A Cultural History of Ideas in the Modern Age

PRAISE FOR A CULTURAL HISTORY OF IDEAS: VOLUMES 1-6
A 2024 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE
2023 AAP PROSE AWARDS WINNER: BEST HUMANITIES REFERENCE WORK

Ideas defined the twentieth century: they and their reflections shaped practices, social life, knowledge, and governance. They played out in policies, in street debates, in histories of the past and future, in school curricula, in revolts, in art, in medical care. They offered up reasons to fight, work, and spend, ideals to trust in, violence to inflict or oppose, algorithms to program.

This book confronts the challenge of the narrative, symbolic, institutional, and conceptual architecture of the twentieth century, mostly in the Euro-American West. To this day our thought is defined by terms that the twentieth century set in motion-from modernity to the age of extremes, from nationalism to internationalism to decolonization, from dada to poststructuralism, from the expanding university to neoliberalism and the end of history. This book tracks nine categories: “Knowledge”, “The Human Self ”, “Ethics and Social Relations”, “Politics and Economies”, “Nature”, “Religion and the Divine”, “Language, Poetry, Rhetoric”, “The Arts”, and “History”. It completes the six-volume A Cultural History of Ideas by asking in what ways the twentieth century fundamentally addressed and altered each of these categories.

The 6-volume set A Cultural History of Ideas is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available in print for individuals or for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a tangible reference for their shelves or as part of a fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access via www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com. Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available in print or digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.