This is the second and final installment of Peter Gay's most erudite, learned and comprehensive treatment of the Enlightenment in Western Europe. The first volume focused largely on what the "little flock of philosophes" read and thought. This volume's focus is more centered around the implementation of their ideas into discernible programs in science, art, education and politics.
Like the first volume, this volume is not organized by chronology, but rather by topical treatment. It focuses largely on a couple of dozen or so philosophes and their writings and philosophies, some more deeply covered than others. The most covered ones include: Voltaire, Hume, Gibbon, Rousseau, Lessing and Diderot. The other less covered are Adam Smith, Newton, Locke, Condorcet, Paine, Beccaria, Bentham, Montesquieu, Holbach, D'Alembert and Kant. There is also a mention of the some of the American revolutionaries, like Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Adams and Jefferson (toward the end of the book).
Also like the first volume, this is an interpretational intellectual history; a synthesis of a sort. There are no events described (except tangentially to make a point about something else); no dates to follow and memorize. Thus, it's not a typical and popular history of a period.
Like the first volume, the work is a challenging read. It took me almost 4 months to finish it. The prose is relatively fluid, but takes some time getting used to the language, as Peter Gay is of Germanic origin and was writing back in the 1960's. But don't allow this to deter you from reading it. This is one of the most intellectually sophisticated and for that reason satisfying works of intellectual history ever written.
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