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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. The Enlightenment is a contested and often loosely defined term. It is sometimes taken to mean an intellectual movement underpinning many aspects of modernity; but the precise content of that movement, and its priorities, are fiercely disputed. Equally, the term is sometimes used to denote a period, beginning roughly in the mid-17th century and ending with the French Revolution. That “era” is often subdivided into an “early” Enlightenment, roughly ending in the 1740s, and a “high” or “late” Enlightenment, that followed it. In the last twenty years a further fracturing of the Enlightenment has occurred with two historiographical developments. The first is the claim that the Enlightenment has to be seen in national rather than inter- or supranational context. The second is the emergence of a cultural or social history of the Enlightenment, which has tended to expand the traditional remit of studies into realms such as print culture, the public sphere, and gender (and indeed makes a study of the Enlightenment part of 18th-century studies as a whole). The growth of the history of science has also influenced this turn. In short, the Enlightenment can mean a multitude of different things, depending on one’s approach and outlook; indeed, scholars often talk of “Enlightenments” rather than “the Enlightenment,” a fragmentation that also affects other historical terms such as the “Reformation” or “Renaissance.” The resulting literature is vast. This poses a difficulty for any bibliography and perhaps makes the General Overviews section particularly important for those who need to orientate themselves in the historiographical debates about scope, unity, and timing. The focus throughout will be on Europe, since other Oxford Bibliographies entriesdeal specifically with the Atlantic world. Nevertheless, many of the works listed also include a colonial and imperial dimension; and a section on the Atlantic Enlightenment points to works that are particularly important for their treatment of the Enlightenment in an Atlantic context.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
  6.  
  7. By its nature, the Enlightenment lends itself to general treatments, so many of the works listed in other sections attempt to give overviews. Cassirer 2009, Gay 1995, and Gay 1996 were seminal texts in their day and are still worth reading for a “high” Enlightenment dominated by philosophical enquiry. More recent works (Fitzpatrick, et al. 2004, Kors 2003, Yolton 1991) have tended to include and stress the social, cultural, and scientific context of such texts. Indeed, their encyclopedic nature reflects the many different ways of approaching the Enlightenment, as well as echoing the Enlightenment’s most famous text. Israel 2001 is the most important recent attempt at synthesis and is excellent, but it has its own agenda about the importance of Spinoza. The first chapter in Robertson 2007 is one of the best historiographical overviews that sets out and engages with older and recent interpretative trends.
  8.  
  9. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Translated by Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
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  11. Cassirer was himself a philosopher (investigating Kant, symbolic meanings, and totalitarian states) who wrote one of the first and most enduring treatments of 18th-century philosophy. This is an English translation of Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, first published in 1932.
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  13. Fitzpatrick, Martin, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf, and Iain McCalman, eds. The Enlightenment World. London, New York: Routledge, 2004.
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  15. This text has informative essays on a wide range of Enlightenment topics. The volume reflects the social and cultural turn of Enlightenment studies, although there is also an opening section on “intellectual origins.”
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  17. Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation; The Rise of Modern Paganism. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
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  19. The first of two landmark volumes that set out an Enlightenment that was anticlerical and liberal, inspired by the classics and by scientific cosmopolitanism. Originally published in 1966 (New York: Knopf).
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  21. Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom. New York and London: Knopf, 1996.
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  23. Provides a social history of the period and gives background on the philosophes. Originally published in 1969 (New York: Knopf).
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  25. Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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  27. Argues that Spinoza lay at the heart of early Enlightement radicalism. The second volume, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) continues the story into the first half of the 18th century.
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  29. Kors, Alan, ed. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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  31. Like Fitzpatrick, et al. 2004, this covers a wide variety of topics. More extensive than Fitzpatrick, et al., the treatment here is nevertheless similarly intellectual, social, scientific, and cultural in its treatment.
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  33. Robertson, John. The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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  35. The introduction is a superb treatment of approaches to the Enlightenment and to the question of whether the Enlightenment as a term or concept has any meaning.
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  37. Yolton, John, Pat Rogers, Roy Porter, and Barbara Stafford, eds. The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
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  39. A good collection of essays by leading scholars on a wide range of topics. These are intended for reference rather than interpretation, so the reader will find information about authors and subjects, useful for those starting out and needing more information about individuals or topics mentioned in other texts.
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  41. Textbooks and Surveys
  42.  
  43. Gay (see General Overviews) and Hampson 1968 are still available in print, but there are newer surveys that have greater scope (though not depth). Porter 2001 is very short but introduces key themes accessibly and intelligently, and Outram 2005 is probably the best overall introduction to the recent more culturally inflected Enlightenment agenda. Munck 2000 stresses a more socially inclusive Enlightenment. Habermas’s model of the emergence of a public sphere in the 18th century (Habermas 1989) has been very influential, and Van Horn Melton 2001 draws together recent work that has resulted from that interest.
  44.  
  45. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1989.
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  47. Originally published in 1962, the translation of this work has had a major impact on the historiography by providing a (sociologically inspired) model of public and private interactions. The concept of a public has helped to widen Enlightenment studies from the preserve of intellectuals to their readers and to how ideas shaped public opinion. Notions of public and private have also been used by those working on Enlightenment and print, gender, science, medicine, and art.
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  49. Hampson, Norman. The Enlightenment. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin 1968.
