Emphasizes the British Enlightenment's effects on the future rather than its break with the past. Michael McKeon urges us to distinguish between those aspects of the Enlightenment that eventually were used to organise epistemic violence and oppression from those aspects that were - and remain today - revolutionary.
The Enlightenment has been misconceived as the culmination of traditional thought about art and literature. The focus of Volume 2 is instead the Enlightenment innovation of the modern concept of the aesthetic and its most important features, which has been wrongly credited to later generations.
