An Intellectual History Of Western Europe

“ “It is better,” Voltaire said, “to knowhow men thought in former times than how they acted.” Better or not, it is through an understanding of the ideas and the values that gave impetus to the commitments and actions of an era that we come to an understanding of historical events. In An Intellectual History of Modern Europe, Roland N. Stromberg offers just this perspective to the record of social change and political incident in the modern Western world. “Robespierre had his Rousseau, Lenin his Marx,” Stromberg reminds us, and each period - from the beginnings of the great Scientific and Intellectual Revolutions of the seventeenth century, through the Age of Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and the century of Romanticism and ideological emphasis that followed, right up to and including our own period of crisis and Existential dilemma – can couple the names of its political leaders with those of its philosophers, poets, scientists and theorists. This is the task Stromberg has undertaken. Beginning with a review of the intellectual legacy of the Greek and Classical thinkers, and the body of thought bequeathed by the Medievalists and the men of the Renaissance, Stromberg traces the history of ideas as they unfolded in Europe through the centuries, creating and created by the minds of the modern age.”- Publisher