一部当代欧洲的起源史 保罗·阿扎尔用一副纷杂广阔的画卷，向我们描绘了当时各种思想、各种人物风起云涌的壮丽景象，让我们领略到一出一直延续到今日并永不落幕的伟大剧作，那就是人类的命运。 保罗·阿扎尔在本书中描述了17世纪和18世纪之间的一段历史，以及其间发生的引人入胜的思想变迁。这是一个从神法时代到自然法时代的转折，“曾几何时，大部分法国人的思想还是以博絮埃为参照的；但转瞬间，法国人就全效仿起了伏尔泰：这分明是一场革命”。 通过研究1680—1715年间法国、英国、德国、意大利的伟大思想流派，作者用一幅纷繁复杂、波澜壮阔的画卷，向我们展现了旧制度下各种生机盎然、活力无限，矛盾冲突又无比激烈的思想理念的群像，由此，也让我们领略到一出一直延续到今日且尚未落幕的伟大剧作。 本书叙述清晰透彻，记录了当时许多重要人物——如皮埃尔·贝尔、理查·西蒙、莱布尼茨、斯宾诺莎、洛克、芬乃伦等——的生平与个性，并以娴熟的手法还原了这个“转承时代”中的万千动态，再现了历史中的这场“思想的危机”——这场危机并非抽象的概念之争，而是一个个鲜活个体之间复杂的较量。 从一定程度上说，本书是一部当代欧洲的起源史。

Paul Hazard’s magisterial, widely influential, and beloved intellectual history offers an unforgettable account of the birth of the modern European mind in all its dynamic, inquiring, and uncertain glory. Beginning his story in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while also looking back to the Renaissance and forward to the future, Hazard traces the process by which new developments in the sciences, arts, philosophy, and philology came to undermine the stable foundations of the classical world, with its commitment to tradition, stability, proportion, and settled usage. Hazard shows how travelers’ tales and archaeological investigation widened European awareness and acceptance of cultural difference; how the radical rationalism of Spinoza and Richard Simon’s new historical exegesis of the Bible called into question the revealed truths of religion; how the Huguenot Pierre Bayle’s critical dictionary of ideas paved the way for Voltaire and the Enlightenment, even as the empiricism of Locke encouraged a new attention to sensory experience that led to Rousseau and romanticism. Hazard’s range of knowledge is vast, and whether the subject is operas, excavations, or scientific experiments his brilliant style and powers of description bring to life the thinkers who thought up the modern world.