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Full Description
A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present.
The Time of Enlightenment argues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and build a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but fundamentally different from it. A theoretically inflected work combining intellectual history and the history of science, this book will appeal to anyone interested in European history and the history of science, as well as the history of France, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Making Time Different: Historical Change and the Laws of Nature
2. Living the Future: Ideas of Progress and Uncanny Temporality
3. "The Explosion of Light": The Economic Order and the Scientific Revelation of the Future
4. Generating Time: Buffon and the Biological Instruments of Futurity
5. The Time of Regeneration: Renewal, Rupture, and Beginning Anew in the French Revolution
Conclusion: Colonizing the Future
Notes
Index