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  51. Particularly readable treatment of philosophical thought that does attempt to relate it to the social context, although it suggests that the Enlightenment remained a relatively elite affair.
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  53. Munck, Thomas. The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History, 1721–1794. London: Arnold, 2000.
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  55. Explores how far we can talk about a socially extensive Enlightenment, arguing against the idea of a purely elite intellectual movement and thereby implicitly challenging Hampson.
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  57. Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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  59. A textbook that offers one of the best introductions to the cultural Enlightenment and updated relatively recently. Particularly good on gender and cross-cultural encounters.
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  61. Porter, Roy. The Enlightenment. 2d ed. Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave, 2001.
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  63. A short textbook introduction that sets out some key themes, though not much is dealt with in any great depth. It has a reasonably helpful annotated bibliography.
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  65. Van Horn Melton, James. The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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  67. An excellent synthesis of work on what has become a central concern for recent scholarship in the wake of Jürgen Habermas’s model of the public sphere (Habermas 1989).
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  69. Journals
  70.  
  71. The Enlightenment World: Political and Intellectual History of the Long Eighteenth Century is a fairly new journal that focuses exclusively on the Enlightenment and is broadly conceived. Nevertheless, the Enlightenment is properly considered as part of the wider discipline of 18th-century studies, and there are many journals that specialize in that century. A full listing of relevant journals in English and European languages compiled by the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, but some of the more important ones are listed here.
  72.  
  73. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography.
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  75. An annual publication by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies that surveys recent publications.
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  77. The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.
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  79. Is concerned with the application of contemporary theory and methodology to all aspects of culture from 1660 to 1800, including literature, history, fine arts, science, history of ideas, and popular culture.
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  81. Eighteenth-Century Studies.
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  83. The journal of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; contains interdisciplinary approaches of all aspects of the 18th century.
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  85. The Enlightenment World: Political and Intellectual History of the Long Eighteenth Century.
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  87. Published by Pickering and Chatto since 2007.
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  89. Études sur le XVIIIe siècle.
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  91. Mostly French but also some English articles on various topics.
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  93. Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies.
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  95. The journal of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; publishes essays and reviews.
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  97. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century.
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  99. Unusual in that it publishes both short articles and full-length (including multivolume) monographs in French and in English. Details, including an online listing of what is available, are online.
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  101. The William and Mary Quarterly.
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  103. The long-established journal of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Probably the best journal for an Atlantic world perspective on the 18th century.
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  105. Primary Sources
  106.  
  107. There are numerous editions of key philosophical texts by individual authors and compilations of extracts from them, although there are fewer works that bring together more cultural or scientific sources. The wide range of Enlightenment sources is something that makes the topic particularly amenable to online sources, which can both offer a whole corpus of material (as the Eighteenth Century Collections Online does) or enable the user to compile their own range of material.
  108.  
  109. Printed
  110.  
  111. Several valuable collections are available. Most of these are focused on a particular topic within the Enlightenment, such as politics and law (Williams 1999), key figures (Berlin 1979, Broadie 1997), and black authors (Carretta 1996). Lentin 1985 and Kramnick 1995 contain specialized documents from the era.
  112.  
  113. Berlin, Isaiah, ed. The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
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  115. A classic selection of philosophical texts, from an era when the Enlightenment meant the study of thinkers and their ideas. Originally published in 1956 (New York: New American Library).
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  117. Broadie, Alexander, ed. The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997.
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  119. The Scottish Enlightenment boasted intellectual giants such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, and others. Their preoccupation with reason, virtue, and improvement was widely influential.
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  121. Carretta, Vincent, ed. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
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  123. A useful corrective to the notion that the Enlightenment was limited to white authors.
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  125. Kramnick, Isaac, ed. The Portable Enlightenment Reader. London: Penguin, 1995.
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  127. Contains many short extracts from key documents. The selections are often of key passages and can be useful starting points for students.
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  129. Lentin, A. Enlightened Absolutism (1760–1790): A Documentary Sourcebook. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Avero, 1985.
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  131. A specialist set of documents. “Enlightened absolutism” is the term given to the rising fiscal-military states of the 18th century that took advantage of, and actively fostered, new ideas that could enhance the power and capacity of the state. Topics include law reform, religion, education, and international relations.
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  133. Williams, David, ed. The Enlightenment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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  135. Mainly political theory. Short editorial introductions with suggestions for further reading accompany the extracts, which are longer than those in Kramnick 1995.
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  137. Electronic
  138.  
  139. The Internet is a major boon for the study of the Enlightenment. There are some superb resources. Eighteenth Century Collections Online contains more than 136,000 titles, and English Books Online contains a further 100,000 for the pre-1700 period. Both mainly contain works published in Britain and in English. French holdings are available in less quantity through the Bibliotheque Nationale, the University of Chicago’s project to place the entire seventeen-volume Encyclopédie online, and the University of Turin’s collection of “clandestine” texts. A collaborative dictionary of philosophers offers high-quality commentary on enlightenment thinkers and their work. Besides texts, artifacts are available through the British Museum and some correspondence through Oxford’s Electronic Enlightenment. The Eighteenth-Century Resources site maintained by Jack Lynch of Rutgers University offers a portal to a mass of other sites.
  140.  
