Exploring an Anglo-German network of thought and writing in Britain between 1700 and 1790, this volume offers a new approach to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture. It explores a set of radical figures and institutions that are exorbitant, with particular focus on William Blake and Johann Georg Hamann.

'Exorbitant Enlightenment' compels us to see eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture in new ways. It reveals a constellation of groundbreaking pre-1790s Anglo-German relations, many of which are so radical so exorbitant that they ask us to fundamentally rethink the ways we grasp literary and intellectual history, especially when it comes to Enlightenment and Romanticism. Regier presents two of the great, untold stories of the eighteenth century. The first story uncovers a forgotten Anglo-German network of thought and writing in Britain between 1700 and 1790. From this Anglo-German context emerges the second story: about a group of idiosyncratic figures and institutions, including the Moravians in 1750s London, Henry Fuseli, and Johann Caspar Lavater, as well as the two most exorbitant figures, William Blake and Johann Georg Hamann.

Exorbitant Enlightenment compels us to see eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture in new ways. This book reveals a constellation of groundbreaking pre-1790s Anglo-German relations, many of which are so radical so exorbitant that they ask us to fundamentally rethink the ways we grasp literary and intellectual history, especially when it comes to Enlightenment and Romanticism. Regier presents two of the great, untold stories of the eighteenth century. The first story uncovers a forgotten Anglo-German network of thought and writing in Britain between 1700 and 1790. From this Anglo-German context emerges the second story: about a group of idiosyncratic figures and institutions, including the Moravians in 1750s London, Henry Fuseli, and Johann Caspar Lavater, as well as the two most exorbitant figures, William Blake and Johann Georg Hamann. The books eight chapters show how these authors and institutions shake up common understandings of British literary and European intellectual history and offer a very different, much more counter-intuitive view of the period. Through their distinctive conceptions of language, Blake and Hamann articulate in different yet deeply related ways a radical critique of instrumental thought and institutional religion. They also argue for the irreducible relation between language and the sexual body. In each case, they push against some of the most central cultural and philosophical assumptions, then and now. The book argues that, when taken seriously, these exorbitant figures allow us to uncover and revise some of our own critical orthodoxies.

In this masterful work of historical scholarship, Zeev Sternhell, an internationally renowned Israeli political scientist and historian, presents a controversial new view of the fall of democracy and the rise of radical nationalism in the twentieth century. Sternhell locates their origins in the eighteenth century with the advent of the Anti-Enlightenment, far earlier than most historians. The thinkers belonging to the Anti-Enlightenment (a movement originally identified by Friederich Nietzsche) represent a perspective that is antirational and that rejects the principles of natural law and the rights of man. Sternhell asserts that the Anti-Enlightenment was a development separate from the Enlightenment and sees the two traditions as evolving parallel to one another over time. He contends that J. G. Herder and Edmund Burke are among the real founders of the Anti-Enlightenment and shows how that school undermined the very foundations of modern liberalism, finally contributing to the development of fascism that culminated in the European catastrophes of the twentieth century.

What does the sublime sound like? Miranda Stanyon traces competing varieties of the sublime, a crucial modern aesthetic category, as shaped by the antagonistic intimacies between music and language. In resounding the history of the sublime over the course of the long eighteenth century, she finds a phenomenon always already resonant.

Arguably the most decisive shift in the history of ideas in modern times was the complete demolition during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - in the wake of the Scientific Revolution - of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophy and the philosophes, culminating in Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. In this revolutionary process which effectively overthrew all justicfication for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as well as man's dominance over woman, theological dominance of education, and slavery, substituting the modern principles of equality, democracy, and universality, the Radical Enlightenment played a crucially important part. Despite the present day interest in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have been astonishingly little studied doubtless largely because of its very wide international sweep and the obvious difficulty of fitting in into the restrictive conventions of 'national history' which until recently tended to dominate all historiography. The greatest obstacle to the Radical Enlightenment finding its proper place in modern historical writing is simply that it was not French, British, German, Italian, Jewish or Dutch, but all of these at the same time. In this novel interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment down to La Mettie and Diderot, two of its key exponents, particular stress is placed on the pivotal role of Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism.

The first reference work on one of the key subjects in American history, filling an important gap in the literature, with over 500 original essays.