Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Owner's stamp on first page, else unmarked. Small splash on edge, else moderate wear of book. Jacket spine faded, .5" tear. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: 2/9/1978
ISBN-13:9780195023671ISBN:0195023676
Description: Fine. 0195023676 Like new and Unread! Text is clean and unmarked! Has a publishers mark. May have minor shelf wear from storage. --Be Sure to Compare Seller Engine Feedback and Ratings Before Purchasing— read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date Published: 1978
ISBN-13:9780195023671ISBN:0195023676
Description: Very Good+ 0195023676. Tight binding, clean pages. A hint of very light shelf wear to wraps with some age-toning to pages, otherwise better than Very Good. No inscriptions. Not ex-library. An excellent copy.; Galaxy Books; 8vo; 419 pages. read more
Binding: Cloth
Publisher: Oxford University Press, New York
Date Published: 1976
ISBN-13:9780195020182ISBN:0195020189
Description: Fine in Very Good jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. xix, 419 pp. The jacket is faded at the spine from being shelved in the sunlight, and has a 1/2" closed tear along the lower edge of the front panel. read more
Description: VG+/VG+ W/Dust Jacket 419pgs(Index) Faint coffee? ? streaks at DJ top fore-edge area, 3 coffee spots on bottom page ends, 3/8" DJ tear top spine edge, o.w. clean, Bright & tight. No ink names, bookplates, etc. Price unclipped. Contents in Fine condition. ISBN 0195020189. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford, NY
Date Published: 1976
Description: 8 vo. (xix) 419 pp. Notes, index, blue cloth backed boards. Name front end paper, bottom corner first few pages bumped, very good+; dust jacket short ed ge tear, very good-. read more
Description: Like New. New and in excellent condition (no dust jacket, otherwise in mint/pristine condition). Pages are crisp and clean with a tight spine. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press,, New York
Date Published: 1976
Description: Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. 419 pages, cloth, dj, very good. 1st edition. This book is divided into four sections: The Moderate Enlightenment, 1688-1787; The Skeptical Enlightenment, 1750-1789; The Revolutionary Enlightenment, 1776-1800; and The Didactic Enlightenment, 1800-1815. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, New York
Date Published: 1976
ISBN-13:9780195020182ISBN:0195020189
Description: Fine in very good dust jacket. There is a slight sun fading on the jacket cover spine, otherwise the book is like new. xix, 419 p.; 24 cm. Subject matter includes ideas of the European Enlightenment of many men like Locke, Hume, Voltaire, or Rousseau during the American Revolutionary age. He also includes defining the Enlightenment broadly. Includes bibliographical references and index. read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date Published: 1976
ISBN-13:9780195020182ISBN:0195020189
Description: Fine in Fine jacket. 8vo-over 7 3/4"-9 3/4" Tall. Signed. From the estate of Chaim Potok, Author of The Chosen, and My Name Is Asher Lev. Chaim Potok has signed and inscribed the title page with his name and date of purchase. 419 pages. Tight binding, clean, and crisp pages. A faint hint of shelf wear to dustjacket, with some sunning to spine, otherwise a Very Fine copy. No remainder mark. Not price clipped. Protected in a new Mylar cover. Collectible. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: 1978
ISBN-13:9780195023671ISBN:0195023676
Description: Acceptable. Writing inside cover. Pages yellowed from age. Markings Throughout. Binding/Spine warped from use but intact. Not pretty but functional. Shows wear. read more
May's book tackles a tricky subject. It is clear that eighteenth-century American thinkers were profoundly influenced by the European Enlightenment. Yet they were also, on the whole, deeply religious, and the republic they created would be characterized in the nineteenth century by remarkable Christian enthusiasm. May tries to impose a measure of order on the messy provincial engagement with the Enlightenment by identifying and describing four main strands of Enlightenment thought in America. He calls these the Moderate, Skeptical, Revolutionary, and Didactic Enlightenments.
I suspect May tries too hard to find order in this mixture of traditions. As its best recent historians have shown us, "the Enlightenment" in Europe was a social phenomenon, a set of conversations more than a set of particular ideas. Therefore, it is risky to try to place American thinkers in European categories. A conversation held by correspondents shipping books and letters across the Atlantic, or by politicians and preachers in Connecticut and Virginia, might have a meaning much different from that of a related conversation held in a salon in Paris or a university in Scotland. There can be no doubt that American thinkers took part in a broad set of transatlantic exchanges, but one should be careful about fitting their ideas into European categories. For a traveler like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, or Benjamin Franklin, the difficulty is slight. However, for someone like Timothy Dwight, John Randolph, or Samuel Miller, I think, great care is necessary.