  141. Bibliotheque Nationale.
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  143. This collection contains 850,000 documents, not all relating to the Enlightenment, but also delivers PDFs of original source material.
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  145. The British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery.
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  147. Offers an online tour of its superb Enlightenment Gallery, together with images and details of objects, many of which relate to the imperial ventures undertaken in the 18th century. The collections database also enables access to the wealth of material located throughout the museum. The information placed with the images is also extremely useful.
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  149. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
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  151. A major resource for material printed before 1700, available at many research libraries. Delivers downloadable PDFs of original texts. EEBO has an increasing number of digital transcripts of entire works.
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  153. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
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  155. Subscription based service from Gale Cengage offers access to 18th-century printed material in the English language and is also cross-searchable with Early English Books Online. ECCO is searchable within the texts, enabling sophisticated searching.
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  157. Eighteenth-Century Resources.
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  159. A wealth of 18th-century online sources are available through this portal maintained by Jack Lynch of Rutgers University, including some relating to both the Enlightenment and empire. The site is conveniently arranged into different sections for various aspects of 18th-century life, and it is updated reasonably frequently to remove broken links or add new ones. A useful window to the range of sources available on the Web.
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  161. The Encyclopédie.
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  163. An online (French) version of the Encyclopédie is available at a huge site with over 20 million words and 18,000 pages of text. Not the easiest to navigate or search, but it is a fabulous project.
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  165. French “clandestine manuscripts”.
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  167. Although access to print was one of the great enablers of the Enlightenment, there was still a good deal circulating in manuscripts written in longhand, particularly texts that were considered too risky to publish, such as those texts openly hostile to orthodox religious beliefs.
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  169. Oxford’s Electronic Enlightenment.
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  171. Another subscription service, offering access to a mass of material (especially correspondence of important philosophes).
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  173. European Enlightenment
  174.  
  175. The Enlightenment was strongest and most influential in northern, western, and central Europe, though eastern Europe was increasingly influenced by Enlightenment ideas, and John Robertson also makes a good case for an Italian version of the Enlightenment. A section on national enlightenments will be found here.
  176.  
  177. Philosophy
  178.  
  179. The “intellectual history” approach to the Enlightenment is now rather unfashionable but is also necessary for any understanding of the cultural impact of the Enlightenment. Works listed under General Overviews are probably the best starting point, though Brown 1979 and Hazard 1973 are also useful, supplemented by the works listed under Intellectual Biographies. There were several important intellectual trends that are explored: progress (Spadafora 1990), reform (Venturi 1971), and optimism (Vereker 1967). The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is both helpful and freely available, but Haakonssen 2006 is the most reliable source.
  180.  
  181. Brown, S. C., ed. Philosophers of the Enlightenment. Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1979.
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  183. Essays on the main philosophes, outlining their ideas.
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  185. Haakonssen, Knud, ed. The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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  187. Contains thirty-six essays, including “The Concept of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy,” “The Science of Human Nature,” “Philosophy and Theology,” “Natural Philosophy,” and “Moral Philosophy.” The thematic approach deviates from the works listed under Intellectual Biographies and allows the writings of individuals to be placed in context.
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  189. Hazard, Paul. European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing. New York: Peter Smith, 1973.
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  191. Rather dated in style and approach, this is nevertheless a classic outline along the “great thinkers” model of the Enlightenment. Translated from the French Pensée européene au xviiieme siécle; English edition originally published in 1963 (New York: World Publishing).
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  193. Spadafora, David. The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth Century Britain. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1990.
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  195. Thorough exploration of a key Enlightenment concept.
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  197. Venturi, Franco. Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment. London: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
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  199. Explores reforming visions and their ambiguities, in the collaboration of intellectuals and states.
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  201. Vereker, Charles H. Eighteenth-Century Optimism: A Study of the Interrelations of Moral and Social Theory in English and French Thought between 1689 and 1789. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1967.
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  203. Points out that optimism was also a form of fatalistic pessimism.
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  205. Zalta, Edward N., ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  207. This is an excellent resource for Enlightenment topics. Its remit is certainly much broader than simply the Enlightenment, but it contains peer-reviewed articles and discussions on a host of intellectuals and ideas, both major and minor, at play during the Enlightenment.
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  209. Intellectual Biographies
  210.  
  211. The focus on philosophical ideas leads naturally to the study of the men (and questions of gender are considered in another section below) who wrote about them. Each of the titles listed deals with a major figure: Baker 1975 on Condorcet, Dinwiddy 1989 on Bentham, Mason 1981 on Voltaire, Phillipson 1989 on Hume, and Shackleton 1970 on Montesquieu. Lough 1968 discusses Diderot and D’Alembert, the two editors of the Encylopédie. The intellectual biographical approach was more popular a decade or more ago; more recent work is either collaborative (Riley 2001) or places individuals in a wider context.
  212.  
  213. Baker, Keith M. Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
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  215. Intellectual biography of an important natural and social scientist who became a victim of the French Revolution, written by one of the leading scholars in his field.
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  217. Dinwiddy, John Rowland. Bentham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
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  219. Study of the founder of utilitarianism—which argued for the greatest happiness of the greatest number—and social reformer.
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  221. Lough, John. Essays on the Encylopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.
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  223. Study of the major publishing venture of the French Enlightenment and its two guiding editors, who struggled successfully to realize their vision of a comprehensive and collaborative summary of knowledge and philosophy.
