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The Secular Enlightenment
A major history of how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday lives
The Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, and travelers. Margaret Jacob takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come.
The Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, and travelers. Margaret Jacob takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come.
339 pages, Paperback
Published April 20, 2021
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May 10, 2024If you are interested in this, read it in hardcopy. Don’t get the audiobook. The narrator would probably be good under different direction, but apparently someone thought the book would be dull unless she made every sentence ‘sparkling.’ The intonations are too emphatic. Some cadences seem to convey something different than what the author intended. It’s an academic book and is undermined by an attempt to make it popular by overly-dramatic quotation readings, and the intensity of the narration in general.
October 6, 2020
The first four chapters were quite good, but then the book petered out into summary. By far the most interesting aspect of this book is Jacobs' focus on the broader social context of Enlightenment thought. Rather than a list of famous figures, we get (in the better chapters) a dense network of authors, printers, booksellers, tradespeople, salon and café owners, professors, police, censors, critics, and fans. Jacobs' attention to neglected persons and sources brings alive the vibrant urban culture in which Enlightenment thought incubated and emerged.
Brilliant in portions and peppered with insights throughout, The Secular Enlightenment is certainly worth the time for a dedicated student of the period.
Brilliant in portions and peppered with insights throughout, The Secular Enlightenment is certainly worth the time for a dedicated student of the period.
April 10, 2019
A fascinating look at this period from ground level, with some very fun details. Jacob's writing is a pleasure to read.
November 29, 2023
Lots of info and citations but a bit condensed! The author posits that the Enlightenment was an unintended consequence of colonialism. Arguing that monarchs wanted new land and commerce while the church wanted people to convert but ultimately led to enlightenment which undermined both. Interestingly this does not happen when people immigrate from the Global South to the North; this may be because colonizers thought they were more civilized and powerful than natives and hence were less defensive to new ideas and thoughts as opposed to immigrants.
Redeeming time became the cornerstone of Protestantism, time had to be monitored and tracked. Much like Islamic scholars, because of fixed prayer times. During the Enlightenment, time was gradually secularized.
Need to find Isabella de Moerloose's diary!! In Naples and Milan, the Catholic church tried to restrict the spread of secular free enquiry. Religion always acting as a constraint!
Redeeming time became the cornerstone of Protestantism, time had to be monitored and tracked. Much like Islamic scholars, because of fixed prayer times. During the Enlightenment, time was gradually secularized.
Need to find Isabella de Moerloose's diary!! In Naples and Milan, the Catholic church tried to restrict the spread of secular free enquiry. Religion always acting as a constraint!
January 3, 2025
Some parts were very good, but others droned on. The widow seemed very cool and is the sort of character Hollywood might make biopics about. I was pleased to learn of the religious origins of the reverence for time.
It quickly passed over many people I thought were very interesting, like Beccaria and Montaigne. Her focus on the role of Spinoza seems to me to come from Jonathon Israel and is less than universally accepted compared to that of the French Huguenots or whatever. But the Scots are considered correctly a big dead. Also, I didn't know anything about the Masonic lodges, so I was glad to learn.
Overall, it is very good for those interested in the intellectual history of the enlightenment and will lead them to discover many underrated books.
It quickly passed over many people I thought were very interesting, like Beccaria and Montaigne. Her focus on the role of Spinoza seems to me to come from Jonathon Israel and is less than universally accepted compared to that of the French Huguenots or whatever. But the Scots are considered correctly a big dead. Also, I didn't know anything about the Masonic lodges, so I was glad to learn.
Overall, it is very good for those interested in the intellectual history of the enlightenment and will lead them to discover many underrated books.
January 26, 2023
The period known as the Enlightenment witnessed a shift from religious concerns dominating everyday life to secular ones. The Enlightenment “vastly expanded the sphere of the secular, making it, for increasing numbers of educated people, a primary frame of reference (12).”
