The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers Paperback – November 1, 2003

this collection of lectures from eighty years ago by one of america's best and clearest teachers of history continues to inform and impress. as lincoln said, "we cannot escape history," and becker shows that the so-called modern thinkers, the philosophes of the late eighteenth century, could not escape the precepts of their medieval religious teachers. it took another hundred years to overturn some of these well-intentioned but misleading ideas. as keynes said, "it is not the new ideas that are so difficult to understand, but escaping the old ideas which ramify into all corners of our thinking<" or words to that effect.

Carl L. Becker is marvelous writer I first met while in college in the 1950s who upon rereading has even more to offer. The Age of Reason and Science that Voltaire, Newton and their contemporaries believed had assured their escape from Christianity's confines had, in Becker' view, merely tightened religion's hold upon their minds. Our 20th Century belief in rationality and technology has led into another cul-de-sac of complacency and self-congratulations while again leaving us constrained by pseudo-free-thinkinging-ness and an enormously inflated belief in our ability to think freely and without mythical constraints.

Wonderfully written with many references that I will purchase. I wore my first copy out with underlinings. Will not do likewise with this copy

Becker wrote a number of great books on history of philosophy and history of religion. This book can help you put into perspective what happened to the Protestant Reformation and the peoples Christian movement. This book is an important read.

This book is an intellectual tour-de-force. Carl Becker has a mastery of all the most-influential Enlightenment writers, assesses their ideas with beguiling ease, and quotes them with alacrity. While he examines the writings of the English and Scottish philosophers (particularly Hume), the emphasis of his analysis (or polemic, if you will) is on the French philosophers (Condorcet, Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc.), and what their influence wrought—the French Revolution. The American Revolution, and for that matter Hume’s later writings that shaped the thinking of Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison, is not touched upon at all.

The book is the result of several lectures Becker delivered at the Yale School of law in 1931. According to Johnson Kent Wright in the foreword, the lectures were lightly revised and published the following year. The copy I read is a second edition, published in 2002. Wright praises Becker for the “architectural clarity” of his writing, “the elegance and wit” of his presentation, and the “seductive elegance of his prose.” Becker himself said of his book: “This certainly isn’t history. I hope it’s philosophy, because if it’s not, it’s probably moonshine. . . .” My feeling is the book falls somewhere in between “elegance and wit” and “moonshine.” While I respect his intellect and analysis I’m not at all swayed by his argument.

Becker argues that the forward-looking ideas of the Enlightenment were hardly original but rather a rehash of philosophical thought from centuries past. “Far from being the first source of the modern outlook, as was widely supposed, the Enlightenment in fact represents the last bow of the medieval,” says Wright of Becker’s thesis. “For all their apparent hostility toward Christianity, the eighteenth-century philosophers ‘demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.’” That may be so, but nothing is created out of a vacuum. Where do philosophers sharpen their thinking but from reading what others have written before them? It’s what they did with it that matters. The past is prologue.

Politically, Becker was a liberal, deeply influenced by Henry Adams, “whose bleak vision of civilizational entropy was a constant reference point,” says Wright. Becker, like his contemporary James Beard, shared a decidedly cynical view of the American Founding Fathers. Beard went so far as to write a book “puncturing the pretensions of the American Founding,” a book since discredited as being based on faulty and incomplete scholarship. Since publication of Becker’s thesis, many of his arguments have been discredited as well, by Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay, not to mention a host of historians in our time. What do current historians say? Namely, that the Enlightenment philosophers (particularly Locke and Hume) deeply influenced the framers of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, the writers of the Federalist Papers, and who, in the person of Alexander Hamilton, produced four state papers that elevated America from an economic backwater to a national powerhouse. The papers were: Report on Public Credit, Report on a National Bank, Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank, and Report on the Subject of Manufacturers.

Becker scorns Enlightenment writers as “eager bearers of good tidings to mankind. Disinterested? Objectively detached? By no means.” To us, the inheritors of the world their ideas fostered, I say, thank you. I read Becker’s book in search of the perennial pony amidst the barnful of manure . . . and never found it. At some point, I realized Becker was writing at a time when capitalism and democracy itself appeared to be failing the American people, which helped me to understand his cynicism. However dated, his book is valuable for its informed and critical analysis. Four stars.

His reasoning is flawed, and I'm surprised people take this book seriously. Since this book was cited by a conservative writer in the NY Times Book Review, I should have been on my guard, but I thought it was going to be a laudatory treatment of the idealistic goals of the French philosophes. Fully 3/4 of the book is philosophical gibberish, and only in the very last pages of the fourth section does he reveal his true motive: to denigrate secular ideals as inherently coercive and to endorse laissez-faire responses to the Crash and the Depression that were contemporaneous with these lectures. His reasoning was that since the philosophes were impractical radicals without God, they were morally equivalent to Soviet Communists in intention and methods. Right wingers hate the Enlightenment and the men who brought it forth, but instead of just saying that they prefer the ancien regime, they slyly try to equate the Enlightenment with the Russian Revolution. Since FDR, the conservative project has been to undermine and kill every New Deal program and to re-install Wall Street as the rulers of America. This is another of their revered books, along with Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom," which also condemned the New Deal.

This was a pretty good history of philosophy book. It is not philosophy itself. It is comprised of four essays, the best of which, in my opinion, was the first.