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The Enlightenment: An Interpretation #2
Enlightenment Volume 2
The Science of Freedom completes Peter Gay's brilliant reinterpretation begun in The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism. In the present book, he describes the philosophes' program and their views of society. His masterful appraisal opens a new range of insights into the Enlightenment's critical method and its humane and libertarian vision.
748 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1969
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684 people want to read
About the author
Peter Gay
148 books153 followersPeter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 4, 2019
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.
January 18, 2023
This is the second and final installment of Peter Gay's most erudite, learned and comprehensive treatment of the Enlightenment in Western Europe. The first volume focused largely on what the "little flock of philosophes" read and thought. This volume's focus is more centered around the implementation of their ideas into discernible programs in science, art, education and politics.
Like the first volume, this volume is not organized by chronology, but rather by topical treatment. It focuses largely on a dozen or so philosophes and their writings and philosophies. Some of the more prominent ones include: Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Lessing and Diderot. Some others, less prominent ones include: Adam Smith, Newton, Locke, Condorcet, Paine, Beccaria, Bentham, Holbach, D'Alembert and Kant. There is also a mention of the some of the American revolutionaries, like Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Adams and Jefferson (toward the end of the book).
Also like the first volume, this is an interpretational intellectual history; a synthesis of a sort. There are no events described (except tangentially to make a point about something else); no dates to follow and memorize. Thus, it's not a typical and popular history of a period.
Like the first volume, the work is a challenging read. It took me almost 4 months to finish it. The prose is relatively fluid, but takes some time getting used to the language, as Peter Gay is of Germanic origin and was writing back in the 1960's. But don't allow this to deter you from reading it. This is one of the most intellectually sophisticated and for that reason satisfying works of intellectual history ever written.
Like the first volume, this volume is not organized by chronology, but rather by topical treatment. It focuses largely on a dozen or so philosophes and their writings and philosophies. Some of the more prominent ones include: Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Lessing and Diderot. Some others, less prominent ones include: Adam Smith, Newton, Locke, Condorcet, Paine, Beccaria, Bentham, Holbach, D'Alembert and Kant. There is also a mention of the some of the American revolutionaries, like Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Adams and Jefferson (toward the end of the book).
Also like the first volume, this is an interpretational intellectual history; a synthesis of a sort. There are no events described (except tangentially to make a point about something else); no dates to follow and memorize. Thus, it's not a typical and popular history of a period.
Like the first volume, the work is a challenging read. It took me almost 4 months to finish it. The prose is relatively fluid, but takes some time getting used to the language, as Peter Gay is of Germanic origin and was writing back in the 1960's. But don't allow this to deter you from reading it. This is one of the most intellectually sophisticated and for that reason satisfying works of intellectual history ever written.
June 21, 2008
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).
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).
August 27, 2010
Volume 2. Here Gay attempts to construct the social setting in which Enlightenment thought took off. Enlightenment thinkers did not come up with their ideas in a vacuum; they were influenced by the rise of capitalism, changes in technology, food production, etc.
April 26, 2020
A classic, a must for everyone!
January 20, 2025
Better than its first volume, "The Science of Freedom" is part of the late historian Peter Gay's quest to provide a foundation for late twentieth century secular progressivism. Now profoundly challenged by contemporary historians, Gay's book retains some value for its wide-ranging interpretation of eighteenth century art, philosophy, and society, as well as its extensive bibliography (fairly authoritative on early twentieth century works on the philosophes). Yet, Gay's triumphalist narrative is no longer in vogue; indeed, now very much doubt has been cast upon his and Ira Wade's approach, 'updated' to become Jonathan Israel's "modernization thesis," where the West slowly marches toward greater freedom, enlightenment, and peace as it gradually sloughs off the superstitions of Judaism and Christianity. What we see in the eighteenth century can actually be interpreted as a "religious enlightenment" (Sorkin), or, as a series of several "enlightenments" taking place all across Europe and the "new world" in a variety of ways. When the idea is dispersed this broadly, though, one might interrogate the very notion of "enlightenment" in the first place.
