The Secular Enlightenment, Margaret Jacob
The Secular Enlightenment, Margaret Jacob
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The Secular Enlightenment

Author: Margaret Jacob

Narrator: Elizabeth Wiley

Unabridged: 10 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/14/2020


Synopsis

The Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways that 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, readers, and travelers.

Margaret Jacob reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes listeners 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. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book.

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.

About Margaret Jacob

Margaret C. Jacob is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her many books include The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans and The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850. She lives in Los Angeles.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Drkshadow03 on September 16, 2023

The Enlightenment was an 18th century intellectual and cultural movement in Western Europe that was critical “about once unquestioned truths” and developed new ideas about religion, epistemology, morality, and the best form of society, which expanded “the mental universe of the literate (1).” The Enl......more

Goodreads review by Steve on April 16, 2021

This is a great little book on the Enlightenment! The "brief history" is less than 100 pages. The remainder of the book is a collection of excerpts from original documents of Enlightenment authors. Despite the book's compact size, I found it gave me some valuable insights into the period and a new pe......more

Goodreads review by Erin on October 09, 2020

Jacob does a pretty good job explaining the Enlightenment. Voltaire always cracks me up with his witticisms, but for the most part I don't find the other philosophers as engaging (maybe part of this also has to do with that I was forced to read this).......more

Goodreads review by Alyssa on January 19, 2018

I had to read this for my HST 400 class. It's really informative it's just I don't really enjoy reading the work of philosophes. Although I did enjoy Diderot and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. I can't stand Locke or Voltaire.......more

Goodreads review by Tiffany on December 26, 2012

I read this for my Western Perspective II class. I honestly loved it! The beginning is an introduction by the author and part two of the book is a collaboration of first-sources. I liked it so much instead of selling it I re-gifted it to a good friend of mine I new would enjoy it.......more