The social history of skepticism

by Brendan Maurice Dooley

"Do new information technologies always produce progress and enlightenment? No, at least not according to observers in seventeenth-century Europe. As Brendan Dooley demonstrates in The Social History of Skepticism, the transformation of information about present and past politics into a saleable product, whether in the form of commissioned histories or in the form of journalism, turned writers into speculators, information into opinion, and readers into critics. The result was a powerful current of skepticism with extraordinary consequences. Combined with late-seventeenth-century developments in other areas of thought and writing, it produced skepticism about the possibility of gaining any historical knowledge at all." "Joining the history of ideas to the history of journalism and publishing, Dooley sets out to discover when early modern people believed their political informants and when they did not."--BOOK JACKET.