As Jacobs is careful to note, this doesn’t mean Enlightenment thinkers or people of the period ignored religious questions or abandoned their religions completely, but rather secular concerns began to coexist with religious ones as being equally, if not more, important.
“Attachment to the world—the here and the now—to a life lived without constant reference to God, became increasingly commonplace and the source of an explosion of innovative thinking about society, government, and the economy (12).”
The popularity of books like Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World which discussed the customs and practices of different world religions without addressing the veracity of their beliefs showed people could read, discuss, and study religions in new secular ways without necessarily believing in or concerning themselves with its truth.
Enlightened ideas were adopted more readily by Protestants than Catholics and were found in cities more than the rural countryside. The origins of the Enlightenment stem from French-Protestant exiles fleeing to the freer and less repressive Dutch Republic, which allowed them to publish more controversial books without the heavy state-sponsored censorship of Louis XIV, and provided them with ample resentment against religious intolerance and absolutist government repression. Many of the exiles were journalists that took their criticisms of French absolutism to the international level. By 1700 half the books published on continental Europe originated in the Dutch Republic.
The Enlightenment was also a product of coming to grip with a bigger and more diverse world. The discovery of new continents in the Americas expanded European’s awareness of the size and diversity of the world. They confronted many new tribes who held a plethora of strange religious beliefs and customs. Colonialism also led to expanded contact with diverse peoples from Africa and Asia. Commercial expansion of these European empires and the spread of money economies also fueled a desire for greater understanding and knowledge of the customs and beliefs of other people. While missionaries tried to “civilize” and convert natives, these meetings undermined religious certainty and authority. The simultaneous growth of the publishing industry fed the curiosity of educated Europeans about these foreign lands.
By 1600, the average educated person was aware of these vast new continents. The booming genre of travel literature allowed readers to imagine new possibilitities, identify shortcomings of their own world, and analyze differences between their lives and often exotic imaginary ones. It encouraged European readers to consider and express new views on sexuality, religion, and death. These ideas spread through translations across Europe, even to the furthest reaches of Eastern Europe like Poland and Armenia. The once local world of many Europeans developed into a broader international one.
Growing commerce abroad led to new public spaces at home. Cafes and salons appeared where educated city-dwellers could read the latest newspapers and intellectual journals such as the Spectator, and discuss the newest ideas and news with fellow patrons. Eating clubs of London brought the educated middle-class in contact with the governing elites and intellectuals. The spread of Freemason Lodges across Europe provided another place to spread Enlightenment ideas and ideals of brotherhood. Many of these places also provided anonymity to share more extreme and blasphemous ideas such as the irreligious pamphlet the Treatise of the Three Imposters, which denounced Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed as frauds. Intellectual Societies such as the Select Society in Edinburgh that included leading members of the Scottish Enlightenment like David Hume and Adam Smith discussed topics that included the well-being of the state, the economy, and the status of women. The period featured the birth of the public sphere where the average educated person and mercantile classes could read and converse about the topics of the day.
European understanding of space also changed in response to the Copernican Revolution and Newtonian science. Many theologians took up the challenges the new science presented by arguing that mathematics and the new scientific discoveries could be adopted to Christian beliefs. They could be employed to “augment piety and exalt the Grand Architect . . . [and] reinforce the theology of order and providential design (19).” Thinkers like Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton championed the position that science could serve theology and that physico-theology could stand against deism, atheism, and materialism. By 1700 most educated people had accepted Newton’s mathematical formulas describing gravity and thus had changed their understanding of space. Newton’s student, Samuel Clarke, used his extensive correspondence to spread these ideas to Protestant congregations throughout Europe. In general, this Moderate Enlightenment embraced science, religious tolerance, and avoided doctrinal disputes between Christians.