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  225. Mason, Haydn. Voltaire: A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.
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  227. Voltaire was one of the giants of the Enlightenment, and this accessible treatment of his life sheds light on his character and concerns.
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  229. Phillipson, Nicholas T. Hume. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989.
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  231. Brief but perceptive biography of one of the Scot who wrote widely on history, human nature, religion and miracles, luxury, and wealth. Phillipson is a leading expert on the Scottish Enlightenment more generally so Hume is set in context.
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  233. Riley, Patrick, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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  235. A comprehensive set of essays exploring the life and works of one of the most controversial and influential figures of the Enlightenment.
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  237. Shackleton, Robert. Montesquieu: A Critical Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
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  239. Montesquieu was a particularly important figure for the early Enlightenment, and his legalistic mind is revealed nicely here.
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  241. Science, Exploration, and Empiricism
  242.  
  243. The development of the history of science has had a major impact on the way in which the Enlightenment is now written about. Science is seen in its religious (Grell and Cunningham 2007), social and cultural (Clarke, et al. 1999, Gascoigne 1994), and economic (Jacob 1997) context rather than as something divorced or separate from it. Porter 2003 and Hankins 1985 offer excellent introductions. For science beyond the Europe see Gavroglu 1999 and Safier 2008.
  244.  
  245. Clark, William, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, eds. The Sciences in Enlightened Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
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  247. Important collection of essays, edited by leading scholars of the field. A cultural approach predominates.
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  249. Gascoigne, John. Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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  251. Explores the work of a naturalist in his wider cultural context and hence on the role science could play in the construction of politeness.
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  253. Gavroglu, Kostas. The Sciences in the European Periphery during the Enlightenment. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 1999.
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  255. This treats science in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Scandinavia, thereby refocusing attention away from the dominant literature on the European “core” of the Enlightenment.
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  257. Grell, Ole Peter, and Andrew Cunningham, eds. Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate 2007.
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  259. The essays emphasize the continuing importance of religion in medicinal practice and theory, reflecting an important strand of current research that explores the ongoing interaction between science and religion as intertwined phenomenon.
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  261. Hankins, Thomas L. Science and the Enlightenment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
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  263. A general introduction of the range of scientific activities, providing an overview of this topic.
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  265. Jacob, Margaret C. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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  267. Explores the links between science, technology, and industry.
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  269. Porter, Roy, ed. The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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  271. Survey of the many different forms of scientific enquiry by one of the leaders in his field.
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  273. Safier, Neil. Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
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  275. Excellent on how scientific knowledge went from “periphery” to “core,” thereby helping to complicate further the old Enlightenment paradigms.
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  277. Religion and Belief
  278.  
  279. The Enlightenment could once be characterized by Gay (see General Overviews) and others as hostile to religion and as a secularizing process, though Becker 2003 had earlier been aware of the religious overtones of 18th-century utopianism. More recent work (summarized by Barnett 2004) has challenged the view that religion was one of the principal targets of the Enlightenment, emphasizing religious rationalism and tolerance (Haakonssen 1996, Grell and Porter 2000), the contribution of radical religion (Jacob 1981, Champion 1992), and the persistence of millenarian belief (Bloch 1985). Manuel 1959 remains a classic exploration of religious relativism.
  280.  
  281. Barnett, S. J. The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004.
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  283. Argues for the important role of religion in the Enlightenment, rejecting a secular version of it. It presses its case rather too strongly in parts but is a provocative read.
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  285. Becker, Carl L. Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. 2d ed. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003.
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  287. A classic work, first published in 1932, arguing that the “secular” philosophes expressed older ideals about salvation in a different rhetoric (natural law and rights), seeking salvation on earth rather than in heaven but nevertheless requiring faith in reason.
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  289. Bloch, Ruth H. Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
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  291. Examines how religious (especially apocalyptic) rather than secular ideas galvanized the spirit of revolution.
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  293. Champion, J. A. I. The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
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  295. Examines the English deists who challenged the established Church of England in the early Enlightenment. The work is densely written but important, not least for the impact the English deists had more widely in Europe.
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  297. Grell, Peter Ole, and Roy Porter, eds. Toleration in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  299. Stresses that toleration was not a given but was a limited and fragile phenomenon. Makes the point that toleration fluctuated rather than continually gained strength and was often ambiguous, but nevertheless did become more extensive over the duration of the 18th century and was more vigorously championed.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Haakonssen, Knud, ed. Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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  303. This collection of essays explores the importance of rational dissent in shaping 18th- century education, law, and political radicalism. Several contributions highlight the impact on Scotland and Ireland. The volume as a whole emphasizes the importance of religion to the Enlightenment.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Jacob, Margaret C. The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans. London: Allen and Unwin, 1981.
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  307. Makes bold claims about the early Enlightenment’s association with religious and political radicals.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Manuel, Frank. The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959.
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  311. Explores the impact of ideas about the origins of pagan gods and primitive religion, and hence illuminates the Enlightenment bugbear of “superstition.”
  312. Find this resource:
  313. The Public, Public Opinion, and the Press
  314.  
