S. Barnett – författare

This book offers a critical survey of religious change and its causes in eighteenth-century Europe, and constitutes a challenge to the accepted views in traditional Enlightenment studies. Focusing on Enlightenment Italy, France and England, it illustrates how the canonical view of eighteenth-century religious change has in reality been constructed upon scant evidence and assumption, in particular the idea that the thought of the enlightened led to modernity. For, despite a lack of evidence, one of the fundamental assumptions of Enlightenment studies has been the assertion that there was a vibrant Deist movement which formed the “intellectual solvent” of the eighteenth century. The central claim of this book is that the immense ideological appeal of the traditional birth-of-modernity myth has meant that the actual lack of Deists has been glossed over, and a quite misleading historical view has become entrenched.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

While policymakers in the world reiterate the importance of protecting voice diversity, traditional media conglomerates and new social media giants make their task increasingly challenging. This book assesses the current state of policy-making on media plurality and explores novel policy ideas for funding, regulatory and structural interventions.