“This is a fascinating, brilliant, compelling study of how many Europeans came to conceptualize the little-known ‘barbarians’ on the eastern fringes of Europe in the Enlightenment. . . . This new book goes still further in demonstrating how complex the whole question of recognizing difference and establishing what the definitions of civility were.”—Anthony Pagden, Johns Hopkins University
“A fine imaginative historian who makes a persuasive case for the origin of the concept “eastern Europe,” [Wolff] has a tendency to base his assertions not only on the findings of his meticulous research but on theories he discovered in the work of the late Michel Foucault, who sought to disclose how knowledge, in the guise of various scientific “discourses,” exercised a disciplinary power.”—Slavic Review