Into Print

The famous clash between Edmund Burke and Tom Paine over the Enlightenment"s "evil" or "liberating" potential in the French Revolution finds present-day parallels in the battle between those who see the Enlightenment at the origins of modernity"s many ills, such as imperialism, racism, misogyny, and totalitarianism, and those who see it as having forged an age of democracy, human rights, and freedom. The essays collected by Charles Walton in Into Print paint a more complicated picture. By focusing on print culture-the production, circulation, and reception of Enlightenment thought-they show how the Enlightenment was shaped through practice and reshaped over time. These essays expand upon an approach to the study of the Enlightenment pioneered four decades ago: the social history of ideas. The contributors to Into Print examine how writers, printers, booksellers, regulators, police, readers, rumormongers, policy makers, diplomats, and sovereigns all struggled over that broad range of...