The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment

by Peter Gay

Often the target of uninformed or hostile criticism, the Enlightenment has been characterized as "shallow and pretentious intellectualism" and "unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition." In this provocative book--at once a scholarly study and a vigorous polemic--Peter Gay sets out to shatter old myths, to sort out illusion from reality, and to restore the men of the Enlightenment--Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot--to the esteem they deserve. The nine related essays in The Party of Humanity fall into three three are on Voltaire, presenting the great philosophe as a tough-minded, realistic man of letters who tried to reshape his world, rather than as a merely brittle and shallow wit. Then, three essays discuss the French Enlightenment as a whole and seek for the unity underlying the diversity of tempers and attitudes among its leaders. The last three, which include Mr. Gay's well-known critique of Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers , challenge some widely accepted views of the Enlightenment. The longest chapter here is a detailed examination of Rousseau and his reputation among his interpreters. What all nine essays have in common, apart from their portrayal of the philosophes as serious and engaged partisans of humanity, is that they are essays in the social history of ideas; they all treat ideas as inseparable from the specific social and cultural setting from which they emerge, and which they affect.

Genres: History, Essays

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Peter 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".

Reviews

[Judy Parsons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another good one

Peter Gay was a scholar of exceptional wisdom and compassion. For me he presents the Enlightenment in a reasonable and proper perspective. A time of questioning and looking at life's mysteries from as many different angles as possible. I am grateful to have discovered his writing.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this a fairly dull selection of essays. The book is broken up into three sections: the first is comprised of essays about Voltaire, the second, entitled “Toward Synthesis” is Gay’s attempt to argue against a sort of nominalism in intellectual history, the third contains essays of Gay “contra” (Carl Becker’s Heavenly City, biographers and historians of Rousseau and other writers’ versions of the Enlightenment). I read and liked Becker’s book but I don’t have enough of a background (or a memory of the book) to agree or disagree with Gay’s argument against it. I felt the strongest essay in the book was the first one in the middle section, “The Unity of the French Enlightenment.”

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Easy prose. More forthcoming on this book.