At the same time, other thinkers had stopped invoking God to explain societal issues and problems in the world. People wanted better explanations to explain the world and improve their social situation. Economics and inequality replaced Original Sin to explain the ills of society. New Enlightenment political theories arose in response to the numerous revolts against kings and authorities that had defined the previous age such as the English Civil War, the Netherlands overthrowing Spanish power, and the Thirty Years Wars. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Hugo Grotius and Spinoza offered a political philosophy that denigrated the divine rights of kings and replaced it with one based on consent of the people and protection of property.
A Radical change in the perception of time also occurred during the Enlightenment. Christian time gave way to secular time. Most people of the late 17th and early 18th century, including educated ones like Isaac Newton and John Locke, would have understood the world to be 6000 years old. Their entire sense of time was framed around religious events. Protestant time was framed around the beginning of creation and the end of the world, while Catholic time was constructed around the plethora of Saints’ Days as evidenced by almanacs from the period.
Early attempts to secularize time took the form of profane almanacs focused on the lives famous artists, scientists, and philosophers rather than saints or religious events.
“In March, the reader might begin on the first day honoring Moses, and then go on to think about Michelangelo, remembering the Ides of March (15th) when Brutus murdered Caesar, and among the moderns take note of Turgot, Toland, Newton, Wollaston, and Descartes. In April, Jesus Christ and Hobbes got their days. May offered Albert Durer, Campanella, and Voltaire, while June honored Anthony Collins, Leibniz, J. J Rousseau (54-55).”
The anonymous author of this almanac had created a neutral calendar that a person of any religion could accept, which drew the ire of the French Parlament. By the middle of the 17th century even almanacs that included religious material often had blank spaces for people to record and keep track of their own business affairs.
“The mundane began to mix effortlessly with prophecy (60).”
By 1750, it became more common for almanacs to frame chronology on the reigns of monarchs or currency exchange rates rather than on sacred time. By the 1780s, the political upheavals that led to the French Revolution decimated the Christian conception of time completely. The French Revolution created a new calendar and partisans who supported the revolution proclaimed that the revolution of 1789 was the new beginning of time.
Research on fossils and geology expanded people’s conceptions of the length of time and forced them to contend with the problems of the biblical timeframe. The work of naturalist Count de Buffon on fossils and the cooling time of iron led him to suggest the world was 75,000 years old, although it seems he really thought the world was 10 million years old in private. Benoît de Maillet also used fossils to estimate the earth was 2 billion years old and argued all life had originated in the sea. In light of these vast time frames, many in the educated classes rejected scripture as offering anything useful to say about time. This represented an expansion of time in which time was conceived in more expansive and broader terms.
The new concept of time found further support with the proliferation of new technologies of time such as pocket watches and clocks that made time a more substantial part of everyday life, especially in England and the Dutch Republic. While these were still seen as luxury items, the prices of watches dropped between 1680s to 1810 and became more readily available to the average person. The cheapest watches of the day could be purchased for one pound.
Even the way people talked about time changed. Prior to 1700s references to time in literary works and diaries were more general in which people referred to doing something in the morning or the evening, but this was replaced with recording daily events at specific hours. It is in the early 1700s where personal writings and other literature begin to use the phrase “o’ clock” to indicate specific hours.
People also became more concerned with how they spent their time. Diaries of this period indicate people became concerned over using their precious time wisely and not wasting it.
Two factors led to a shift in Protestant thinking about time. Once Protestants abandoned a strict belief in predestination of their Puritan predecessors, many felt anxiety about the proper use of their time.
“The emphasis now centered on living and practicing a religiosity of pious control over time. It would lead to self-disciplining and self-control imposed by habits, customs, and comings and goings in the service of faith. Every action was to be monitored; the self had to be constrained within the parameters set up by worldly time (71).”
This went hand-in-hand with a new emphasis in the Church of England that attempted to reconnect morality and Godliness, and by extension put more emphasis on using time for religious practices and performing good works. Many religious diaries of the time castigate idleness and laziness. Eventually in the late 18th century we start finding diaries describing everyday secular events of people’s daily lives.
