The Roads to Modernity: The British French and American Enlightenments

About this book

One of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history. The Roads to Modernity reclaims the Enlightenmentan extraordinary time bursting with new ideas about the human condition in the realms of politics society and religionfrom historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and America. Contrasting the Enlightenments in the three nations Gertrude Himmelfarb demonstrates the primacy of the British and the wisdom and foresight of thinkers such as Adam Smith David Hume Thomas Paine the Earl of Shaftesbury Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke who established its unique character and historic importance. It is this Enlightenment she argues that created a moral and social philosophyhumane compassionate and realisticthat still resonates strongly today in America perhaps even more so than in Europe. This is an illuminating contribution to the history of ideas.