Enlightenment and revolution : the making of modern Greece / / Paschalis M. Kitromilides

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910814687503321
• Autore: Kitromilides Paschalis
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Cambridge, Mass., : Harvard Univ. P., 2013
• ISBN: 9780674726413 (e-book); 9780674725058 (hbk.); 0-674-72766-5; 0-674-72641-3
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (xvi, 452 p.) : ill
• Disciplina: 949.507
• Soggetti: Enlightenment - Greece; Political science - Greece - Philosophy - History - 18th century; Political science - Greece - Philosophy - History - 19th century; Social sciences - Greece - Philosophy - History - 18th century; Social sciences - Greece - Philosophy - History - 19th century; Greece Intellectual life 18th century; Greece Intellectual life 19th century; Greece Politics and government 18th century; Greece Politics and government 19th century
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: An earlier version of this work was originally published in Greek as Neoellinikos Diaphotismos. Oi politikes kai koinonikes idees
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Introduction to the American edition -- Prologue : the political meaning of the Enlightenment -- The long road to Enlightenment -- The formation of modern Greek historical consciousness -- The geography of civilization : from adulation to revolution -- Enlightened absolutism as a path to change -- Ancients and moderns : cultural criticism and the origins of republicanism -- The revolution in France: the glow and the shadow -- The Enlightenment's political alternative -- The Enlightenment as social criticism -- The republican synthesis : a matrix for nationalism -- The fate of the enlightenment -- Epilogue : the conditions of liberal politics.
• Sommario/riassunto: Greece sits at the center of a geopolitical storm that threatens the stability of the European Union. To comprehend how this small country precipitated such an outsized crisis, it is necessary to understand how Greece developed into a nation in the first place. Enlightenment and Revolution identifies the ideological traditions that shaped a religious community of Greek-speaking people into a modern nation-state - albeit one in which antiliberal forces have exacted a high price. Paschalis Kitromilides takes in the vast sweep of the Greek Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, assessing developments such as the translation of modern authors into Greek; the scientific revolution; the rediscovery of the civilization of classical Greece; and a powerful countermovement. He shows how Greek thinkers such as Voulgaris and Korais converged with currents of the European Enlightenment, and demonstrates how the Enlightenment's confrontation with Church-sanctioned ideologies shaped present-day Greece. When the nation-state emerged from a decade-long revolutionary struggle against the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, the dream of a free Greek polity was soon overshadowed by a romanticized nationalist and authoritarian vision. The failure to create a modern liberal state at that decisive moment is at the root of Greece's recent troubles.