Synopsis
“Anthony Pagden defends the Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan project with classical roots and contemporary relevance. Like Kant, he argues that we live in an age of enlightenment, ongoing but incomplete, but that someday we will experience a fully enlightened age. His lucid and learned book might help to realize that hope.”—David Armitage, author of Foundations of Modern International Thought ". . . in the beginnings of social sciences like economics, the course of the Enlightenment unfolds in Padgen’s presentations of major figures Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Adam Smith, and Kant. Readers interested in the origins of modernity, progressivism, and conservatism will find much to ponder in Padgen’s substantive history of ideas." [Gilbert Taylor]