The second factor that influenced Protestants changing thoughts on time was Newton’s principle of absolute time that proposed time as independent of observers and uniform throughout the universe. Instead of events defining time, time exists as an independent entity from everything else. It became like a setting in a play for secular history and personal events to unfold.
“It forms part of the scaffolding that undergirds narrativity. The shift among Westerners toward an embrace of worldly time was profound, one of the singular and lasting consequences—or better said, causes—of the Enlightenment. But it occurred gradually and millions of believers in biblical time can be found to this day (69).”
Although better known philosophers like Voltaire, Montesquieu, Kant are mentioned, the book avoids the usual predominance of the major thinkers of the period to explore the changing cultural and social trends, and spends time dealing with the average educated person and how they would have viewed the world.
“Many of these small voices from the eighteenth century remain relatively unknown to our day. . . .They speak without assuming that they are in the vanguard of a movement of ideas that will transform Western thinking on a wide variety of topics. They are therefore all the more valuable because they allow us to see the “seepage” of ideas in an age that was coming to terms with the discovery of the world’s peoples, with religious conflict, and with vast differences in wealth of regions close to home and far away (114).”
Henry Penruddocke Wyndham was a worldly traveler and tourist who was appalled at the poverty he found while visiting Ireland and Sicily, praised politeness and civility as human ideals, and admired Roman Antiquities over modern churches. The publisher Robert Dodsley was known for publishing Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke and possibly being the anonymous author of The Oeconomy of Human Life, which appeared in over 200 editions and was translated into numerous languages. The book was “intended to guide a worldly life well-lived (95)” without the need of priests. Enlightened chaplain Samuel Dickinson wrote positively of the African peoples he met during his journeys on the ship Dunkirk and challenged European stereotypes of Africans as indolent. He proposed that their hot climate and the easiness to achieve their needs and wants within their environment explained this behavior rather than some inherent racial characteristic. He was a man who embraced cultural difference. John Anderson was a faculty member of Glasgow that critiqued primogeniture and argued for responsibility and fairness of men to leave equal inheritance to all their children. He expressed belief in the progress of science and the benefits of improved technology for the lower classes, believing machines would reduce the burden of labor. Isabella de Moerloose was a freethinker who published a 600 page autobiography that expressed her rejection of the Catholic clergy, organized religion, and contained frank accounts of sexuality. Under the inspiration of the Spectator, Suzanne Necker created her own literary journal with the goal of guiding people to think for themselves. She was a fan of Voltaire and proposed putting up a statue of him by the sculptor Houdon. Évariste Parny was an erotic poet from the French Caribbean that expressed anti-clerical sentiments, voiced support for the American revolutionaries as freedom fighters against tyranny, and opposed slavery. He even earned the admiration of Voltaire. By looking at these ordinary people and thinkers rather than the more renowned philosophers of the time, Jacobs shows how Enlightenment ideas infiltrated the thoughts of more typical educated and middle-class people of the period.
Jacobs also explores what the library of an Enlightened individual might look like. Constantijn Huygens Jr. had an extensive library of over 5,000 works that covered literature, law, philosophy, and science. His collection included many prohibited books and pornography with limited religious writings.
“Huygens’s remarkable library . . . is a study in what a highly educated layman with wide-ranging interests did, and did not, care to read (85).”
She also explores the illicit trade of forbidden books. The widow Stockdorff who traveled to Paris in 1771 to purchase prohibited and pornographic books in her role as a book trafficker ended up arrested by the authorities and spent two years in the infamous Bastille.
The last half of the book was spent discussing the Enlightenment in different European countries like Scotland, Germany, and Italy, along with government repression in many European countries in the 1790s after the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.
“The French Revolution asserted democracy and the end of absolutism in church and state in ways that forever put these ideals on the agenda of the Western World ( 290).”
