Age of Enlightenment [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION During most of the 19th Century, critics, philosophers, historians and artists all damned the 18th Century as the "Age of Prose and Reason": onesided, shallow, rationalistic, unable to understand man and the universe, a static rather than a dynamic culture. The range of their condemnations was great, from Wordsworth's reference to Voltaire's Candide as "that dull product of a scoffer's pen" to James Russell Lowell's objection to the whole 18th Century as "that razor-ridden age." Our own generation has learned to look on the 18th Century with less jaundiced vision. We can indeed produce so well balanced a treatment of the Enlightenment as this one of Peter Gay's. For, though Professor Gay likes the philosophes he writes about, and shares their basic belief in the ability to use thought to make this earth a better place, he is fully aware of the complexities of the Age of Enlightenment, knows its doubts, its fears, its own full awareness of how far man is from complete rationality, and its occasional understandable impatience with ordinary human limitations. He finds place in this book for the full range of the culture of the age, its important German phases, so often pushed into the background in English and American works on the subject, as well as its more familiar British and French phases. He manages, without bogging down in a mass of detail, to give the reader telling bits of the mind and heart of these enlightened thinkers, who were also, as he shows, often enlightened doers. Here then, in remarkably succinct form, is the age which, more than any other, brought to some kind of focus in the awareness of millions (not just of a middle class) those revolutionary ideas we are still living with, still struggling for or against. Call this what you will—the Industrial Revolution, the democratic revolution, the scientific revolution, the intellectual revolution, or simply "modernization," "revolution of rising expectations," even "Americanization"—it is now worldwide. Professor Gay brings out clearly the extent to which the philosophes of the Enlightenment rejected the traditional Christian picture of a universe divided between a City of God and a City of Earth. Louis de Saint-Just, the youthful French revolutionary, put it neatly in a speech to the Convention: "Happiness is a new idea in Europe." And he was talking not simply about ultimate happiness in another and heavenly world, but about the concept of happiness in the here and now. But Professor Gay also shows the extent to which most people, including at bottom the philosophes themselves, continued to accept of the basic tenets of the Western Judeo-Christian tradition. The 19th Century, although it was extremely critical of the Enlightenment, still kept much of its predecessor's faith in the possibility of progress toward a better world. Many of the intellectuals of our own century, faced with two world wars, a great depression, an apparently unending and not really very cold war, have sometimes seemed to reject more completely than the romantic generation of 1800 ever did the whole heritage of the Enlightenment. However, that heritage is clearly alive among millions. West and East, even in the midst of all the horrors of our present Time of Troubles. For, to revert to Arnold Toynbee's famous figure of the climbers on the cliff, our Western civilization really did in the Age of Enlightenment begin to edge itself precariously upward onto a new foothold. It is still there. CRANE BRINTON Harvard University