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Students of the Enlightenment have long assumed that the major movement towards atheism in the Ancien Régime was centered in the circle of intellectuals who met at the home of Baron d'Holbach during the last half of the eighteenth century. This major critical study shows, contrary to the accepted views, that in fact, atheism was not the common bond of a majority of the members and that, far from being alienated figures, most of the members were privileged and publicly successful citizens devoted to peaceful and gradual reform. Alan Charles Kors determines the coterie's membership and discovers it to have been a diverse assemblage of philosophes, men of letters, and scientists. Analyzing the thought and behavior of those members who lived past 1789, the author argues that the hostility to the Revolution expressed by the coterie's survivors was fully consistent with their world view. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Goodman chronicles the story of the Republic of Letters from its earliest formation through major periods of change: the production of the Encyclopedia, the proliferation of a print culture that widened circles of readership beyond the control of salon governance, and the early years of the French Revolution.
Through this new translation of d'Holbach's "Christianity Unveiled," and a host of related documents never before translated, the reader will come to an in-depth appreciation of the courageous atheist who criticized sovereigns who pandered to the Church.
The historical achievements of religious belief have been large and well chronicled. But what about the accomplishments of those who have challenged religion? Traveling from classical Greece to twenty-first century America, Imagine There's No Heaven explores the role of disbelief in shaping Western civilization. At each juncture common themes emerge: by questioning the role of gods in the heavens or the role of a God in creating man on earth, nonbelievers help move science forward. By challenging the divine right of monarchs and the strictures of holy books, nonbelievers, including Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, help expand human liberties, and influence the early founding of the United States. Revolutions in science, in politics, in philosophy, in art, and in psychology have been led, on multiple occasions, by those who are free of the constraints of religious life. Mitchell Stephens tells the often-courageous tales of history's most important atheists— like Denis Diderot and Salman Rushdie. Stephens makes a strong and original case for their importance not only to today's New Atheist movement but to the way many of us—believers and nonbelievers—now think and live.
This collection of essays studies the expression and diffusion of radical ideas in Britain from the period of the English Revolution in the mid-seventeenth century to the Romantic Revolution in the early nineteenth century. The essays included in the volume explore the modes of articulation and dissemination of radical ideas in the period by focusing on actors ('radical voices') and a variety of written texts and cultural practices ('radical ways'), ranging from fiction, correspondence, pamphlets and newspapers to petitions presented to Parliament and toasts raised in public. They analyse the way these media interacted with their political, religious, social and literary context. This volume provides an interdisciplinary outlook on the study of early modern radicalism,with contributions from literary scholars and historians, and uses case studies as insights into the global picture of radical ideas. It will be of interest to students of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and history.
"Draws together the work of thirty-nine leading international experts on the European Enlightenment (c1660-1800) to offer informed, comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of this period as both an historical epoch and a cultural formation".--BOOKJACKET.
A subtle and complex study of the Enlightenment, this book allows us to reflect on how nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars have constructed our views on eighteenth-century people.
The Great Protector of Wits provides a new assessment of baron d’Holbach (1723–1789) and his circle. A challenging figure of the European Enlightenment, Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach was not only a radically materialistic philosopher, a champion of anticlericalism, the author of the Système de la nature – known as ‘the Bible of atheists’ –, an idéologue, a popularizer of the natural sciences and a prolific contributor to the Encyclopédie, but he also played a crucial role as an organizer of intellectual networks and was a master of disseminating clandestine literature and a consummate strategist in authorial fictions. In this collective volume, for the first time, all these different threads of d’Holbach’s ‘philosophy in action’ are considered and analyzed in their interconnection. Contributors to this volume: Jacopo Agnesina, Nicholas Cronk, Mélanie Éphrème, Enrico Galvagni, Jonathan Israel, Alan Charles Kors, Mladen Kozul, Brunello Lotti, Emilio Mazza, Gianluca Mori, Iryna Mykhailova, Gianni Paganini, Paolo Quintili, Alain Sandrier, Ruggero Sciuto, Maria Susana Seguin, and Gerhardt Stenger.
The English republican tradition and eighteenth-century France offers the first full account of the role played by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English republican ideas in eighteenth-century France. Challenging some of the dominant accounts of the republican tradition, it revises conventional understandings of what republicanism meant in both Britain and France during the eighteenth century, offering a distinctive trajectory as regards ancient and modern constructions and highlighting variety rather than homogeneity within the tradition. Hammersley thus offers a new and fascinating perspective on both the legacy of the English republican tradition and the origins and thought of the French Revolution. The book focuses on a series of case studies, featuring such colourful and influential characters as John Toland, Viscount Bolingbroke, John Wilkes and the Comte de Mirabeau. This book will thus be of value to all those interested in the fields of intellectual history and the history of political thought, seventeenth and eighteenth-century British history, eighteenth-century French history and French Revolution studies.
Recent books by, among others, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens have thrust atheism firmly into the popular, media, and academic spotlight. This so-called New Atheism is arguably the most striking development in western socio-religious culture of the past decade or more. As such, it has spurred fertile (and often heated) discussions both within, and between, a diverse range of disciplines. Yet atheism, and the New Atheism, are by no means co-extensive. Interesting though it indeed is, the New Atheism is a single, historically and culturally specific manifestation of positive atheism (the that there is/are no God/s), which is itself but one form of a far deeper, broader, and more significant global phenomenon. The Oxford Handbook of Atheism is a pioneering edited volume, exploring atheism--understood in the broad sense of 'an absence of belief in the existence of a God or gods'--in all the richness and diversity of its historical and contemporary expressions. Bringing together an international team of established and emerging scholars, it probes the varied manifestations and implications of unbelief from an array of disciplinary perspectives (philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, demography, psychology, natural sciences, gender and sexuality studies, literary criticism, film studies, musicology) and in a range of global contexts (Western Europe, North America, post-communist Europe, the Islamic world, Japan, India). Both surveying and synthesizing previous work, and presenting the major fruits of innovative recent research, the handbook is set to be a landmark text for the study of atheism.