Enlightenment Thought

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"Margaret L. King has put together a highly representative selection of readings from most of the more significant—but by no means the most obvious—texts by the authors who made up the movement we have come to call the 'Enlightenment.' They range across much of Europe and the Americas, and from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. In the originality of the choice of texts, in its range and depth, this collection offers both wide coverage and striking insights into the intellectual transformation which has done more than any other to shape the world in which we live today. It is simply the best introduction to the subject now available."
      —Anthony Pagden, UCLA, and author of The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters

"King offers an ambitious and exciting anthology, bringing together both classic and previously overlooked texts from men and women from very different national backgrounds and languages. It provides critical materials for thinking about issues of the Enlightenment that still resonate with us, as we untangle the relationships between nature, reason, religion, and rights. King's translation work is particularly impressive and her translations accessible, even for novice readers."
      —Jennifer Heuer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of The Family and The Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830

About the Author:

Margaret L. King is Professor of History, Emerita, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the recipient of The Renaissance Society of America’s 2018 Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award.

Contents:

Chronology, Introduction

Chapter One - Casting Out Idols: 1620–1697

• Idols, or false notions: Francis Bacon, The New Instrument (1620)
• I think, therefore I am: René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637)
• God, or Nature: Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)
• The system of the world: Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687)
• He searched for truth throughout his life: Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697)

Chapter Two - The Learned Maid: 1638–1740

• A face raised toward heaven: Anna Maria van Schurman, Whether the Study of Letters Befits a Christian Woman (1638)
• The worlds I have made: Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (1666)
• A finer sort of cattle: Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673)
• I warn you of the world: Madame de Maintenon, Letter: On the Education of the Demoiselles of Saint-Cyr (August 1, 1686), and Instruction: On the World (1707)
• The daybreak of your reason: Émilie Du Châtelet, Fundamentals of Physics (1740)

Chapter Three - A State of Perfect Freedom: 1689–1695

• The chief criterion of the True Church: John Locke, Letter on Toleration (1689)
• Freedom from any superior power on earth: John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689)
• A white paper, with nothing written on it: John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
• Let your rules be as few as possible: John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
• From death, Jesus Christ restores all to life: John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695)

Chapter Four - All Things Made New: 1725–1784

• In the wilderness, they are reborn: Giambattista Vico, The New Science (1725/1730/1744)
• Without these Names, nothing can be known, Carl Linnaeus, System of Nature (1735)
• All the clouds at last are lifted: Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, The Successive Advancement of the Human Mind (1750)
• A genealogical or encyclopedic tree of knowledge: Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse (1751)
• Dare to know! : Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment? (1784)

Chapter Five - Mind, Soul, and God: 1740–1779

• The narrow limits of human understanding: David Hume, An Abstract of a Book Lately Published (1740)
• The soul is but an empty word: Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1747)
• All is reduced to sensation: Claude Adrien Helvétius, On the Mind (1758)
• An endless web of fantasies and falsehoods: Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, Common Sense (1772)
• Let each believe that his own ring is real: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise (1779)

Chapter Six - Crush That Infamous Thing: 1733–1764

• This is the country of sects: Voltaire, Philosophical Letters (1733)
• Disfigured by myth, until enlightenment comes: Voltaire, The Culture and Spirit of Nations (1756)
• The best of all possible worlds: Voltaire, Candide (1759)
• Are we not all children of the same God?: Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance (1763)
• If a book displeases you, refute it! : Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764)

Chapter Seven - Toward the Greater Good: 1748–1776

• Things must be so ordered that power checks power, Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
• Complete freedom of trade must be ensured: François Quesnay, General Maxims for the Economic Management of an Agricultural Kingdom (1758)
• The nation's war against the citizen: Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (1764)
• There is no peace in the absence of justice: Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)
• Led by an invisible hand: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)

Chapter Eight - Encountering Others: 1688–1785

• Thus died this great man: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave (1688)
• Not one sins the less for not being Christian: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Embassy Letters (1716–1718)
• Do you not restore to them their liberty?: Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of European Colonies and Commerce in the Two Indies (1770)
• Some things which are rather interesting: Captain James Cook, Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World (1777)
• The inner genius of my being: Johann Gottfried von Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind (1785)

Chapter - Nine Citizen of Geneva: 1755–1782

• The most cunning project ever to enter the human mind: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Human Inequality (1754)
• The supreme direction of the General Will: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)
• Two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise (1761)
• Build a fence around your child’s soul: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (1762)
• This man will be myself: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1770)

Chapter Ten - Vindications of Women: 1685–1792

• No higher design than to get her a husband: Mary Astell, Reflections on Marriage (1700)
• The days of my bondage begin: Anna Stanisławska, Orphan Girl (1685)
• A dying victim dragged to the altar: Denis Diderot, The Nun (1760/1780)
• Created to be the toy of man: Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
• Man, are you capable of being just?: Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman as Citizen (1791)

Chapter Eleven - American Reverberations: 1771–1792

• I took upon me to assert my freedom: Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1771/1792)
• Freedom has been hunted round the globe: Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
• Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights: Thomas Jefferson and Others, Declaration of Independence (1776)
• A safeguard against faction and insurrection: James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787)
• An end to government by force and fraud: Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791–1792)

Chapter Twelve - Enlightenment's End: 1790–1794

• A partnership of the living, the dead, and those unborn: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
• The future destiny of the human species: Nicolas de Condorcet, A Sketch of a Historical Portrait of the Progress of the Human Mind (1793–1794)

Texts and Studies, Index