Giacomo Leopardi
- 244 pages
- 9 hours of reading
Paul Hazard Book order
Paul Hazard was a distinguished French historian of ideas and a pioneering scholar of comparative literature. His work primarily delves into the intellectual history of Europe, focusing on pivotal shifts in European thought. Hazard meticulously examined the evolution of intellectual currents and their profound impact on European culture and literature. His insightful analyses illuminate the deep transformations in the understanding of the world and human society.
- 2022
- 2013
The Crisis Of The European Mind
- 454 pages
- 16 hours of reading
Paul Hazard’s magisterial, widely influential, and beloved intellectual history offers an unforgettable account of the birth of the modern European mind in all its dynamic, inquiring, and uncertain glory. Beginning his story in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while also looking back to the Renaissance and forward to the future, Hazard traces the process by which new developments in the sciences, arts, philosophy, and philology came to undermine the stable foundations of the classical world, with its commitment to tradition, stability, proportion, and settled usage. Hazard shows how travelers’ tales and archaeological investigation widened European awareness and acceptance of cultural difference; how the radical rationalism of Spinoza and Richard Simon’s new historical exegesis of the Bible called into question the revealed truths of religion; how the Huguenot Pierre Bayle’s critical dictionary of ideas paved the way for Voltaire and the Enlightenment, even as the empiricism of Locke encouraged a new attention to sensory experience that led to Rousseau and romanticism. Hazard’s range of knowledge is vast, and whether the subject is operas, excavations, or scientific experiments his brilliant style and powers of description bring to life the thinkers who thought up the modern world.
