Ordering the World in the Eighteenth Century

FRANK O'GORMAN has been Professor of History at the University of Manchester, UK since 1992 where he was successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader in the same institution. He has published on a wide variety of subjects, including the development of political parties, the history of political thought, the electoral politics of the period and the nature of popular ritual behaviour. His latest work was The Long Eighteenth Century: Political and Social History, 1688-1832 (1998). DIANA DONALD was formerly Head of the Department of History of Art and Design at Manchester Metrop

The Eighteenth century is often represented, applying Tom Paine's phrase, as 'The Age of Reason': an age when progressive ideals triumphed over autocracy and obscurantism, and when notions of order and balance shaped consciousness in every sphere of human knowledge.The Eighteenth century is often represented, applying Tom Paine's phrase, as 'The Age of Reason': an age when progressive ideals triumphed over autocracy and obscurantism, and when notions of order and balance shaped consciousness in every sphere of human knowledge. Yet the debates which surrounded the development of Eighteenth-century thought were always open to troubling doubts. Was nature itself truly an ordered entity, as Newton had argued, or was it a mass of chaotic, randomly moving atoms, as some materialist thinkers believed? This book explores the tensions and conflicts in these debates through a series of interdisciplinary essays from leading international scholars, each challenging the idea that the Eighteenth century was an age of order.