The Roads to Modernity The British, French, and American Enlightenments
, by HIMMELFARB, GERTRUDENote: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.
- ISBN: 9781400077229 | 1400077222
- Cover: Paperback
- Copyright: 8/9/2005
In an elegant, eminently readable work, one of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history.The Roads to Modernityreclaims the Enlightenmentan 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 ethichumane, compassionate, and realisticthat still resonates strongly today, in America perhaps even more than in Europe. The Roads to Modernityis a remarkable and illuminating contribution to the history of ideas.