The Enlightenment
The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790
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4.0 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A magisterial history that recasts
the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason,
but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness.
One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment
is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom
of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument.
Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so
profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless
calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have
accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that
enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an
unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”.
Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from
approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really
about.
Robertson returns to the era’s
original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about
increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting
scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the
campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital
punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the
experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people
who lived through this extraordinary moment.
In answering the question 'What is
Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have
the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the
Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity
in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on
philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western
European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture
history about the foundational epoch of modern times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The so-called "Age of Reason" also put emotion and conscience at the center of a new social ideology, according to this sweeping study of the Enlightenment. Robertson (Goethe: A Very Short Introduction), a professor of German at Oxford University, defends Enlightenment thinkers against criticisms from the reactionary right and the postmodern left. Rather than preaching an arid rationalism, he contends, "Enlighteners" extolled sympathy and innate moral feelings as "the glue holding society together" and played on human emotions to support the abolition of capital punishment and slavery. They also were eager to reconcile science with belief in God; preferred persuasion and reform to violent change and state regimentation (most, Robertson claims, were antagonistic to the French Revolution); put empirical evidence and individual freedom above doctrine and authority; and held out happiness as the ultimate goal of inquiry and policy. Robertson's far-flung thematic survey probes the work of philosophers and ideologues, among them Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, and Immanuel Kant, and expertly interprets the period's art and literature, including Samuel Richardson's melodramatic novel Clarissa, which set all of Europe to weeping. Thanks to Robertson's elegant prose and lucid analyses, this massive and deeply erudite work serves as a stimulating and accessible introduction to a watershed period in the intellectual development of the West.
