Habsburg Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was many before it became one. The history politics of the French Revolution obliterated its diversity, congealing the rival varieties oft he Enlightenment into a coherent historical field. Fillafers rediscovery of the interacting strands of the Enlightenment is based on material from the Habsburg Empire whose internal workings the book views afresh. The species of Enlightenment Fillafer uncovers did not simply culminate in Revolution and liberalism, but they left a deep imprint on Habsburg Central Europe far into the nineteenth century: This book reveals that the Empire was no bastion against Enlightenment and Revolution. Apart from breaking fresh ground through Fillafers careful ana lysis of Central Europes knowledge regime that ranges from sacred hermeneutics to the political economy and from the study of nature to jurisprudence, the studys broader conceptual purchase lies in its reappraisal of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history. By extricating the Enlightenment from a research tradition that focuses on its Western European roots and on its radical ideas, Fillafer also retrieves the process by which its eighteenth-century variegation was supplanted by an Enlightenment project poised between Reformation and Revolution that continues to be glorified and despised as the origin of modernity.