The Secular Enlightenment

By: Margaret Jacob

Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley

The Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and Freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers.

Margaret Jacob reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes listeners from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risque book.

A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of 18th-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come.

©2019 Princeton University Press (P)2020 Tantor

Freemasonry

I enjoyed this wide-ranging survey of Enlightenment thought; I wish it had been longer. I learned the importance of Masonic lodges in spreading Enlightenment values.

Draws together so many strands to explain modern secularism

This detailed examination of the world shift from the religiously oriented Renaissance into the critical and largely secular realms of the 19th century (down to today) offers concrete examples of things, persons and events that contributed to the gradual transition into the state of affairs that we take for granted, based on separation of church and state. I loved the "conceptual" first two chapters in which the changing mind's world of time and space was sketched--and so appreciated the broad coverage of various European scenes that explained so much of the varistions from state to state even today--the historical reasons for the energetic French revolt against all religions (due to heavier influence of Catholic clerics at many points), for instance.

I thought Jacob's tracing of Masonic lodge life and growth together with the trail of banned and "naughty" books and their paths of distribution were clever and insightful.

I learned a ton from this scholarly and balanced book. Strongly recommended!