The Crisis of the European Mind

‘it’s refreshing to turn to a genuine work of intellectual history that is back in print in a new edition … if you want to understand the Enlightenment in its complexity and contradictions, read Paul Hazard’s stylish book.” New Statesman

Paul Hazard (1878-1944) was an eminent French historian of ideas and a pioneering scholar of comparative literature. After teaching at the University of Lyon and the Sorbonne, he was appointed to the chair of comparative literature at the Coll ge de France in 1925 and in 1940 was elected to the French Academy. From 1932 on Hazard also taught at regular intervals at Columbia University, and he was in New York when the Nazis occupied France in 1941. He immediately returned to France to assume the rectorship of the University of Paris but was rejected for the position by the Nazis. Hazard’s reputation rests on two major works of intellectual history- The Crisis of the European Mind, from 1935, and its sequel, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century- From Montesquieu to Lessing, published posthumously in 1946.

James Lewis May (b. 1873) was a British critic and translator, best known as a translator and biographer of Anatole France. His 1928 translation of Madame Bovary for The Bodley Headwas for many years the standard edition. In addition to translating The Crisis of the European Mind, May translated its sequel, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century.

Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University. His most recent book is The Culture of Correction in RenaissanceEurope.

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