In this reissue, originally published in English in 1973, French philosopher Lucien Goldmann turns his attention to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the great age of liberalism and individualism and analyses the 'mental structures' of the outlook of the philosophes, who showed that the ancien regime and the privileges of the Church were irrational anachronisms.
In assessing the strengths and limitations of individualism, Goldmann considers the achievements and limitations of the Enlightenment. He discusses the views of Hegel and Marx and examines the relation between liberal scepticism and traditional Christianity to point the way to the possible reconciliation of the two seemingly incompatible 'world visions' of East and West today.
Lucien Goldmann was a French philosopher and sociologist of Jewish-Romanian origin. A professor at the EHESS in Paris, he was a Marxist theorist.
Goldmann was born in Bucharest, Romania, but grew up in Botoşani.
He studied law at the University of Bucharest and the University of Vienna under the Austromarxist jurist Max Adler.[1] In 1934, he went to the University of Paris to study political economy, literature, and philosophy.[1] He moved to Switzerland in November 1942, where he was placed in a refugee camp until 1943.[1] Through Jean Piaget's intervention, he was subsequently given a scholarship to the University of Zurich,[1] where he completed his PhD in philosophy in 1945 with a thesis entitled Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants (Man, Community and world in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant).
"European intellectual life was then dominated by the crucial opposition between the pseudo-Christian, radically secularized bourgeois society, with its constantly growing, morally neutral economic life, and the immanent humanist faith of socialism, with its hope of an authentic intellectual and religious rebirth in the struggle for a future community, transparent and freed from ideology, to be created by men for themselves.'