The first half of the book did a better job at illustrating how Enlightenment ideas gradually changed people’s perceptions of time and space, how they developed a secular conception of these things, while the second half gets little lost and muddled with its focus on the Enlightenment in different countries. The two halves almost felt like two different books.
As Jacobs is careful to note, this doesn’t mean Enlightenment thinkers or people of the period ignored religious questions or abandoned their religions completely, but rather secular concerns began to coexist with religious ones as being equally, if not more, important.
“Attachment to the world—the here and the now—to a life lived without constant reference to God, became increasingly commonplace and the source of an explosion of innovative thinking about society, government, and the economy (12).”
The popularity of books like Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World which discussed the customs and practices of different world religions without addressing the veracity of their beliefs showed people could read, discuss, and study religions in new secular ways without necessarily believing in or concerning themselves with its truth.
Enlightened ideas were adopted more readily by Protestants than Catholics and were found in cities more than the rural countryside. The origins of the Enlightenment stem from French-Protestant exiles fleeing to the freer and less repressive Dutch Republic, which allowed them to publish more controversial books without the heavy state-sponsored censorship of Louis XIV, and provided them with ample resentment against religious intolerance and absolutist government repression. Many of the exiles were journalists that took their criticisms of French absolutism to the international level. By 1700 half the books published on continental Europe originated in the Dutch Republic.
The Enlightenment was also a product of coming to grip with a bigger and more diverse world. The discovery of new continents in the Americas expanded European’s awareness of the size and diversity of the world. They confronted many new tribes who held a plethora of strange religious beliefs and customs. Colonialism also led to expanded contact with diverse peoples from Africa and Asia. Commercial expansion of these European empires and the spread of money economies also fueled a desire for greater understanding and knowledge of the customs and beliefs of other people. While missionaries tried to “civilize” and convert natives, these meetings undermined religious certainty and authority. The simultaneous growth of the publishing industry fed the curiosity of educated Europeans about these foreign lands.
By 1600, the average educated person was aware of these vast new continents. The booming genre of travel literature allowed readers to imagine new possibilitities, identify shortcomings of their own world, and analyze differences between their lives and often exotic imaginary ones. It encouraged European readers to consider and express new views on sexuality, religion, and death. These ideas spread through translations across Europe, even to the furthest reaches of Eastern Europe like Poland and Armenia. The once local world of many Europeans developed into a broader international one.
Growing commerce abroad led to new public spaces at home. Cafes and salons appeared where educated city-dwellers could read the latest newspapers and intellectual journals such as the Spectator, and discuss the newest ideas and news with fellow patrons. Eating clubs of London brought the educated middle-class in contact with the governing elites and intellectuals. The spread of Freemason Lodges across Europe provided another place to spread Enlightenment ideas and ideals of brotherhood. Many of these places also provided anonymity to share more extreme and blasphemous ideas such as the irreligious pamphlet the Treatise of the Three Imposters, which denounced Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed as frauds. Intellectual Societies such as the Select Society in Edinburgh that included leading members of the Scottish Enlightenment like David Hume and Adam Smith discussed topics that included the well-being of the state, the economy, and the status of women. The period featured the birth of the public sphere where the average educated person and mercantile classes could read and converse about the topics of the day.
European understanding of space also changed in response to the Copernican Revolution and Newtonian science. Many theologians took up the challenges the new science presented by arguing that mathematics and the new scientific discoveries could be adopted to Christian beliefs. They could be employed to “augment piety and exalt the Grand Architect . . . [and] reinforce the theology of order and providential design (19).” Thinkers like Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton championed the position that science could serve theology and that physico-theology could stand against deism, atheism, and materialism. By 1700 most educated people had accepted Newton’s mathematical formulas describing gravity and thus had changed their understanding of space. Newton’s student, Samuel Clarke, used his extensive correspondence to spread these ideas to Protestant congregations throughout Europe. In general, this Moderate Enlightenment embraced science, religious tolerance, and avoided doctrinal disputes between Christians.
