The Other Enlightenment: Self-Estrangement, Race, and Gender

Challenging widespread misunderstandings, this book shows that central to key enlightenment texts was the practice of estranging taken-for-granted prejudices by adopting the perspective of Others.

The enlightenment's key progenitors, led by Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot, were more empiricist than rationalist, and more critical than utopian. Moreover, each was an artful exponent of the 'proto-postmodernist' practice of asking Europeans to review what they considered unquestionable through the eyes of Others: Persians, women, Tahitians, Londoners, natives and na?ves, the blind, and even imaginary extra-terrestrials. This book aims to show that this self-estrangement, as a means to gain critical distance from one's taken-for-granted assumptions, was central to the enlightenment, and remains vital for critical and constructive sociopolitical thinking today.

Author: Matthew Sharpe
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 11/15/2024
Series: Off the Fence: Morality, Politics and Society
Pages: 194
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.33h x 6.18w x 0.84d
ISBN: 9781538160237