The Enlightenment Mind

What happens when inherited authority is no longer allowed to answer, "Because it always has"?

The Enlightenment Mind explores the ideas that transformed debates about knowledge, religion, government, freedom, morality, and human nature.

From Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza to Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Smith, Wollstonecraft, Condorcet, and Kant, the book follows the arguments that challenged tradition and helped redefine the modern world. It examines skepticism, natural rights, religious toleration, the social contract, separation of powers, moral sentiment, commerce, progress, education, and public reason.

It also confronts the Enlightenment's less comfortable contradictions: thinkers defended liberty while living amid slavery, empire, hierarchy, and the political exclusion of women. Universal principles were announced with confidence, then applied with remarkable selectivity.

The Enlightenment Mind is a story of philosophers demanding reasons from authority-and discovering that once questioning begins, it becomes very difficult to control.