The Enlightenment A Brief History with Documents

by Jacob, Margaret C.

• ISBN13: 9780312179977
• ISBN10: 0312179979
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-10-04
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's

Summary

This brief volume introduces the movement called the Enlightenment that swept through 18h-century Europe affecting all areas of political, religious, and educational life. A variety of selections showcase the writings of a number of Enlightenment figures, including Locke, Rousseau, Mary Wortley Montagu, Diderot, and Moses Mendelssohn. A comprehensive introduction reaches back to the roots of the movement to set up critical background on the political and social debates of the period. All documents are preceded by headnotes, and the volume includes a chronology, 14 illustrations, a bibliography, and an index.

Author Biography

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 to 1998. Her most recent book is Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (1997).

Table of Contents

Foreword	v
Preface	vii
List of Illustrations	xiii
PART ONE Introduction: The Struggle to Create a New Culture	1	(72)
Political Origins	4	(11)
Scientific and Religious Origins	15	(5)
The Public Sphere	20	(2)
Enlightened Feminism	22	(5)
Reworking Seventeenth-Century Formal Philosophy	27	(6)
A Clandestine Universe	33	(8)
A Protestant Odyssey	41	(2)
Travel Literature	43	(3)
Anglophilia	46	(4)
Mid-Century Crisis	50	(5)
Rousseau	55	(4)
The International Republican Conversation, 1775-1800	59	(6)
Slavery, Imperialism, and the French Revolution	65	(3)
The Legacy of the Enlightenment	68	(4)
A Note about the Text	72	(1)
PART TWO The Documents	73	(156)
Some Thoughts concerning Education, 1693	73	(21)
John Locke
Treatise of the Three Impostors, 1719	94	(20)
Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, 1733	114	(23)
Letters, 1716-1718	137	(19)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Encyclopedia, 1751	156	(4)
Denis Diderot
Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage, 1772	160	(17)
Denis Diderot
The Social Contract, 1762	177	(25)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
What Is Enlightenment? 1784	202	(6)
Immanuel Kant
Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, 1783	208	(21)
Moses Mendelssohn
APPENDIXES
An Enlightenment Chronology (1685-1800)	221	(4)
Selected Bibliography	225	(4)
Index	229