Roads to Modernity

Here's a great book I finished reading recently: The Roads to Modernity - The British, French, and American Enligntenments, by Gertrude Himmelfarb, 2004. I picked up the book before our recent trip to Europe, and I intended to read it while I was there. Instead, I read parts of it before we went, and finished the book after we returned. What an exellent analysis of the Enlightenment era it is!

For one thing, I had no idea the era called the Enlightenment had so many different versions. In fact, that's the basic point the author makes: each nation approached and developed the Enlightenment differently. As she writes on p. 5 of the 2005 Vintage Books edition, "At a critical moment in history, these three Enlightenments represented alternative approaches to modernity, alternative habits of mind and heart, of consciousness and sensibility."

As the good author that she is, Himmelfarb succinctly summarizes the differences between the three countries with a distinctive phrase: the British focused on the sociology of virtue, the French on the ideology of reason, and the Americans on the politics of liberty. These distinctions were expertly fleshed out, and informatively substantiated. The section on the British Enlightenment was most elaborate, with 6 sub-sections on everything from "social affections" and political economy to Methodism and "the Age of Benevolence".

Above all, the book achieved what I intended it to: it deepened my understanding of the Enlightenment. I had intended this to be a bridge book between two semesters of studying European history. However, I decided the successor course to Winter semester's "History of Western Civilization Part II" will just have to wait. Six weeks time is not enough for all the reading I intend to do! So, this book will serve, instead, to tide me over until I can continue with Feig's Foothill College curriculum. In the meanwhile, I found a richer experience while traveling in Europe from having read about some of England's great historical figures: Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Isaac Newton, and John Wesley. And, upon return, I understood more of France's Enlightenment from having seen it's monumental buildings and it's magnificent museums (brief visits though they were).

All in all, I recommend this book highly. It's topic is deep and complex, yet it's writing is sufficiently elegant to make history both come alive, and become relevant.

For more information online, see Paul Brian's The Enlightenment, or check out my summary of Konnilyn Feig's Enlightenment links.