Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory by Geoffrey Hawthorn
Published 1978 · 120,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory to read?
Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory scores 64 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Intellectual history vocabulary requiring familiarity with social theory.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- High-level historical and philosophical argument.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Closely argued across a very wide intellectual range.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Direct historical argument.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- Analytical.
- Ironic distance: 14 out of 100
- The title's irony — Enlightenment and Despair — signals the author's characteristic note.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The despair thesis is deliberately left unresolved at the book's end.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Chronological history of ideas with a sustained evaluative argument.
How Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory is regarded
Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory holds a literary regard score of 73 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.