about 18th century philosophers, you may envision them as either boring, dry academics or as a bunch of haphazard, wealthy writers who's ideas somehow went on to establish modern notions about democracy, human rights and religion. Neither is quite the entire picture.Philipp Blom turns Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau and others into... early modern activists.By the end of this book, I got quite convinced that these people would have drooled over digital media such as Twitter or blogs.

A very out of the blue look at the Enlightenment that takes everything I've been taught so far and turns it on his head. It's dense reading...and I'm not sure I always agree with the author's thesis...but it IS nevertheless very compelling.I appreciate how this new look at the Englightenment compares to the radicals of thought in our current day and age, especially men such as Christopher Hittchens and Richard Dawkins. Agree or disagree, it will leave you with much to contemplate after the

I should probably start off by admitting that I didn't read this very carefully. Usually if I get through more than a few pages of something I force myself to read all of it but I had just read this guy's other book on the Enlightenment and found so much overlap between the two that I didn't see the point. I read the first 20 or 30 pages and every word of the last 3 or 4 chapters but basically just skimmed through the rest. Like his other one (Enlightening the World) this is very Diderot

In Western culture, the late 17th and most of the 18th century is known as The Enlightenment a European intellectual movement where reason was placed on centre stage and used as the basis for submitting all traditional values into question. The philosophical movement stressed the importance of reason and the critical re-appraisal of existing ideas and social institutions. Bloms work concentrates on the twenty-year period from the 1750s to the 1770s, and specifically on the Paris salon of Baron