Antoine Lilti

Going against the grain, this refreshing book argues for a non-ideological portrait of the Enlightenment as having been, above all else, a self-critical enterprise. The Enlightenment has come under substantial attack over the past several years, with some going so far as to recommend leaving its thinkers—and their Eurocentric prejudices—behind. On the other hand, the most orthodox defenders of the...

Frequently perceived as a characteristic of modern culture, the phenomenon of celebrity has much older roots. In this book, The Invention of Celebrity, Antoine Lilti shows that the mechanisms of celebrity were developed in Europe during the Enlightenment, well before films, yellow journalism, and television, and then flourished during the Romantic period on both sides of the Atlantic. Figures from...