Walter W. Davis

This work aims to provide a broad, integrated and reasonably comprehensive survey of political economic, cultural and social developments of the 17th and 18th centuries in the eastern and western worlds.

This book provides a broad, integrated, and reasonably comprehensive surveyóboth geographically and topicallyóof political, intellectual and cultural currents of the 17th and 18th centuries. Contents: Preface; Political and Economic Background; Emergence of a New World View: Forces in Contention; Baroque Cultural Currents, Politics, Economics, and Society; The 18th Century: Political, Economic, and Artistic Currents; 18th Century Music and Literature; Science and Humanism: The Rise of a New Deity; Historians and Colonies; The American Colonial Experience; Tension, Conflict and Freedom; A New Covenant Nation Under God; Cultural, Religious, and Intellectual Patterns in the New American Nation; Oriental Civilization and Western Expansion; The Rediscovery of China by the West; The Emergence of Russia; The Rise of Brandenburg-Prussia; Enlightenment Despotism in Flower; The "Radical Enlightenment"; Philosophies, Anti-Philosophes, Jansenists, Encyclopedists and Freemasons; The Crucible of Revolution; Napoleon and Europe; The Cultural Milieu of the Napoleonic Age; Pictures; Maps; Bibliography; Index.

It has been said that never has a monarch so narrowly missed "greatness" as did the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. An idealistic, sincere, and hardworking monarch whose ultilitarian bent, humanitarian instincts, and ambitious programs of reform in every area of public concern have prompted historians to term him an "enlightened despot," "revolutionary Emperor," "philosopher on a throne," and a ruler ahead of his time, Joseph has also been condemned for being insensitive to the phobias and follies of his subjects, essentially unrealistic, almost utopian, in establishing his goals, and dogmatic and overly precipitous in trying to achieve them. Efforts to analyze and explain the actions of this complex and controversial personality have involved a number of savants in investigations of "Josephinism" (or as I prefer to call it, "Josephism"), dealing in great detail with the motiva­ tions, substance, and influence of his innovations. The roots of Josephism run deep, but can be observed emerging here and there from the intellectual and political soil that nourished them, before joining the central trunk of the system formulated during the latter years of Maria Theresa's reign to grow to an ephemeral and stunted maturity under Joseph II.