The enlightenment : an interpretation. [Vol. 2], The science of freedom

Peter Gay will inevitably leave his stamp on our conception of the Enlight- ment for decades to come. The sheer bulk of his writing on the subject alone will ensure that. He began his re-interpretation of the movement in 1959 with Voltaire's Politics: the Poet as Realist, showing the foremost philosophe to have been a much more liberal and practical political thinker than had often been assumed. There followed in 1964 The Party of Humanity, a series of essays in which Gay challenged some of the commonplace characterizations of the philosophes, especially the notion that they were impractical idealists. Then in 1966 he published The Rise of Modern Paganism, the first volume of his interpretation of the Enlightenment. He completed this analysis in 1969 with a second tome entitled The Science of Freedom. Finally last year he capped his work with The Bridge of Criticism, a debate among Lucian, Eras- mus, and Voltaire which the author admits amounts to a polemic on behalf of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile he had propagated his view of the movement in the introductions to his translations of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary and Candide, his anthologies of the works of Deists and of Locke on educa- tion, and his numerous articles and public lecture. -- Description from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2737948 (April 17, 2012). The Science of Freedom completes Peter Gay's brilliant reinterpretation of the Enlightenment of the philosophes begun in The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism . In that book, Mr. Gray analyzed the struggle in qhich the philosophes pitted classical pagan thought against their Christian heritage. In the present book, which can be read independently as a social history of the Enlightenment, he describes the philosophes' environment, their program, their views of progress, of science, of art, of society, and of politics. He explains the complex relantionship an interaction between the two Enlightenmentsthe philosophic movement and the environment from which the philosophes drew ideas and support. His masterful appraisal opens a new range of insights into the Enlightenment's critical method and its humane and libertarian vision. This work completes the author's reinterpretation begun in "The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism". It describes the programme of the "philosophes" and their views of society, with the aim of providing insights into the Enlightenment's critical method and its human and libertarian vision The eighteenth-century Enlightenment marks the beginning of the modern age, when the scientific method and belief in reason and progress came to hold sway over the Western world.

The second volume of Peter Gay's in-depth study of the dawn of the modern world—the Age of Reason.

IN THE CENTURY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT, educated Europeans awoke to a new sense of life.