"Julie Candler Hayes offers an ambitious reinterpretation of a crucial aspect of Enlightment thought, the rationalizing and classfying impulse. Taking issue both with traditional liberal and contemporary critical accounts of the Enlightenment, she analyzes the writings of Denis Diderot, Emilie Du Chatelet, the abbe de Condillac, Buffon, d'Alembert, and numerous others, to argue for a new understanding of 'systematic reason' as complex, paradoxical, and ultimately liberating."--BOOK JACKET.