Age Of Enlightenment
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How Artists Have Brought the Coronation to Life May 10, 2023
In 1937, the Parisian communist newspaper Ce soir sent a 28-year-old would-be filmmaker on an unpromising first assignment. Henri Cartier-Bresson was to take photographs of the British coronation, an event of limited appeal either to Ce soir’s reader...
The Enlightenment as Reading Project February 15, 2023
“What is Enlightenment?” Kant’s 1784 answer to the question, that the Enlightenment “dares to know”, is famous and paradoxical. Enlightenment, he maintains, requires freedom of the press, but only an authoritarian regime can allow unchecked debate: t...
‘Thomas Jefferson’ Review: The Spirit Was Partly Willing May 25, 2022
Thomas Jefferson was once admired by skeptics and atheists. Not so much now. So what did he really think about God?...
Remembering Todd Gitlin, 1943–2022 February 09, 2022
I see that Todd Gitlin—prolific author, former president of Students for a Democratic Society, disgruntled academic radical—has died, age 79.Gitlin was a curious figure....
A Happier Enlightenment December 24, 2021
What is happiness? Every era has entertained this question. Yet as Ritchie Robertson, Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at Oxford University, argues here, the riddle of happiness took center stage among European intellectuals in the ...
Germany's Wollstonecraft September 18, 2021
Something new took place in the German states in 1802. A work of philosophy was published under a woman’s name. In her audacious book On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Intellectual Development (Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildun...
The Sinai Revolution and Ordered Liberty August 02, 2021
Conservatives are by default skeptical of revolutions. British statesman Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France declared: “A revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good.” More provocatively, he asserted...
Was There One Enlightenment or Many? March 02, 2021
History used to be so much easier. Take the Enlightenment, for example. Everyone knew that this was the Age of Reason: the moment when science finally started to impose order and banish religion. The French rationalists had their heyday, Voltaire, th...
The High Stakes World of Pirate Publishing January 29, 2021
It is now 55 years since Robert Darnton first became aware of the vast archive of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), one of the principal suppliers of books to the French market in the late 18th century. It is fair to say that this happy c...
The Soul of a Free Man January 19, 2021
In the American Revolution, Enlightenment principles, natural rights, and the traditions of English liberty combined with the martial valor of the Continental Army to produce a new birth of freedom on this continent. It and the French Revolution went...
Two Books on the Great Political Divide December 14, 2020
Every man and every woman, it seems, knows Gilbert and Sullivan’s quipping lines from “Iolanthe” (1882): “That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive. / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative.” When the lines w...
The Other Scottish Enlightenment November 13, 2020
In the popular imagination—and that of many scholars—the Scottish Enlightenment is forever associated with skeptics like David Hume, moderate Presbyterians such as William Robertson, and those like Adam Smith who lay somewhere in between. Such lumina...
Canon Fodder August 25, 2020
As everybody knows, the battle pitting Great Books against Bad Books or No Books has been raging for a long time now. As everybody also knows, the results on most campuses are grim. “Comparative literature” often no longer means reading literature, b...
The Magic is Gone March 09, 2020
Most of the intended readers of Michael Hunter’s provocative and enjoyably readable new study will instantly recognise the allusion in its title. In 1971 – and it is to be hoped that someone is already thinking about ways to mark the almost-imminent ...
A Philosophe in Full December 24, 2019
oltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu are the names most readily associated with the 18th-century French Enlightenment. But Denis Diderot, though less well known, ultimately may have had a greater effect on the formation of the Enlightenment than any of...
The Rise and Fall (and Restoration) of the West October 21, 2019
The restoration of Western civilization from its present travails requires getting the story right. Gregg's Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization may be the most important recent work in this area, offering an important corrective ...
How the West Was Won August 30, 2019
s Notre-Dame cathedral was burning, conservative columnist Ben Shapiro made what should have been a rather bland and unobjectionable remark on Twitter. He said: “Absolutely heartbreaking. A magnificent monument to Western civilization collapsing.”Cat...