  315. Much of the interest in the rise of a public and public opinion (charted in Ozouf 1988 and Mah 2000) has focused on print culture, exploring how philosophical ideas were shaped and disseminated by the press, and especially how the popular press carried Enlightenment ideas (Darnton 1979, Darnton 1995, Mason 1999, Chartier 1988, Knights 2005). Cultural history has sought an Enlightenment that was not limited to a narrow elite but which engaged, at a number of levels, with a wider public (Blanning 2002).
  316.  
  317. Blanning, T. C. W. The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
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  319. Emphasizes the importance of the public sphere and the cultural revolution of the 18th century. Blanning includes material about the cultural role of the arts and so goes beyond a consideration of the public in its more restricted political sense.
  320. Find this resource:
  321. Chartier, Roger. Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1988.
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  323. Essays exploring how ideas influenced those in the lower social orders. Chartier writes conceptually and philosophically, providing a model and framework for how to approach cultural history.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Darnton, Robert. The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1979.
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  327. Important account of how the major publishing venture of the French Enlightenment was accomplished and pirated. Darnton stresses that ideas were part of a market and as such were as much in the hands of booksellers and publishers as authors.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1995.
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  331. French erotica as the embodiment of Enlightenment principles and ideas. Darnton argues, in this lively account, that Enlightenment ideas were popularized through material that, at first sight, does not seem the most obvious form of dissemination.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Knights, Mark. Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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  335. Argues that the public was invoked as an umpire, through print but also through frequent elections and mass petitioning/addressing movements, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in Britain; also argues that partisanship led to fears that the public was being misled and deceived by what it read.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Mah, Harold. “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians.” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 153–182.
  338. DOI: 10.1086/315932Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  339. Argues that Habermas has often been misunderstood and that his model of the emergence of the public sphere (Habermas 1989) was very much an ideal construct.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Mason, Haydn T., ed. The Darnton Debate: Books and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999.
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  343. Assessments of Darnton’s 1995 account of popularization and cheap literature.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Ozouf, Mona. “Public Opinion at the End of the Old Regime.” Journal of Modern History 60 (1988): 1–21.
  346. DOI: 10.1086/243372Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  347. Examines the terminology used in France at the end of the 18th century, noting that esprit publique was a more common phrase than “public opinion.”
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  349. Political Economy and Luxury
  350.  
  351. Political economy was always a central concern of philosophes, especially those in Scotland and France, but also more widely because of the importance of trade to 18th- century economies. Important work has recently stressed the importance of the debate over consumption/luxury (Berg 2005, Berry 1994, Hundert 1994) and the role of economic theory in state formation (Hont and Ignatieff 1983, Meek 2003, Robertson 2007, Rothschild 2001). Indeed, political economy has emerged alongside religion and science as one of the important recent trends in writing about the Enlightenment.
  352.  
  353. Berg, Maxine, and Elizabeth Eger, eds. Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
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  355. Explores the notion and debates around luxury, which was seen as both a positive good (essential for politeness and a boost to the economy) and as a vice (effeminizing men, leading to sin and immorality).
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Berg, Maxine. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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  359. Examines the products consumed by the urban middling sorts, their consumption, and their global markets.
  360. Find this resource:
  361. Berry, Christopher. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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  363. Part of a treatment going back to classical times, a chapter deals with the 18th-century debate on luxury and sketches its contours well, together with chapters about the notion of “needs.”
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Hont, Istvan, and Michael Ignatieff, eds. Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
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  367. Places Adam Smith’s ideas in their Scottish and moral context.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Hundert, E. J. The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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  371. Examines an iconoclastic figure whose ideas (that private vice was a public virtue) influenced later writers, including Smith. Hundert’s is an outstanding intellectual biography.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Meek, Ronald L., ed. The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and Translations. London: Routledge, 2003.
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  375. The French economic movement that stressed how wealth was derived from land and agriculture (rather than mercantile wealth) and that pushed at reform. The volume has a good general introduction and then translates physiocratic writings into English, followed by essays that explore physiocratic aspects, including their influence, in more depth. Originally published in 1962 (London: Allen and Unwin).
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Robertson, John. The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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  379. Important study that makes the case for a common Enlightenment across two seemingly different societies, and also focuses on the (common) thinking about political economy in both countries.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Rothschild, Emma. Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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  383. Stresses importance of free trade and free markets (endorsing Hume’s idea that industry, knowledge, and humanity are linked like a chain), examining the intellectual interplay between economic and political sentiments: economic thought is shown to be part of political thought and economic life part of political, emotional, and moral life.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Gender
  386.  
  387. The Enlightenment was once a very masculine affair of great male thinkers. Recent interpretations have stressed the role that women writers played in fostering and shaping ideas and in absorbing Enlightenment culture and also explored the contemporary debate about the proper role of women (Tomaselli 1985). An ambiguity emerges: on the one hand the Enlightenment gave voice to some women and helped to undercut traditional female stereotypes; but on the other hand, those stereotypes endured and often constrained female authors (Davis and Frage 1993, Hunt, et al. 1984, O’Brien 2009, Spencer 1984). The last twenty years have also investigated what masculinity meant in the 18th century (summarized by Carter 2001) and more generally how sex was thought about and constructed (Rousseau and Porter 1987). Knott and Taylor 2005 is the best starting point.
  388.  
  389. Carter, Philip. Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: Britain, 1660–1800. Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001.