At the same time, other thinkers had stopped invoking God to explain societal issues and problems in the world. People wanted better explanations to explain the world and improve their social situation. Economics and inequality replaced Original Sin to explain the ills of society. New Enlightenment political theories arose in response to the numerous revolts against kings and authorities that had defined the previous age such as the English Civil War, the Netherlands overthrowing Spanish power, and the Thirty Years Wars. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Hugo Grotius and Spinoza offered a political philosophy that denigrated the divine rights of kings and replaced it with one based on consent of the people and protection of property.
A Radical change in the perception of time also occurred during the Enlightenment. Christian time gave way to secular time. Most people of the late 17th and early 18th century, including educated ones like Isaac Newton and John Locke, would have understood the world to be 6000 years old. Their entire sense of time was framed around religious events. Protestant time was framed around the beginning of creation and the end of the world, while Catholic time was constructed around the plethora of Saints’ Days as evidenced by almanacs from the period.
Early attempts to secularize time took the form of profane almanacs focused on the lives famous artists, scientists, and philosophers rather than saints or religious events.
“In March, the reader might begin on the first day honoring Moses, and then go on to think about Michelangelo, remembering the Ides of March (15th) when Brutus murdered Caesar, and among the moderns take note of Turgot, Toland, Newton, Wollaston, and Descartes. In April, Jesus Christ and Hobbes got their days. May offered Albert Durer, Campanella, and Voltaire, while June honored Anthony Collins, Leibniz, J. J Rousseau (54-55).”
The anonymous author of this almanac had created a neutral calendar that a person of any religion could accept, which drew the ire of the French Parlament. By the middle of the 17th century even almanacs that included religious material often had blank spaces for people to record and keep track of their own business affairs.
“The mundane began to mix effortlessly with prophecy (60).”
By 1750, it became more common for almanacs to frame chronology on the reigns of monarchs or currency exchange rates rather than on sacred time. By the 1780s, the political upheavals that led to the French Revolution decimated the Christian conception of time completely. The French Revolution created a new calendar and partisans who supported the revolution proclaimed that the revolution of 1789 was the new beginning of time.
Research on fossils and geology expanded people’s conceptions of the length of time and forced them to contend with the problems of the biblical timeframe. The work of naturalist Count de Buffon on fossils and the cooling time of iron led him to suggest the world was 75,000 years old, although it seems he really thought the world was 10 million years old in private. Benoît de Maillet also used fossils to estimate the earth was 2 billion years old and argued all life had originated in the sea. In light of these vast time frames, many in the educated classes rejected scripture as offering anything useful to say about time. This represented an expansion of time in which time was conceived in more expansive and broader terms.
The new concept of time found further support with the proliferation of new technologies of time such as pocket watches and clocks that made time a more substantial part of everyday life, especially in England and the Dutch Republic. While these were still seen as luxury items, the prices of watches dropped between 1680s to 1810 and became more readily available to the average person. The cheapest watches of the day could be purchased for one pound.
Even the way people talked about time changed. Prior to 1700s references to time in literary works and diaries were more general in which people referred to doing something in the morning or the evening, but this was replaced with recording daily events at specific hours. It is in the early 1700s where personal writings and other literature begin to use the phrase “o’ clock” to indicate specific hours.
People also became more concerned with how they spent their time. Diaries of this period indicate people became concerned over using their precious time wisely and not wasting it.
Two factors led to a shift in Protestant thinking about time. Once Protestants abandoned a strict belief in predestination of their Puritan predecessors, many felt anxiety about the proper use of their time.
“The emphasis now centered on living and practicing a religiosity of pious control over time. It would lead to self-disciplining and self-control imposed by habits, customs, and comings and goings in the service of faith. Every action was to be monitored; the self had to be constrained within the parameters set up by worldly time (71).”
This went hand-in-hand with a new emphasis in the Church of England that attempted to reconnect morality and Godliness, and by extension put more emphasis on using time for religious practices and performing good works. Many religious diaries of the time castigate idleness and laziness. Eventually in the late 18th century we start finding diaries describing everyday secular events of people’s daily lives.
The second factor that influenced Protestants changing thoughts on time was Newton’s principle of absolute time that proposed time as independent of observers and uniform throughout the universe. Instead of events defining time, time exists as an independent entity from everything else. It became like a setting in a play for secular history and personal events to unfold.
“It forms part of the scaffolding that undergirds narrativity. The shift among Westerners toward an embrace of worldly time was profound, one of the singular and lasting consequences—or better said, causes—of the Enlightenment. But it occurred gradually and millions of believers in biblical time can be found to this day (69).”
Although better known philosophers like Voltaire, Montesquieu, Kant are mentioned, the book avoids the usual predominance of the major thinkers of the period to explore the changing cultural and social trends, and spends time dealing with the average educated person and how they would have viewed the world.
“Many of these small voices from the eighteenth century remain relatively unknown to our day. . . .They speak without assuming that they are in the vanguard of a movement of ideas that will transform Western thinking on a wide variety of topics. They are therefore all the more valuable because they allow us to see the “seepage” of ideas in an age that was coming to terms with the discovery of the world’s peoples, with religious conflict, and with vast differences in wealth of regions close to home and far away (114).”
Henry Penruddocke Wyndham was a worldly traveler and tourist who was appalled at the poverty he found while visiting Ireland and Sicily, praised politeness and civility as human ideals, and admired Roman Antiquities over modern churches. The publisher Robert Dodsley was known for publishing Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke and possibly being the anonymous author of The Oeconomy of Human Life, which appeared in over 200 editions and was translated into numerous languages. The book was “intended to guide a worldly life well-lived (95)” without the need of priests. Enlightened chaplain Samuel Dickinson wrote positively of the African peoples he met during his journeys on the ship Dunkirk and challenged European stereotypes of Africans as indolent. He proposed that their hot climate and the easiness to achieve their needs and wants within their environment explained this behavior rather than some inherent racial characteristic. He was a man who embraced cultural difference. John Anderson was a faculty member of Glasgow that critiqued primogeniture and argued for responsibility and fairness of men to leave equal inheritance to all their children. He expressed belief in the progress of science and the benefits of improved technology for the lower classes, believing machines would reduce the burden of labor. Isabella de Moerloose was a freethinker who published a 600 page autobiography that expressed her rejection of the Catholic clergy, organized religion, and contained frank accounts of sexuality. Under the inspiration of the Spectator, Suzanne Necker created her own literary journal with the goal of guiding people to think for themselves. She was a fan of Voltaire and proposed putting up a statue of him by the sculptor Houdon. Évariste Parny was an erotic poet from the French Caribbean that expressed anti-clerical sentiments, voiced support for the American revolutionaries as freedom fighters against tyranny, and opposed slavery. He even earned the admiration of Voltaire. By looking at these ordinary people and thinkers rather than the more renowned philosophers of the time, Jacobs shows how Enlightenment ideas infiltrated the thoughts of more typical educated and middle-class people of the period.
Jacobs also explores what the library of an Enlightened individual might look like. Constantijn Huygens Jr. had an extensive library of over 5,000 works that covered literature, law, philosophy, and science. His collection included many prohibited books and pornography with limited religious writings.
“Huygens’s remarkable library . . . is a study in what a highly educated layman with wide-ranging interests did, and did not, care to read (85).”
She also explores the illicit trade of forbidden books. The widow Stockdorff who traveled to Paris in 1771 to purchase prohibited and pornographic books in her role as a book trafficker ended up arrested by the authorities and spent two years in the infamous Bastille.
The last half of the book was spent discussing the Enlightenment in different European countries like Scotland, Germany, and Italy, along with government repression in many European countries in the 1790s after the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.
