Ordering the World in the Eighteenth Century

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

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2. Introduction: Concepts of Order in the Eighteenth Century — Their Scope and Their Frailties

   1. Introduction: Concepts of Order in the Eighteenth Century — Their Scope and Their Frailties

      • Diana Donald

      Pages 1-23

3. The Ordering of the World and of Human Affairs

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 25-25

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   2. Providence, Predestination and Progress: Or, Did the Enlightenment Fail?

      • J. C. D. Clark

      Pages 27-62

   3. ‘One is All, and All is One’: The Great Chain of Being in Berkeley’s Siris

      • Costica Bradatan

      Pages 63-82

   4. Ordering the Political World: The Pattern of Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1660–1832)

      • Frank O’Gorman

      Pages 83-111

   5. The Ordering of Family and Gender in the Age of the Enlightenment

      • Rosemary Sweet

      Pages 112-140

4. The Ordering of Knowledge: Bridging Nature and Culture

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 141-141

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   2. Félibien and the Circle of Colbert: A Reevaluation of the Hierarchy of Genres

      • Barbara Anderman

      Pages 143-162

   3. The Values of the Mineral Kingdom and the French Republic

      • Jonathan Simon

      Pages 163-189

   4. The Système figuré des connaissances humaines and the Structure of Knowledge in the Encyclopédie

      • David Adams

      Pages 190-215

   5. ‘Encircling the Arts and Sciences’: British Encyclopedism after the French Revolution

      • Judith Hawley

      Pages 216-243

5. Back Matter

   Pages 245-251

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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.

• Britain
• eighteenth century
• enlightenment
• kingdom
• revolution

• Department of History of Art and Design, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

  Diana Donald

• University of Manchester, UK

  Frank O’Gorman

DAVID ADAMS Professor of French Enlightenment Studies, University of Manchester, UK BARBARA ANDERMAN Assistant Professor and Chair of the Department of the History of Art, Lebanon Valley College, Pennsylvania, USA COSTICA BRADATAN Postdoctoral Fellow, Miami University, Ohio, USA JONATHAN C. D. CLARK Professor of History, University of Kansas at Laurence, Kansas, USA JUDITH HAWLEY Senior Lecturer in English, Royal Holloway College, University of London, UK JONATHAN SIMON Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany ROSEMARY SWEET Lecturer, School of Historical Studies, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, UK

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