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  391. Accessible survey, drawing together a good deal of recent work but also blending this with Carter’s own work, with a focus on masculinity and how the codes of politeness shaped masculine behavior.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Davis, Natalie Zemon, and Arlette Farge, eds. A History of Women in the West. Vol. 3, Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
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  395. Nineteen essays exploring different aspects of women’s lives and roles, conceived as part of a much bigger history.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Hunt, Margaret, et al., eds. Women and the Enlightenment. New York: Institute in Research in History, 1984.
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  399. Pioneering collection of essays. Examines both how the Enlightenment undercut prevailing assumptions about women but also how many of them endured during the Enlightenment.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Knott, Sarah, and Barbara Taylor, eds. Women, Gender, and Enlightenment. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
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  403. A collection of forty essays showing the varied and sometimes competing images of women, (as scientists and salonnieres, bluestockings and governesses, political polemicists, and novelists) put forward during the Enlightenment. The volume brings together most of the best writers on the subject and is now the essential starting point.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century Britain. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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  407. Examines women writers (both recovering neglected writers and situating women in relation to the male-dominated debates they engaged with) and the subject of women (stressing that the role of women had varied over time and place and was not therefore one of natural subjection). O’Brien sees religion and intellectual history as important parts of her story.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Rousseau, G. S., and Roy Porter, eds. Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1987.
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  411. Explores new ideas about sexual liberty by exploring prostitution, libertinism, homoeroticism, rape, and male midwives. The volume as whole is interested in exploring the boundaries of sexual behavior and ideas, both for their own sake and for what light they shed on the limits of conventional mores.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Spencer, Samia I., ed. French Women and the Age of Enlightenment. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
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  415. Surveys the role of women in contemporary society, politics, culture, and science; women writers (novelists, memorialists) and how philosophes wrote about women.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Tomaselli, Sylvana. “The Enlightenment Debate on Women.” History Workshop Journal 20 (1985): 101–124.
  418. DOI: 10.1093/hwj/20.1.101Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  419. Examines 18th-century views about women in order to encourage study of the relationship between Enlightenment and women. Now perhaps a little dated, but, along with Hunt, et al. 1984, a clarion call at the time for research in this area.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Enlightened Absolutism
  422.  
  423. Enlightenment thinkers and ideas were exploited by central and eastern European monarchs to produce a more efficient, “rational,” but also more “absolute” or even “despotic” state. Particularly useful were ideas about law reform, about the separation of church and state or toleration, and political economy. The Austrian (Beales 2005, Robertson and Timms 1991, Wangermann 1973), Prussian (Behrens 1985) and Russian (Raeff 1984) states are often seen as good examples of enlightened absolutism. Henshall 1992 attacks the term “absolutism.” Scott 1990 or Beales 2005 are the best starting points.
  424.  
  425. Beales, Derek. Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe. London: I. B. Taurus, 2005.
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  427. The book ranges across Europe but the focus is on Joseph II and the Habsburg monarchy, arguing that enlightened despotism was the embodiment of enlightenment ideas about government and administration. The book draws together articles and lectures, rather than standing as a monographic investigation.
  428. Find this resource:
  429. Behrens, C. B. A. Society, Government, and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of Eighteenth-Century France and Prussia. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985.
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  431. Compares the experience of France and Prussia, two fiscal-military powers with “absolute monarchies” that nevertheless developed differently. Behrens argues that Prussia evolved “a newer, more efficient model” of efficient autocracy.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Henshall, Nicholas. The Myth of Absolutism: Continuity and Change in Early Modern European Monarchy. London: Longman, 1992.
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  435. Argues that the term “absolutism” is often misapplied and is used interchangeably with “despotism,” and therefore that the concept is only of limited use and should be rendered redundant. He argues instead that monarchies (and his chronological sweep extends back into the 17th century) were far more varied than has been suggested. Much better in launching a polemical attack on absolutism than offering a constructive alternative.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Krieger, Leonard. Kings and Philosophers, 1689–1789. New York: W.W. Norton, 1970.
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  439. Examines the difficult relationship between thinkers and “enlightened despots,” including Voltaire’s dalliance with Frederick of Prussia, and Voltaire and Diderot with Catherine the Great.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Raeff, Marc. The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1984.
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  443. Studies enlightened absolutism through a comparative approach of central and eastern Europe.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Robertson, Ritchie, and Edward Timms, eds. The Austrian Enlightenment and its Aftermath. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.
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  447. Downplays the break between Enlightenment and conservative ideas in the late 18th and 19th centuries, suggesting that the ideals of Joseph II survived in some form after his death. The intellectual debate that he fostered thus did not evaporate.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Scott, Hamish M., ed. Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.
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  451. A useful text for students because it makes available in English commentaries on non-Anglophone societies such as Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Russia, Austria, and Italy, providing accessible summaries for each.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Wangermann, Ernst. The Austrian Achievement, 1700–1800. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973.
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  455. Examines how the Habsburgs used Enlightenment ideas in Austria.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. National Enlightenments
  458.  
  459. One important recent approach has been to argue that the Enlightenment varied across nations or had a specific national character. This trend owes much to the work of Roy Porter, both in his own account of Britain (Porter 2000) and his volume placing Britain in a wider context of national enlightenments (Porter and Teich 1981; see also Himmelfarb 2004), though the treatment of the Scottish Enlightenment both preceded and drew on it (Berry 1997, Broadie 2003). Venturi 1972 examines the neglected enlightenment in southern Europe, also explored by Robertson (see Enlightened Absolutism) in his comparison of Scotland and Naples. Withers 2007 thinks about space in a different way, in geographical rather than national terms. Much of the historiography on the Enlightenment focuses on France and the relationship between Enlightenment and the French Revolution and therefore has been given a separate subsection in this entry.
