The Enlightenment

This second volume picks up the argument of the first part of Peter Gay's study of the Enlightenment. Here Gay turns to the philosophes, the thinkers of eighteenth-century Europe, and sets out what they hoped to achieve and how they understood the societies around them. The book also examines the way these writers tested ideas, questioning received assumptions with a sharp critical eye. Its central concern is their commitment to human welfare and to individual liberty, values that Gay traces through their writings and intellectual aims.

Readers of intellectual history will find here a close study of the Enlightenment as a movement of ideas, rather than a simple survey of its famous names. Gay, a historian who taught at Columbia University, writes for those who want to understand how these thinkers reasoned about politics, religion and social life.