Ben Lowe

Philosophies of History: From Enlightenment to Postmodernity

knowledge. This is an engaging book. It is, however, uneven in quality-perhaps as a consequence of its origins in lectures-and the historiographical chapter seems more of a trudging duty than otherwise. But these criticisms should n o t blind us to the fact that Burke has made a significant contribution to cultural history. By tracing the epistemological consequences of printing and of humanist movements, Burke shows how knowledge was a form of exchange and how it became what we would recognize it as today. Burke’s achievement in A Social History of Knowledge is to remind us that people in the past did not view knowledge in the same way we do today.