National Book Award Non Fiction Winner
The Enlightenment: An Interpretation
by Peter Gay
Summary
The first volume of Gay's two-part study, subtitled "The Rise of Modern Paganism," arguing that the eighteenth-century philosophes were united less by doctrine than by a shared appropriation of classical antiquity against Christian authority. Gay reads Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and their circle as a coherent intellectual "family" recovering pagan confidence in human reason and worldly happiness. The book reframed Enlightenment studies for the postwar Anglophone academy.
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Historical Context & Significance
Gay was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany; his defense of Enlightenment reason was seen as a personal response to the irrationality of 20th-century fascism.