The Enlightenment
Published on 4. October 2000
Book
Paperback/Softback
225 pages
978-0-312-17997-7 (ISBN)
Description
In an unusually diverse collection, Margaret Jacob presents the eighteenth-century movement known as the Enlightenment that forever changed the political, religious, and educational landscape of the day. Selections by some of the period's most important thinkers include pieces by Locke, Rousseau, Mary Wortley Montagu, Denis Diderot, and Moses Mendelssohn. She covers the movement's lengthy evolution in a comprehensive introduction, which establishes the issues central to understanding the documents and provides important background on the political and social debates of the period.
Reviews / Votes
'This is an excellent collection. The clear and elegant introduction usefully discusses many current topics of interest regarding the Enlightenment, including the role of religion; the cultural processes of criticism; the social and gender status of the 'enlightened', and attitudes towards non-European societies and peoples. The well-chosen documents, combined with the author's fine introduction, should make this a very effective text for use in the classroom.' - John Marshall, Johns Hopkins University 'Jacob's introduction provides an original understanding of the Enlightenment, in particular through its exceptionally international treatment that explores England, France and deeper into the continent. The author is also very successful at merging more traditional intellectual history with newer approaches.The selection of documents gives the reader an excellent sense of the range of issues that absorbed the philosophers.' - Jack R. Censer, George Mason UniversityMore details
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09/2016
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Person
MARGARET C. JACOB is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published widely on science, religion, freemasonry and the origins of the Industrial Revolution. A past Guggenheim and Fulbright fellow, Jacob has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her first book The Newtonians and the English Revolution (1976) won the Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, of which she was president from 1997-1998
Content
Foreword.- Preface.- PART ONE: INTRODUCTION: The Struggle to Create a New Culture.- Political Origins.- Scientific and Religious Origins.- The Public Sphere.- Enlightened Feminism.- Seventeenth Century Formal Philosophy and its Reworking.- A Clandestine Universe.- A Protestant Odyssey.- Travel Literature.- Anglophilia.- Crisis at Mid-Century.- Rousseau.- The International Republican Conversation, 1775-1800.- Slavery.- The Legacy of Enlightenment.- PART TWO: THE DOCUMENTS.- John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693.- The Treatise on the Three Impostors.- Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nations, 1733.- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters, 1716-1718.- Denis Diderot, Encylopedia, 1751.- Denis Diderot, Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage, 1772.- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762.- Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?, 1784.- Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, 1783.- Chronology.- Selected Bibliography.- Index.