About the Author

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 College de France in 1925. Elected to the French Academy in 1939, in January 1941 he voluntarily returned from a semester of teaching at Columbia University to Nazi-occupied France, where he continued to teach and write. That same year his nomination to the rectorship of the University of Paris was rejected by the Nazis. His reputation rests on two major works of intellectual history: La Crise de la conscience europeenne, from 1935, and its sequel, concerned with European thought in the eighteenth century, published posthumously in 1946. 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 Renaissance Europe.

Reviews

'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