  460.  
  461. Berry, Christopher. Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.
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  463. Complements and updates Gladys Bryson’s Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945) on the Scottish Enlightenment.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Broadie, Alexander, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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  467. A collection of essays about important Scottish thinkers (Hume, Smith, Ferguson, and others) and the fields of philosophy, theology, economic, anthropology, natural science, and law.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments. New York: Vintage, 2004.
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  471. Stresses the importance of the British Enlightenment, with an approving forward by Gordon Brown.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Porter, Roy. The Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World. London: Allen Lane, 2000.
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  475. A highly readable exploration of the British Enlightenment, an exemplar of Porter’s stress on the Enlightenment in national contexts.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Porter, Roy, and Mikuláš Teich, eds. The Enlightenment in National Context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
  478. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511561283Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  479. A groundbreaking set of essays arguing for a plurality of Enlightenments that were shaped by different national contexts. The volume has essays on each of the European nations with a view to examining what was distinctive and different about its version of the Enlightenment.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Venturi, Franco. Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century. With an introduction by Stuart Woolf, translated by Susan Corsi. London: Longman, 1972.
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  483. Building on his 1972 monograph on Italy, Venturi examines the Enlightenment in southern Europe, an area that is commonly ignored or marginalized. Stresses the possibility of collaboration between established power and intellectuals and a reformist monarchy. Venturi’s five-volume Settecento Riformatore sets the Italian Enlightenment in a European context.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Withers, Charles. Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically About the Age of Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
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  487. A different type of book from the others cited in this section, since it is concerned with place in its own distinctive way, arguing not for the importance of national distinction but about the nature and role of geography, a science that came of age in the 18th century and affected how nature and the world was regarded.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. France
  490.  
  491. The French Enlightenment pervades many of the works listed in previous sections of this entry. Nevertheless, some works take France as their principal focus, often in order to discuss the connection between the Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1789. Darnton (see The Public, Public Opinion, and the Press) has important things to say about the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas in France that are relevant here. The shift to cultural explanations of the French Revolution is also apparent in Baker 1990, Farge 1994, Roche 1998, and Goodman 1994. The Schechter 2001 collection of essays is a good starting point for those focusing on the French Revolution. Cranston 1986 and McManners 1981 are older treatments but are still worth reading for their depth. See also separate article on Hanoverian Britain.
  492.  
  493. Baker, Keith M. Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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  495. Baker brings together a collection of his essays that explore the political culture of France. Baker’s essay on public opinion is particularly important.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Cranston, Maurice. Philosophers and Pamphleteers: Political Theorists of the Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
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  499. Focuses on French theorists from Montesquieu to Condorcet and the emergence of populist ideas. Cranston recognizes the importance of a range of texts below the high philosophical treatise.
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  501. Farge, Arlette. Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France. Translated by Rosemary Morris. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1994.
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  503. English translation of Dire et mal dire: l’opinion publique au XVIIIe siècle, first published in 1992. This work explores the surveillance of popular ideas, blending social and intellectual history. Farge relates the history of ideas to social history in a thoroughly praiseworthy manner.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
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  507. Highlights the role of salons and the intellectual circles.
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  509. McManners, John. Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France. Oxford: Clarendon, 1981.
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  511. Important account of shifting beliefs about death, a topic that goes far beyond its ostensibly narrow remit to uncover a wider set of cultural norms and how these were being challenged by Enlightenment ideas on suicide, the afterlife, and much more.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Roche, Daniel. France in the Enlightenment. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
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  515. Originally published in French as France des lumières, 1993. A sociocultural history in which Roche outlines a framework of institutions and spaces and then analyzes patterns of urban and rural life, with a particular interest in politics and material culture. The important third section of the book, “Enlightenment and Society,” is particularly strong.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Schechter, Ronald, ed. The French Revolution: The Essential Readings. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.
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  519. Brings together essays by historians who have reinterpreted the French Revolution in the last twenty or so years, including many pieces that relate to the Enlightenment and written by authors listed elsewhere in this bibliography (Baker, Chartier, Darnton, Ozouf) but also by others who make important contributions to rethinking the ideological origins of the French Revolution (Furet, Jones, Maza).
  520. Find this resource:
  521. Wade, Ira. The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.
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  523. Classic study of early radicalism.
  524. Find this resource:
  525. Atlantic Enlightenment
  526.  
  527. Many treatments of the Enlightenment tended to characterize it as a purely European movement or as an artificial category imposed on American history (Boorstin 1958). More recent work, spurred in part by wider trends in Atlantic and global history, has uncovered links between the European and the Atlantic world (Manning and Cogliano 2008, May 1976, Ferguson 1997, Bailyn 1967). Ferguson 1997 and Warner 1990 is more interested in America, with Warner 1990 being particularly important for exploring how America’s public sphere differed from that of Europe, with more stress on letter writing.
  528.  
  529. Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1967.
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  531. Stresses the debt of American revolutionary rhetoric to that of 17th-century England, and in particular the languages of corruption and liberty.
