"Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World" profiles fifty landmark philosophers, scientists, political and social theorists as well as spiritual leaders whose ideas have defined the age we live in. It offers a crisp analysis of their key ideas, and in some cases a re-evaluation of their importance as we proceed into the 21st century. For the reader who has lain awake fretting over his tenuous grasp of the "Critiques of Immanuel Kant", or his unformed sense of the line of thought that descends from Hegel through Marx to 20th-century Soviet state socialism, or who struggles to call to mind the key strands in the thinking of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida - help is at hand. It comes in the comfortingly accessible form of Stephen Trombley's "Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World", a concise history of modern thought from the Enlightenment to the present day.