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Title: Dire Performance
Review: A typical example of Modern Academic Style -- impotent, equivocal, non-committal; everything is "problematic." It has some potential although unpleasurable use as an indication of the current state of academic debates concerning the Enlightenment (although on that score, it will go out of date fast), and it can point one in the direction of some better books, such as Albion W. Small's "The Cameralists," an interesting, confident 1909 study that can still be read with pleasure and profit one hundred years after publication -- because of that very confidence (as well as the depth of Small's research). The mousiness of Outram's text is, by contrast, extremely unattractive.
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