I have a few outstanding promissory blogging notes and have not posted anything recently, so I thought I’d share the introduction to one of the things I’ve been working on and hope to soon complete: a bibliography on the European Enlightenment (roughly, from the middle of the seventeenth until the close of the eighteenth century, with the historical periods just prior and immediately following being of considerable importance as well). Incidentally, today is the birthday of Michael Harrington.
Introduction
As with most of my bibliographies, this one has two principal constraints: books, in English. I have not included the primary works of the leading scientists—including their precursors—(e.g., Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Joseph Black, Joseph Priestly, Antoine Lavoisier …), philosophes (e.g., Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot, Montesquieu) and philosophers (e.g., and in no particular order, Pierre Bayle, Marquis de Condorcet, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Frances Hutcheson, Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, G.E. Lessing, John Locke, Moses Mendelssohn, Thomas Reid, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Baruch Spinoza, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Christian Wolff) of this period (some of whom might be classified just outside the Enlightenment), assuming this literature is fairly well known or easy to look up. In fact, in addition to the secondary literature, this list contains a number of titles that are relevant to the historical periods just prior to and immediately following the Enlightenment in Europe. The history and myriad consequences of the Enlightenment must today of course be placed within a global and cosmopolitan framework in which the triune principles and virtues of liberté, égalité, and fraternité (including the obligations and imperatives of individual human dignity, social justice, and human rights) are the birthright of every human being. The democratic struggles against conformism, religious and ethno-nationalism, authoritarian populism, fascism, militarism, parochialism, racism, sexism, conspicuous consumption and acquisitiveness, unbridled ambition, celebrity worship and fame-seeking, the will to dominate others, in short, “false consciousness” (well-captured in Erich Fromm’s clever locution, ‘the pathology of normalcy’), take place today in concert with unprecedented (with regard to this civilization) and indispensable ecological awareness and environmental concerns evidenced in the first place by response to the facts of catastrophic global climate change. Utopian thought and imagination thus becomes urgently relevant, one reason we can speak, without contradiction, of envisioning “real utopias,” even as our dreams and ideals will never become wholly incarnate, for we cannot but help appreciate the fact that the “perfectibility” of man (after Condorcet and Godwin) does not entail perfection (while human nature is not, so to speak, set in stone, it remains human, however divine our aspirations or the potential for self-realization). I have appended a large number of bibliographies to this compilation germane to these topics and questions.
While not exhaustive, I hope this bibliography is fairly comprehensive within its constraints. I welcome notice of works believed to be conspicuous by their absence.
I cannot pin down the precise reasons, but the compilation of some bibliographies is more enjoyable than others, the instant case—to borrow a phrase from the law—being a perfect example. It likely has something to do with the understandable hence justifiable dystopian or apocalyptic-like tenor of our time in crisp contrast to the spirit and logic of the European Enlightenment which, for me at any rate, has served as an intellectual and emotional antidote to that altogether bleak and, yes, rational assessment (whatever the subsequent critiques of the European Enlightenment, they in no way detract from its immense and enduring philosophical, moral, scientific, political and cultural value*). And the motivating pleasure and subsequent satisfaction has more than a little to do with the impact on yours truly of the latest cluster of remarkable books penned by Jonathan I. Israel.
* For a vigorous response to the more over-the-top or hyperbolic critiques (some of which exhibit the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy), please see Stephen Eric Bronner’s Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (Columbia University Press, 2004).
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