"Was the Enlightenment French?": A talk by Dan Edelstein February 13, 2009

Dan Edelstein is a professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. He has recently completed a book manuscript entitled The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism and the Cult of Nature in France, 1699-1794 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). In this work, he examines how liberal natural right theories, classical republicanism, and the myth of the golden age became fused in eighteenth-century political culture, only to emerge as a violent ideology during the Terror. He is the co-editor of Myth and Modernity, a special issue of Yale French Studies, and is currently working on a new book project called Myth and Enlightenment, a critical reassessment of Horkheimer and Adorno's claims about the Enlightenment, mythology, and totalitarian ideologies.

Official Website: http://tems.umn.edu