Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment

by Larry Wolff

Release Date: January, 1996

Edition: Paperback

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Enlightenment on the Enlightenment

All too often people think of the Enlightenment as a group of smart people thinking about why we are so wonderful. The flip side of Enlightenment thinking is that to make Europeans seem so wonderful, the Philosophes described themselves against an Other, who possessed all the undesirable traits not accepted by the "Enlightened" people. Wolff shows how the Philosophes, with limited actual knowledge of Eastern Europe, used the civilizations east of Germany to show the benefits of living in the West. During the Enlightenment the language used to describe Eastern Europe ascribed barbaric qualities to the people and offered little faith that the people could ever "evolve" as Western Europeans had. Wolff uses maps and traveler's accounts to show the influence the philosphes had on perceptions of Eastern Europe. It is rather disconcerting to note that many of these same perceptions persist today.