Enlightenment

Two very different evaluations of the Enlightenment appear in recent books. First from Robert Darnton, historian of the French Enlightenment, who, according to the reviewer in the October 6 TNR , devotes the first and most substantative essay in his recent book George Washington’s False Teeth to defending the Enlightenment. The reviewer’s summary: “Enlightenment was a cause that galvanized intellectuals committed to tolerance, skepticism, individuals, civil liberty, and cosmopolitanism, and that its values have proved to be the most potent defense against the various forms of inhumanity that we have experienced in our world.” Rather quaint, that.

The second comes from a review of a spate of recent books on Jonathan Edwards, published in the October 20 issue of The Weekly Standard . Summarizing some of the points raised in George Marsden’s biography, the reviewer argues that Edwards traditional Calvinism made him one of the most prescient critics of Enlightenment: “Because Edwards was nearly the only moral philosopher in the eighteenth century to deny natural human goodness, he was among the few to perceive that this dream [of establishing a universal system of morality that would bring an end to war] was not only empty but could lead to unimagined horrors.”