The Enlightenment, Vol. I: The Rise of Modern Paganism
by Peter Gay
Summary
The Rise of Modern Paganism is the first of Peter Gay's two volumes on the Enlightenment, and it reframed how a generation understood the eighteenth century. Gay's subject is the philosophes, the little flock as he calls them, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, d'Alembert, Hume, and their allies from Edinburgh to Naples and Philadelphia, and his argument gives the volume its title: the Enlightenment was a rebirth of classical paganism inside Christian Europe. The philosophes armed themselves with the ancients, with Cicero's skepticism and Lucretius's materialism, to fight free of the church that had educated them, and the book's drama is that struggle, conducted in essays, encyclopedias, salons, and smuggled books, between criticism and revelation. Gay writes with unusual authority because he treats the philosophes as a single connected family across nations while giving each member his individuality, and because his learning wears well; the prose is elegant, epigrammatic, and openly on the philosophes' side. He completed the interpretation in 1969 with a second volume, The Science of Freedom, which follows the program into politics, economics, education, and the American founding. The first volume won the National Book Award in History and Biography in 1967, and the pair became the standard synthesis of the subject for decades; the historian Margaret Jacob has called it the last great work to provide a synthetic account of the philosophes. Later scholars have widened the Enlightenment far beyond Gay's flock and pressed on his blind spots, but every survey of the field still starts by measuring itself against this one.
Historical Context & Significance
Gay was born Peter Fröhlich in Berlin in 1923 and escaped Nazi Germany with his family in 1939, and the refugee's history stands behind the scholarship: his Enlightenment is a defense of criticism, tolerance, and secular reason written by a man who had watched their destruction. He wrote the volumes at Columbia before moving to Yale, where he became Sterling Professor. The 1967 National Book Award consolidated the Enlightenment's standing in postwar liberal thought, and the subsequent argument over the book, that it idealized its heroes and overlooked their prejudices, became the road into today's far broader Enlightenment studies. Gay himself moved on to a five volume history of the Victorian bourgeoisie, but readers who want the classic case for the age of reason still start here.