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In this book, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment provides a bracing and clarifying new interpretation of this watershed period. Arguing that philosophical and historical interpretations of the era have long been hopelessly confused, the author makes the case that it is only by separating these views and taking an approach grounded in social and cultural history that we can begin to grasp what the Enlightenment was—and why it is still relevant today. The book explains why the Enlightenment was a profound and wide-ranging cultural revolution that reshaped Western identity, reformed politics through the invention of human rights, and redefined knowledge by creating a critical culture. These new ways of thinking gave birth to new values that spread throughout society and changed how everyday life was lived and understood. Featuring an illuminating afterword describing how the author's argument challenges the work of Anglophone interpreters including Jonathan Israel, the book provides a fascinating reevaluation of the true nature and legacy of one of the most important and contested periods in Western history.

This book maps and conceptually explores material practices of the past, showing how physical artifacts and visual environments manifest culturally rooted modes of thought and participate in the most nuanced processes of negotiations and ideological exchanges. According to the text, material structures enable people to think in new ways—distill emerging or alter existing worldviews—before words can stabilize them as conventional narratives. Combining design thinking with academic methods of inquiry, the book traces ancient to modern architectural histories and—through critical readings of select buildings—examines the role of nonverbal exchanges in the development of an accumulated Western identity. Operating from the assertion that buildings are the most permanent record of unself-conscious beliefs and attitudes, it discusses Byzantium and the West after iconoclasm, the conquest and colonization of Mesoamerica, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Eastern Europe, the rise of the culture of consumerism in Victorian England, and High Modernism as its consequence. By moving beyond the assumption that historical structures reflect transcendental values and deterministic laws of physics or economy or have been shaped by self-conscious individuals, the book challenges the traditional knowledge of what architecture is and can be.

As Europe wrangles over questions of national identity, nativism, and immigration, this book interrogates the place of Christianity, foundation of Western identity. Do secularism and Islam really pose threats to the continent's ‘Christian values’? What will be the fate of Christianity in Europe? Rather than repeating the familiar narrative of decline, the book challenges the significance of secularized Western nations' reduction of Christianity to a purely cultural force relegated to issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and equal marriage. It illustrates that, globally, quite the opposite has occurred: Christianity is now universalized and detached from national identity. Not only has it taken hold in the Global South, generally in a more socially conservative form than in the West, but it has also ‘returned’ to Europe, following immigration from former colonies. Despite attempts within Europe to nationalize or even racialize it, Christianity's future is global, non-European, and immigrant, as the continent's Churches well know. The book represents a persuasive and novel vision of religion's place in national life today.