Historiography of the Enlightenment

Article - "What's Wrong with the Enlightenment?" [Philosophy Now - Jun-July 2017]

Article:  "How has the historiography of the Enlightenment changed since the 1960s?"

Article:  "A Makable Past:  Enlightenment Historiography from Cassirer to Israel in Moral Perspective (1932-2006)"  


Works on the Enlightenment:

 Both Moses Mendelssohn and Immanual Kant (1784):  Enlightenment is an ongoing process, not a completed event. 


Edmund Burke (1729 - 1779) was an Irish conservative whose Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was the first major critical assessment of the Enlightenment and the Revolution.


Adorno, Theodore & Max Horkheimer.  Dialectic of Enlightenment  (1947/1972)  

    Highly critical of the Enlightenment; blames it for the Nazis and other bad things. 


Cassirer, Ernst.  The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951)

    An early pro-Enlightenment history


Gay, Peter.  The Enlightenment, vol. 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism  (1966)

Gay, Peter.  The Enlightenment, vol. 2: The Science of Freedom   (1970)

    Gay focused on the major Enlightenment figures seeing them as a family with a common project.


Venturi, Franco.  Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment  (1971)

Venturi, Franco.  The End of the Old Regime in Europe 1768 - 1776: the First Crisis  (1979/89)

     Venturi broadens the Enlightenment to Poland, Italy, Sweden, Russia.


The Enlightenment in the Americas:

      May, Henry.  The Enlightenment in America  (1976)

      Aldridge, A. Owen.  The Ibero-American Enlightenment  (1971)


Darnton, Robert.  (several 1968 - 1984) 

      Mostly focuses on publishing and censorship. Known for criticizing Peter Gay's approach.

       The Literary Underground of the Old Regime  (1985)  272 pages. (@UNF)

       The Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775 - 1800  (1989)  327 pages.  (@UNF) Habermas, Jürgen.  The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere  (1989)

      Habermas is an important 20th century German philosopher.  His theory of the Pubic Sphere is highly recognized.  But this is very advanced reading.


Robertson, John.  The Case for The Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760  (2015)  476 pages (@ UNF)


Jonathan Israel divides the Enlightenment into two groups, the moderates and the radicals and argues the radicals, as the heirs of Spinoza's thoughts, were the progressive social levelers anxious to replace monarchy and aristocracy with republican government and diminish church control. 

Israel, Jonathan I.  Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750  (2002)  832 pages  (@UNF)

Israel, Jonathan I.  Enlightenment Contested:  Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man, 1670 - 1752  (2009)  1,024 pages  (@UNF)

Israel, Jonathan I. A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (2011)   296 pages (@ JPL) (This is a short overview of Israel's main thesis).

Israel, Jonathan I.  Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790 (2013) 1,066 pages

Israel, Jonathan.  Revolutionary Ideas:  An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from the Rights of Man to Robespierre  (2014)  888 pages

Israel, Jonathan.  The Expanding Blaze:  How the American Revolution Ignites the World, 1775 - 1848  (2017)  768 pages.


Book Reviews:

Review - "The Trouble with the Enlightenment - Anthony Pagden's The Enlightenment: and Why It Still Matters - Prospect magazine - May 2013

Article  -  Jeremy Popper: "Review of Jonathan Israel's Revolutionary Ideas."

Article  -  Israel's Reply to Popper  

Article  -  Seeing reason: Jonathan Israel's radical vision

Article  -  Samuel Moyn: "Mind the Enlightenment"  (a critique of Jonathan Israel's interpretation)