The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture

Do new information technologies always produce progress and enlightenment? No, at least according to observers in 17th-century Europe. Brendan Dooley demonstrates in this study that the transformation of information about present and past politics into a saleable product - whether in the form of hired histories or in the form of journalism - turned writers into speculators, information into opinion and readers into critics. The result, he says, was a powerful current of scepticism with extraordinary consequences. Combined with late-17th-century developments in other areas of thought and writing, it produced scepticism about the possibility of gaining any historical knowledge at all.