The very word, enlightenment, involves a metaphor, and every metaphor involves the imagination - an imagination nourished by culture, tradition, and religion. In short, it makes a metaphysical claim. What was once dark, ignorant, obscured is now brightened, known, and clarified. This process or procedure is "Enlightenment." According to the philosophes, this happens through education coupled with the freedom of expression and publication, along with a popularization of the new discoveries of natural philosophy (science). What Hamann saw, and few others did, is that with a secular "Enlightenment," new priests are called for with new rituals, new authoritative books, and new creeds. What was once explained quite clearly by philosophers like Aquinas and Cusanus, as, for example, the meaning and scope of human reason, is now explained (or failed to be explained) in a thousand contradictory ways by different self-proclaimed philosophes - the "free-thinkers." From this plethora of interpretations, there is a mass fragmentation of ideas about everything from God to nature. The so-called Romantics try to pick up the pieces and re-weave the rainbow (Keats), but without success. Blake saw this, as did thinkers such as Von Baader, but with God increasingly vague and nebulous and 'pantheized,' art unravels from life and becomes a religion unto itself: "art for art's sake" (Pater). With a brief gasp for mysticism and tradition (Symbolism), our philosophies then degenerate into surreal fantasies and nihilistic modernism. From these mid-twentieth century nightmares, the surrender to simulation (where art and language and art and life form a puzzling, never-ending circle, like a snake eating its own tail) that is postmodernism dies an ignominious death and no one is sad.
Now the time is ripe for a continuation and intensification - across confessional lines - of the ressourcement of the twentieth century, where the "Enlightenment" is seen through the lens of the Orthodox Philokalia (published in 1782), for example, or the blank verse poem "Night Thoughts" (1742-45) by Edward Young. We also have the grievously overlooked dialogues of James Hervey (d. 1758), the profound writings of J. G. Hamann (d. 1788), and the theological-philosophical poems of Chris. Smart and Wm. Blake. Rather than there being a 'counter-enlightenment' (Isaiah Berlin) which is opposed to the rationalism and free-thinking of the "Enlightenment," we will realize that in every era there is barbarism and cruelty, irrationalism and hatred - in every epoch man is repeating the sin of the original garden; the only true enlightenment is from the light that is above (φῶς ἄνωθεν), the light that is given, not by Kantian gatekeepers, but by the Spirit.
The very word, enlightenment, involves a metaphor, and every metaphor involves the imagination - an imagination nourished by culture, tradition, and religion. In short, it makes a metaphysical claim. What was once dark, ignorant, obscured is now brightened, known, and clarified. This process or procedure is "Enlightenment." According to the philosophes, this happens through education coupled with the freedom of expression and publication, along with a popularization of the new discoveries of natural philosophy (science). What Hamann saw, and few others did, is that with a secular "Enlightenment," new priests are called for with new rituals, new authoritative books, and new creeds. What was once explained quite clearly by philosophers like Aquinas and Cusanus, as, for example, the meaning and scope of human reason, is now explained (or failed to be explained) in a thousand contradictory ways by different self-proclaimed philosophes - the "free-thinkers." From this plethora of interpretations, there is a mass fragmentation of ideas about everything from God to nature. The so-called Romantics try to pick up the pieces and re-weave the rainbow (Keats), but without success. Blake saw this, as did thinkers such as Von Baader, but with God increasingly vague and nebulous and 'pantheized,' art unravels from life and becomes a religion unto itself: "art for art's sake" (Pater). With a brief gasp for mysticism and tradition (Symbolism), our philosophies then degenerate into surreal fantasies and nihilistic modernism. From these mid-twentieth century nightmares, the surrender to simulation (where art and language and art and life form a puzzling, never-ending circle, like a snake eating its own tail) that is postmodernism dies an ignominious death and no one is sad.
Now the time is ripe for a continuation and intensification - across confessional lines - of the ressourcement of the twentieth century, where the "Enlightenment" is seen through the lens of the Orthodox Philokalia (published in 1782), for example, or the blank verse poem "Night Thoughts" (1742-45) by Edward Young. We also have the grievously overlooked dialogues of James Hervey (d. 1758), the profound writings of J. G. Hamann (d. 1788), and the theological-philosophical poems of Chris. Smart and Wm. Blake. Rather than there being a 'counter-enlightenment' (Isaiah Berlin) which is opposed to the rationalism and free-thinking of the "Enlightenment," we will realize that in every era there is barbarism and cruelty, irrationalism and hatred - in every epoch man is repeating the sin of the original garden; the only true enlightenment is from the light that is above (φῶς ἄνωθεν), the light that is given, not by Kantian gatekeepers, but by the Spirit.
July 10, 2020
It would have been better to have called the book : The French Enlightenment, as it is mainly about French Philosophes and then also mainly about Voltaire. It this is it very nice, educational and stuffed with details and references. Bit it is a bit dated by now.
Want to read
May 16, 2024ملاحظة لي - لم اقرا الكتاب بعد
عن تطور الافكار وتغيرها وتبدلها عبر الزمن من عصر التنوير الى الحداثة الحاللية
عن تطور الافكار وتغيرها وتبدلها عبر الزمن من عصر التنوير الى الحداثة الحاللية
December 10, 2012
This and its companion volume are together a good deal longer than Ernst Cassirer's study (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment) but are just as valuable. Having read these at some distance in time, I won't attempt now to say anything more about them.
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January 18, 2011Yay, for revisits to the bookshelf!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews