The Enlightenment

Last update: 09 Apr 2026 10:28
First version: Sometime before 13 May 1995

---

Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, La Mettrie, Smith, Gibbon. Origins of the revolution, the Left. Relations to science, superstition, Romanticism, the industrial revolution. Connections and attitudes to classical antiquity, the Renaissance.

Recommended, big picture, secondary:
• Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment [This is and fully deserves to be a classic work, but he has far to much on obscure people who either thought they were building on Leibniz, or whom Cassirer thought were making straight the way for Kant and Hegel, i.e., his approach to history is still too teleological.]
• Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation [Dividing through for the Freudian mish-mash, fortunately under pretty good control here]
• Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment

Recommended, primary:
• Jean Le Rond D'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie

Recommended, secondary, close-ups:
• Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France
• Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change [The philosophes as the first modernizing intellectuals worked up about under-development.]
• Jonathan I. Israel [Or, how Spinoza overthrew the old regime.]
  • Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650--1750
  • A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy
• Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air: A History of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America
• David Wootton, Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison

Recommended, modern appropriations:
• Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

To read, modern appropriations:
• Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Towards a Politics of Radical Engagement

To read, the Enlightenment and the Islamic world:
• Alexander Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment
• Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670--1840
• Murad Wahbah and Mona Abousenna (eds.), Averroes and the Enlightenment

To read, the Enlightenment and the sciences:
• Tore Frangsmyr, J. L. Heilbron and Robin E. Rider (eds.), The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century
• Giuliano Pancaldi, Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment
• Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment
• Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment [He's a good writer, but really, how far can one trust someone writing about the Enlightenment who thinks that "no ought from is" is a discovery of the deconstructionists?]

To read, not otherwise or not yet classified:
• C. B. A. Behrens, Society, Government and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of Eighteenth-Century France and Prussia
• Becker, The Heavenly City of the 18th-Century Philosopher
• Philipp Blom, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment [The d'Holbach circle]
• Condorcet, Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind
• Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France
• Sarah Ellenzweig, The Fringes of Belief English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660--1760
• Don Garrett and Edward Barbanell (eds.), Encyclopedia of Empiricism [Focusing on the 17th and 178th centuries]
• Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity
• Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
• Paul Ilie, The Age of Minerva
• Ulrich Im Hof, The Enlightenment
• Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard's Religious Ceremonies of the World
• Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested
• Margaret C. Jacob
  • Radical Enlightenment
  • Living the Enlightenment
• Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Celebres of Prerevolutionary France
• James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe
• Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
• Paul Monod, Solomon's Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment
• Thomas Munck, The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History, 1721--1794
• Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire
• Roy Porter
  • English Society in the Eighteenth Century
  • The Enlightenment
  • Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul
  • Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency
• Marko A. Rodriguez and Jennifer H. Watkins, "Revisiting the Age of Enlightenment from a Collective Decision Making Systems Perspective", arxiv:0901.3929 = First Monday 14 (2009)
• Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith and Condorcet
• Robert E. Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham
• Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Harman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century
• Mary D. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art
• David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna
• T. H. White, The Age of Scandal
• Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism