Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Enlightenment in England
- 2 The Scottish Enlightenment
- 3 The Enlightenment in France
- 4 The Enlightenment in the Netherlands
- 5 The Enlightenment in Switzerland
- 6 The Italian Enlightenment
- 7 The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany
- 8 The Enlightenment in Catholic Germany
- 9 Reform Catholicism and Political Radicalism in the Austrian Enlightenment
- 10 Bohemia: From Darkness into Light
- 11 The Enlightenment in Sweden
- 12 The Russian Enlightenment
- 13 Enlightenment and the Politics of American Nature
- Afterword
- Notes to the text
- Further reading
- Index
3 - The Enlightenment in France
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Enlightenment in England
- 2 The Scottish Enlightenment
- 3 The Enlightenment in France
- 4 The Enlightenment in the Netherlands
- 5 The Enlightenment in Switzerland
- 6 The Italian Enlightenment
- 7 The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany
- 8 The Enlightenment in Catholic Germany
- 9 Reform Catholicism and Political Radicalism in the Austrian Enlightenment
- 10 Bohemia: From Darkness into Light
- 11 The Enlightenment in Sweden
- 12 The Russian Enlightenment
- 13 Enlightenment and the Politics of American Nature
- Afterword
- Notes to the text
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
Since the Enlightenment is usually regarded as something that happened rather more in France than anywhere else, this is perhaps the best place to ask what it was, even if the question can only be answered in the vaguest of terms. It was not some kind of a torch, kindled by Bacon, blown into flame by Newton and Locke and thence passed to the outstretched hands of the French philosophes. If it had anything to do with light, it was more like the green band in the rainbow, which began mostly as blue and ended up unmistakably yellow. Some such way of looking at things at least serves as a reminder that the movement was in a state of continual change, but it remains such a crude oversimplification that it may be more of a hindrance than a help, for the Enlightenment was less a body of doctrine than a number of shared premises from which men of different temperaments, placed in different situations, drew quite radically different conclusions.
The Enlightenment implied a simultaneous commitment to three assumptions, which had not been generally believed or taken for granted before the latter part of the seventeenth century, and which were to appear increasingly implausible in the nineteenth. The first of these was that Nature was a self-regulating system of laws.
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- Information
- The Enlightenment in National Context , pp. 41 - 53Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1981
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