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  533. Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: The Colonial Experience. New York: Vintage, 1958.
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  535. Argues that the idea of an American Enlightenment was mistaken and imposed on America by Europhiles.
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  537. Ferguson, Robert. The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
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  539. Approaches the subject from a literary perspective and attempts to explore how Americans understood the revolution and the world it shaped. Stresses reason, science, property, and independence of mind as defining characteristics.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Manning, Susan, and Francis D. Cogliano, eds. The Atlantic Enlightenment. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.
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  543. Collection of essays that argues “there was no Enlightenment without the Atlantic” and that the Atlantic fostered the Enlightenment’s comparative and relative ways of thinking.
  544. Find this resource:
  545. Muthu, Sankar. Enlightenment against Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
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  547. Argues that there is a strong anti-imperial strain in Enlightenment thought, thereby countering the notion that the Enlightenment contributed to colonialism.
  548. Find this resource:
  549. May, Henry F. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
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  551. Reacting against Boorstin, May argues that there was an American Enlightenment, and identified three stages: moderate (1688–1787), skeptical (1750–1789), and revolutionary (1776–1800).
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
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  555. Examines print and epistolary culture, thereby applying some of the notions of the Habermasian public sphere (Habermas 1989) to America.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. Wilson, Kathleen, ed. A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
  558. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  559. A collection of essays that show the cultural turn in imperial history and explore the connections across the British Empire.
  560. Find this resource:
  561. Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1992.
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  563. Argues that secular and radical Enlightenment ideals were betrayed by the evangelical revival of the early 19th century.
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  565. Enlightenment and Slavery
  566.  
  567. The 18th century was often ambiguous about other cultures, on the one hand relishing the cultural diversity but also often seeking to categorize civilizations and races into a hierarchy or to justify inequalities. Philosophes were no exception to this, as Cohen 1980 and Sala-Molins 2006 point out.
  568.  
  569. Cohen, William B. The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
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  571. Covering much more than just the Enlightenment, there are nevertheless chapters in this book that focus on negative depictions of Africans by Enlightenment thinkers.
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  573. Sala-Molins, Louis. Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment. Translated by John Conteh-Morgan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
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  575. Argues that Enlightenment discourses and philosophes were complicit in the Atlantic slave trade. The book outlines the attempts made to justify slavery intellectually.
  576. Find this resource:
  577. Enlightenment Critics and Reflections
  578.  
  579. The Enlightenment, as a movement of ideals and methods of debate, lends itself to interesting criticism and reflection from a modern perspective. The Enlightenment has simultaneously been hailed not only as the civilizing process that gave western Europe many of its key values (once the world ceased to be preoccupied with religious issues) but also as a destructive force and the source of all sorts of ills, including despotism and even fascism (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). This range of responses questions both the coherence and utility of the term “Enlightenment” and makes it a useful subject through which to explore any number of modern or postmodern issues. (Seen as a movement laying the foundation of modernity, it has also been challenged by postmodernism, as explored by Baker and Reill 2001 and Gordon 2001.) Carey and Festa 2009 places it in a postcolonial context, and Schmidt 1996, an important collection, ranges widely between the 18th and 20th centuries. Contemporary critiques of the Enlightenment are explored in McMahon 2001.
  580.  
  581. Baker, Keith M., and Peter H. Reill. What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.
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  583. Contains essays by important scholars on the postmodern challenge to the Enlightenment, complicating the perceived dichotomy between the two movements after the postmodern onslaught on Enlightenment certainties.
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  585. Carey, Daniel, and Lynn Festa, eds. The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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  587. The Enlightenment has been criticized for aiding and abetting colonialism but also hailed for its ideals of liberation. The volume, drawing on postcolonial theory, explores this ambiguity and therefore issues pertaining to race, globalization, human rights, sovereignty, and national and personal identity.
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  589. Dupré, Louis. The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004.
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  591. Examines a wide range of issues to show the positive legacy of the Enlightenment on modern ways of thinking and defends it on those grounds. Dupré also argues that the Enlightenment had a power to self-correct; but there is also an assessment of the Enlightenment’s failures—its intellectual arrogance, overdependence on reason, and naivety about universal values.
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  593. Gordon, Daniel, ed. Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-century French Intellectual History. New York: Routledge, 2001.
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  595. This collection tackles postmodernism’s hostility to the Enlightenment but tries to understand and engage with the postmodern critique, to show that the two movements are perhaps not as incompatible as they are often made out to be.
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  597. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
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  599. A translation of Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, which was originally published in 1947 (Amsterdam: Querido). A powerful critique arguing that, far from liberating, the Enlightenment paved the way for authoritarianism.
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  601. McMahon, Darrin M. Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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  603. Stresses the contemporary resistance to Enlightenment ideas and values, showing the vitality and range of opponents of Enlightenment thought. Part of a wider strand of research highlighting the enduring strength of loyalist thought and political organization, as opposed to the radical Enlightenment.
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  605. Schmidt, James, ed. What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
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  607. Brings together 18th- and 20th-century texts on the importance and meaning of the Enlightenment.
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  609. Wolff, Larry, and Marco Cipolloni, eds. The Anthropology of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
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  611. This argues that anthropology emerged from the Enlightenment’s cross-cultural interests, its acknowledgment of global diversity, and its attempts both to bridge cultural differences and to explore relativist perspectives.
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