Margaret Jacob

A major history of how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday livesThe Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, and travelers. Margaret Jacob takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come.

A major new history of how the Enlightenment transformed people’s everyday livesThe Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Margaret Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of the Enlightenment, reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions, their failures as the result of blind economic forces. A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come.

Gain insight into The Enlightenment from the eras most influential thinkers as Enlightenment explores the impact this time period had on the political, religious, and educational landscape of the day.

WESTERN CIVILIZATION: IDEAS, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY, Eleventh Edition, offers an in-depth introduction to political, cultural, and intellectual history. Readers appreciate the book's accessible writing style as well as its brevity, clarity, and careful selection of content. Updated with more recent scholarship, the eleventh edition retains many popular features that help readers absorb and understand the material, including comparative timelines, full-color art essays, and profile and primary source boxes in each chapter.

WESTERN CIVILIZATION: IDEAS, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY, Eleventh Edition, offers an in-depth introduction to political, cultural, and intellectual history. Readers appreciate the book's accessible writing style as well as its brevity, clarity, and careful selection of content. Updated with more recent scholarship, the eleventh edition retains many popular features that help readers absorb and understand the material, including comparative timelines, full-color art essays, and profile and primary source boxes in each chapter.

WESTERN CIVILIZATION: IDEAS, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY, Since 1400, Eleventh Edition, offers an in-depth introduction to political, cultural, and intellectual history. Readers appreciate the book's accessible writing style as well as its brevity, clarity, and careful selection of content. Updated with more recent scholarship, the eleventh edition retains many popular features that help readers absorb and understand the material, including comparative timelines, full-color art essays, and profile and primary source boxes in each chapter.

WESTERN CIVILIZATION: IDEAS, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY, Eleventh Edition, offers an in-depth introduction to political, cultural, and intellectual history. Readers appreciate the book's accessible writing style as well as its brevity, clarity, and careful selection of content. Updated with more recent scholarship, the eleventh edition retains many popular features that help readers absorb and understand the material, including comparative timelines, full-color art essays, and profile and primary source boxes in each chapter.

This text examines the problem of historical truth. Seeking the roots of contemporary historical study in the Enlightenment, the authors argue that a model of historical research, based on neutrality and objectivity, served historians well until World War II. After that post-modernism suggested history could not reveal the truth about the past and the rise of social history produced a great amount of statistics which effectively swamped the search for historical truth. Accepting that much of history teaching has been flawed, the authors nevertheless argue for an affirmation of historical knowledge against the doubts of the sceptics and the relativists, guiding the reader through the complex areas of political correctness and multiculturalism.