A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment
Philipp Blom
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 0465014534
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In A Wicked Company, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom retraces the fortunes of this exceptional group of friends. All brilliant minds, full of wit, courage, and insight, their thinking created a different and radical French Enlightenment based on atheism, passion, reason, and truly humanist thinking. A startlingly relevant work of narrative history, A Wicked Company forces us to confront with new eyes the foundational debates about modern society and its future.
Alexandre Kojeve: Wisdom at the End of History (20th Century Political Thinkers)
Fichte: The System of Ethics (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)
Politics (Oxford World's Classics)
hand of the empress and earnestly imploring her to modernize the state. Finally the monarch, who was engaged in fighting off a serious challenge to her rule posed by a rebellion of the Don Cossacks, replied:Monsieur Diderot, I have listened with the greatest pleasure to all that your brilliant genius has inspired you with; but all your grand principles, which I understand very well, though they will make fine books, would make sad work in actual practice. You forget, in all your plans for the
accounts, I have done a little gardening and weeded out everything but the essential, largely in good English translations. ENLIGHTENMENT For general works on the Enlightenment, which has fallen a little from scientific favor in recent years, I would recommend as the best, most penetrating, and most elegant Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, volume 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism , and volume 2: The Science of Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1966-1969). A classic is Ernst
présent (The Hague, 1742). 2 Letter from Denis Diderot to Sophie Volland, July 25, 1765, in Denis Diderot, Oeuvres, vol. 5, Correspondance (Paris: Laffont, 1997), 506. 3 Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, ed. and trans., Introduction to Statique des végétaux de Stephen Hales (Paris: Debure l’âiné, 1735), v. 4 Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Histoire naturelle (Paris: Imprimerie royale, n.d.), vol. 1, 12. 5 Denis Diderot, “Pensées interprétation de la nature,” in Diderot, Oeuvres, vol. 1,
and the significance of its existence with physical laws alone, then positing the solution “therefore it must be God’s work” is simply lazy and even narcissistic. The knot of nature may be impossible to disentangle, but introducing the idea of a being who does not obey laws such as cause and effect and who cannot even be perceived, an uncreated Creator, simply makes the knot more complicated. The existence of the universe can be attributed to God’s ineffable will, but assuming something so
and her continental sisters, there were also important differences: Fanny was a jolly prostitute who pleasured gentlemen (and the odd lucky man of a more modest background), a reflection of Britain’s lasting preoccupation with class. Not only were the French libertines interested in elegantly raunchy descriptions of close encounters; they were of a distinctly political and philosophical bent. Morality—particularly sexual morality—was the exclusive fiefdom of the church. Access to the kingdom of
