Paschalis M. Kitromilides is author of numerous books, including Enlightenment and Revolution: The Making of Modern Greece. He is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Athens and a member of the Academy of Athens. He is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the European Society for the History of Political Thought.
Just as [Franco] Venturi did for the Italian peninsula,
Kitromilides examines the reception and influence of Enlightenment
ideas in the Greek-speaking world…The book is valuable in drawing
hitherto little-known Greek sources to the attention of an
anglophone audience, and it makes a worthwhile contribution to the
wider debates.
*Times Literary Supplement*
It would probably come as a surprise to most readers in Europe and
America that the Enlightenment spread all the way to Greece in the
eighteenth century and spawned revolutionary movements in support
of democracy and the rights of man…Kitromilides, more than anyone
since [Constantin] Dimaras, has now given this history the exposure
it has long deserved…No one is better qualified than Kitromilides
to write this kaleidoscopic and tumultuous narrative. He writes as
a political scientist, a historian, and a Greek. Despite his
subtitle, The Making of Modern Greece, his book is a powerful
indictment of the failure of liberalism in his country, as the
process of enlightenment finally came undone in the nineteenth
century. Whether or not this failure can explain, as Kitromilides
hopes it might, the catastrophic deterioration of the Greek
political system in the twenty-first century is by no means clear.
But it is with a rare combination of passion and erudition that he
is moved to lament the end of the New Democracy that Constantine
Karamanlis brought to Greece after the nightmare of military
dictatorship between 1967 and 1974.
*New Republic*
A masterly survey all the more valuable in that it genuinely fills
a yawning gap, nothing of the sort, providing a general picture of
the Greek Enlightenment, having been available before.
*Jonathan Israel, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton*
Kitromilides is the preeminent scholar in the field of
eighteenth-century Greek history and politics, and more generally
one of the world's leading authorities on political thought and the
European Enlightenment. Enlightenment and Revolution clearly
constitutes his magnum opus, brilliantly summing up his
extraordinary erudition concerning the Enlightenment and Greek
political ideas, and providing a definitive history of the
intellectual emergence of modern Greece.
*Larry Wolff, New York University*
A masterly overview of the reception and development of the
Enlightenment in the Greek world and diasporas, under the Ottoman
occupation, through the struggle for liberation, and during the
establishment of the modern Greek state.
*Ioannis D. Evrigenis, Tufts University*
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