Cover: The Enlightenment, 2nd Edition by Margaret C. Jacob
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The Enlightenment

A Brief History with DocumentsSecond Edition ©2017 Margaret C. Jacob

In an unusually diverse collection, Margaret Jacob presents the eighteenth-century movement known as the Enlightenment that forever changed the political, religious, and educational landscape of the day. Selections by some of the period’s most important thinkers include pieces by Locke, Rousseau, Ma...
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ISBN:9781319049867

ISBN:9781319048860

Cover: The Enlightenment, 2nd Edition by Margaret C. Jacob

In an unusually diverse collection, Margaret Jacob presents the eighteenth-century movement known as the Enlightenment that forever changed the political, religious, and educational landscape of the day. Selections by some of the period’s most important thinkers include pieces by Locke, Rousseau, Mary Wortley Montagu, and Denis Diderot. New additions to the document collection include excerpts from Peter Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary as well as The Indiscreet Jewels, Diderot’s novel set in the Congo but clearly aimed at the French court. Jacob covers the movement’s lengthy evolution in a comprehensive introduction, which establishes the issues central to understanding the documents and provides important background on the political and social debates of the period. All documents are preceded by headnotes, and the volume includes a chronology, map, illustrations, and an updated bibliography and index. A list of Questions for Consideration has also been added for this edition.

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New to This Edition

“Jacob’s introduction provides an original understanding of the Enlightenment, in particular through its exceptionally international treatment that explores England, France, and deeper into the continent. The author is also very successful at merging more traditional intellectual history with newer approaches. The selection of documents gives the reader an excellent sense of the range of issues that absorbed the philosophes.”
— Jack R. Censer, George Mason University

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Table of Contents

Foreword
Preface
Maps and Illustrations

PART ONE
Introduction: The Struggle to Create a New Culture
Political Origins
Scientific and Religious Origins
The Public Sphere
Enlightened Feminism
Reworking Seventeenth-Century Formal Philosophy
A Clandestine Universe
A Protestant Odyssey
Travel Literature
Anglophilia
Mid-Century Crisis
Rousseau
The International Republican Conversation, 1775–1800
Slavery, Imperialism, and the French Revolution
The Legacy of the Enlightenment

PART TWO
The Documents
1. Order and Disorder in Church and State Depicted
2. John Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, 1693
3. Peter Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, 1697
4. Treatise of the Three Impostors, 1719
5. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, 1733
6. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters, 1716–1718
7. Denis Diderot, Encyclopedia, 1751
8. Denis Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels, 1748
9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762
10. Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment? 1784

APPENDIXES

An Enlightenment Chronology (1685–1800)
Selected Bibliography
Questions for Consideration

Index

Headshot of Margaret C. Jacob

Margaret C. Jacob

Margaret C. Jacob is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has written extensively on aspects of the Enlightenment as well as the cultural roots of the First Industrial Revolution.  Her works include The First Knowledge Economy, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe, and The Newtonians and the English Revolution. She has been president of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.