Reviews for The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Vol. 2

The average rating for The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Vol. 2 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-06-20 00:00:00 Joseph Bloch Gay provides an interesting dialectical model: the philosophes opposed ancient paganism to medieval Christianity in order to create an autonomous "modern paganism" (vol. I). And his writing is beautiful. Ultimately, though, his picture of the Enlightenment is thoroughly teleological and at times cartoonish. In Gay's account, for example, deism and natural law are just an earlier stage in the evolution of atheism and utilitarianism (I, p. 18). (Their respective exponents would have been very surprised to hear it.) And when the Enlightenment came along, it banished the darkness of Christianity with a "spectacular career of the natural sciences, advances in medicine, the improvement of manners and growth of humanitarian sentiment, the slow crumbling of traditional social hierarchies, and revolutionary changes in the production of food, the organization of industry, the pattern of population -- all pointing in the same direction" (II, 8). So inexorable is this change, apparently -- the philosophical changes being "inevitable" results of the economic and cultural change (II, ix) -- that the New Deal was incipient in the ancien regime: "Rational public administration and rational statistics were in their infancy, but they foreshadowed the modern welfare state. While the decay of the guilds and the decline of clerical orders redounded mainly to the advantage of industrial and commercial capitalism, behind the troops of laissez-faire marched the clerks of government regulation" (II, 8).

Review # 2 was written on 2019-04-03 00:00:00 Martin Pelletier A brilliant, scholarly, yet thoroughly entertaining volume. Gay is the finest social, philosophical historian I've read. He is also as deferential to his sources as he is authoritative on his subject matter.