The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters
“Perhaps the most significant footnote in the entire history of Western thought,” muses Padgen, appeared in a 1783 journal in Berlin. The footnote asked, “What is enlightenment?” Answering the question is this work’s project, which Padgen conducts through eighteenth-century intellectuals associated with the Enlightenment. Unlike the philosophers and theologians of the preceding Renaissance and Reformation, who engaged in rediscovery or restoration of the past, Enlightenment thinkers repudiated traditions thought to fetter human beings. Religion, law, government, and social customs came under criticism from writers who varied in the subjects they contemplated but generally were animated by belief in the power of reason to define human nature and design human society. Partly a process of demolition, as in attacks on the claims of Christianity, and partly a process of construction, as in the beginnings of social sciences like economics, the course of the Enlightenment unfolds in Padgen’s presentations of major figures Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Adam Smith, and Kant. Readers interested in the origins of modernity, progressivism, and conservatism will find much to ponder in Padgen’s substantive history of ideas. --Gilbert Taylor