That said, May is highly sensitive to the affective and interactive aspects of Enlightenment thought in America. He does define his four varieties of Enlightenment in terms of values and temperaments as much as specific ideas. This is what makes his study hold up pretty well even thirty years later.
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The "Moderate Enlightenment," May writes, was the mainstream of British thought from the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century. The British believed in "balance" and in orderly (not enthusiastic) exercise of freedom in politics and religion. Epistemologically, this worldview was defined by Isaac Newton's pious rationalism and by John Locke's humble empiricism. For the most part, the American colonies belonged to this tradition. Colonial America, by the mid-eighteenth century, was largely literate and bourgeois; Americans read widely in moderate Whig thought. In the 1740s, furthermore, the Great Awakening produced a form of exuberant, anti-intellectual popular Christianity that frightened Calvinist leaders in New England and drove them in the direction of moderate rationalism. In much of the country and especially in the South, meanwhile, the Church of England was in a strong and improving position, offering the prospect of a moderate imperial religious consensus. When the controversial campaign for an American Anglican bishop failed, however, and then the American Revolution broke out, this dream was cut short. Nevertheless, it was largely members of the Moderate Enlightenment tradition who guided the colonies through the Revolution and then established the new Constitution in 1787. Of course, the Constitution was a compromise -- a fatally flawed one. It was the last major manifestation, in American public life, of the moderates' faith in a balanced and rational secular order.
Arising later (around 1750), but existing concurrently in the late eighteenth century, was the Skeptical Enlightenment. This, according to May, was the dominant tendency of the Enlightenment in France, whose partisans dedicated themselves to questioning the Old Regime, especially its religious establishment. He argues that the skeptics had no coherent positive program; they tended to share a pragmatic sensibility and a trust in science, but they were too full of doubt to propose their own arrangement for the state. (Among English-speaking thinkers, David Hume and Edward Gibbon were they key skeptical figures.) Thus, the Skeptical Enlightenment contributed little to the revolutionary era in America. Benjamin Franklin, the closest fit for this tradition, was unusual among Americans, and the most skeptical American deists tended to be relatively conservative about politics. The one area in the colonies that resembled France was the South. Southerners were men of paradox, aristocratic libertarians in a slaveowning society; the planter class was caught in decadence and alienation.
In 1776-1800, however, an optimistic tendency emerged in America, France, and Britain: the Revolutionary Enlightenment. In Britain, this movement began as a revival of earlier Whig radicalism, a reaction to the complacency and corruption of British politics. (The key figure here was John Wilkes.) In France and America, revolution cleared the way for the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine -- people with millenarian hopes for mankind, champions of natural simplicity and enemies of all mystery, tradition, and authority. In New England, the Revolutionary Enlightenment took the form of a sort of Calvinist radicalism; until about 1795, New England was arguably the region that was at once the most revolutionary and nationalistic, and the most respectful of religious authority. In Philadelphia, which was the most "French" and scientific of American cities, moderate and revolutionary enlighteners coexisted uneasily during and after the Revolution -- sometimes, as in the case of Benjamin Rush, uniting these tendencies within themselves.
However, in the late 1790s, the High Federalists and the New England clergy joined forces against the Revolutionary Enlightenment. Until about 1795, the Calvinist clergy had generally been optimistic about the French Revolution. Thanks to Napoleon, however, they soured on the French experiment, and furthermore, Thomas Paine's Age of Reason convinced them that republicanism and deism went together. Their "counterattack" against the Revolutionary Enlightenment was largely successful in 1798-1800. Although the Republican Thomas Jefferson, not Federalist John Adams, won the election of 1800, this political victory marked the triumph merely of Jefferson's moderate and contradictory version of Revolutionary Enlightenment; Jefferson did not attempt to implement any radical program once in office. In fact, May writes, the election of 1800 marked the end of both the Moderate and the Revolutionary Enlightenment in America.
For after 1800, the defining cultural movement in America was not an Enlightenment movement but rather a surge of Christian enthusiasm. The popular revivals of the Second Great Awakening, which accompanied (or were part of) a new form of American nationalism, penetrated all sections of the nation and affected even many confirmed deists and Unitarians in the early decades of the nineteenth century. This alarmed many of the intellectual leaders of the country, including many of the clergy. They -- led by Presbyterian college leaders and Boston Unitarians -- responded by articulating a fourth form of Enlightenment, which May calls the Didactic Enlightenment. This movement drew on Scottish thought, especially the Common Sense philosophy of Thomas Reid. This philosophy militated against skepticism of all kinds and supported a kind of moderate, practical sociability. Once ensconced in America's colleges, Common Sense philosophy remained the basis of "genteel" thought for decades."
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