A concise history of modern thought from the Enlightenment to the present day that profiles fifty landmark thinkers – philosophers, scientists, political and social theorists as well as spiritual leaders – whose ideas have defined the modern world. It offers a crisp analysis of their key ideas, and in some cases a re-evaluation of their importance as we proceed into the 21st century.
For the reader who has lain awake fretting over his tenuous grasp of the Critiquesof Immanuel Kant, or his unformed sense of the line of thought that descends from Hegel through Marx and Engels to Lenin and 20th-century Soviet state socialism, or who struggles to call to mind the key strands in the thinking of Husserl, Foucault, Lacan and Derrida, help is at hand. Here too are the theories of Gandhi, Marx, Darwin and Freud, Einstein, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, among others.
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