The invention of liberty, 1700-1789 Book

Responding to other review- Smugness he may be guilty of, but he's hardly the high priest of post-modern cant. Actually by this time Eagleton was looking less and less post-modern and more and more like what a what a younger Raymond Williams with a more thoroughgoing theoretical bent might look like. I'd hardly take Eagleton as the final word on the Western aesthetic tradition and its connections to morality and politics, BUT this serves as a fair introduction to the issues and Eagleton's got some interesting things to say about them.[return][return]Some portions may seems a tad dated--the book certainly reflects its historical context (the late-80s, early 90s peak of academic/political post-modernism), but that's not too much of a bother.