“The French Revolution asserted democracy and the end of absolutism in church and state in ways that forever put these ideals on the agenda of the Western World ( 290).”
The first half of the book did a better job at illustrating how Enlightenment ideas gradually changed people’s perceptions of time and space, how they developed a secular conception of these things, while the second half gets little lost and muddled with its focus on the Enlightenment in different countries. The two halves almost felt like two different books.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 13, 2022
A nicely written account of the Enlightenment. The chapter on secular time was especially good. I preferred this contained treatment of the age to some of the more sprawling and therefore unfocused accounts of the age (Robertson, Israel, etc.).
December 20, 2021
I listened to the audio version of this title. There were so many disjointed facts that were presented at any given point over the course of this 10 hour presentation that it was difficult for me to stay focused. Some nonfiction history titles read like fiction. This book is not one of them. However, based solely on content I would give it 4 stars. I learned a lot, but I wished the text had been presented in a more engaging manner that would have held my attention. Despite the low rating that I gave this book, there is a wealth of information presented here for anyone interested in how the 18th century enlightenment and French Revolution shaped our modern western world.
August 15, 2019
This is more of an analysis on the specific secular thinkers of the Enlightenment and some of what they thought rather than tracing the influence of the ideas (besides "X writing was translated into many languages and went through many editions").
February 23, 2024
I suppose my expectations were different. I'd hoped this was going to be focused on Enlightenment thinking that had nothing to do with religion, whereas instead it's more about Enlightenment reactions to and rejections of religion.
Only not really, as it's not quite that focused. Instead, it seems to be more Enlightenment reactions to and rejections of specific types of organised Christian religion - especially the Catholic Church - which, if anything, makes the Enlightenment feel like little more than an annex to the Reformation.
This impression is compounded by the repeated references to the Freemasons - not in any idiotic conspiracy theory sense, but as an example of a secular society for debate and discussion and organisation. All fine - except that the Freemasons explicitly required (and still require) members to believe in God (or at least *a* god), and the entire organisation is explicitly based around Old Testament myths and vast amounts of ritualistic mumbo-jumbo. They may not be a traditional organised religion, but they're certainly founded on religious traditions, and they're certainly organised. This hardly makes them secular, in my books.
There is still lots of interesting stuff in here - it's about the Enlightenment, it would be amazing if there wasn't - but nothing much new. Without the clarity of focus promised by the title, it ends up feeling a bit disappointing - a quick overview of some aspects of the Enlightenment, without the depth of other overviews (like Ritchie Robertson's excellent, accessible history).
Only not really, as it's not quite that focused. Instead, it seems to be more Enlightenment reactions to and rejections of specific types of organised Christian religion - especially the Catholic Church - which, if anything, makes the Enlightenment feel like little more than an annex to the Reformation.
This impression is compounded by the repeated references to the Freemasons - not in any idiotic conspiracy theory sense, but as an example of a secular society for debate and discussion and organisation. All fine - except that the Freemasons explicitly required (and still require) members to believe in God (or at least *a* god), and the entire organisation is explicitly based around Old Testament myths and vast amounts of ritualistic mumbo-jumbo. They may not be a traditional organised religion, but they're certainly founded on religious traditions, and they're certainly organised. This hardly makes them secular, in my books.
There is still lots of interesting stuff in here - it's about the Enlightenment, it would be amazing if there wasn't - but nothing much new. Without the clarity of focus promised by the title, it ends up feeling a bit disappointing - a quick overview of some aspects of the Enlightenment, without the depth of other overviews (like Ritchie Robertson's excellent, accessible history).
April 18, 2024
Speed running! So far so good
May 9, 2024
Much here that I found interesting, but the presentation seemed to me to be somewhat scattershot and not especially well organized.
December 3, 2024
Pretty interesting overview that kinda zoomed in on some spots
March 4, 2021
I wrote a detailed review of this book on my blog. http://jollylibertarian.blogspot.com/...
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