The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments
Search in google:
In an elegant, eminently readable work, one of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history. The Roads to Modernity reclaims the Enlightenment–an extraordinary time bursting with new ideas about human nature, politics, society, and religion—from 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, Himmelfarb demonstrates the primacy and wisdom of the British, exemplified in such thinkers as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, as well as the unique and enduring contributions of the American Founders. It is their Enlightenments, she argues, that created a social ethic–humane, compassionate, and realistic–that still resonates strongly today, in America perhaps even more than in Europe.The Roads to Modernity is a remarkable and illuminating contribution to the history of ideas. The Washington Post - Stephen Eric Bronner The Roads to Modernity is an exceptionally well written and clever attempt -- all the more clever since its political aims are never made explicit -- to employ a redefined Enlightenment both as a bulwark for neoconservatism and as a device for explaining current conflicts between supposed allies. In Himmelfarb's proudly revisionist history, the English and American variants of the Enlightenment thus confront the French one while, incredibly, she identifies the Enlightenment's best aspects with an attachment to "religious dispositions," a morally upright capitalism and a "benign imperialism."
The British Enlightenment : the sociology of virtue231"Social affections" and religious dispositions252Political economy and moral sentiments533Edmund Burke's enlightenment714Radical dissenters935Methodism : "a social religion"1166"The age of benevolence"131The French Enlightenment : the ideology of reason147The American Enlightenment : the politics of liberty189
