Bibliography

The following booklist is intended for those students who wish to consult secondary sources. Such material cannot replace careful reading of the primary texts. The books are recommended because they offer interesting critical perspectives. In no sense are they to be considered authoritative interpretations.

This list is also available to collect from the CISH office, room 6.124.

General Introductions

  • PORTER, Roy (2001) The Enlightenment, London - Revised edition of the original 1990 work, gives a clear overview.
  • SPENCER, Lloyd and Andrxej Krauze (2006) Introducing the Enlightenment (London, Icon Books)
  • OUTRAM, Dorinda (1995, 2005) The Enlightenment, CUP - Gives an overview of the numerous interpretations of the Enlightenment
  • HAMPSON, Norman (1968), The Enlightenment London, Penguin - An historical introduction, not too exacting.
  • BYGRAVE, Stephen, Uses of Education: Readings in Enlightenment in England  - A study of writings by Chesterfield, Mandeville, Wollstonecraft, and other Enlightenment figures.(Bucknell)  

More detailed historical accounts are:

  • PORTER, Roy (2000) Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, London, Allen Lane
  • ISRAEL, Jonathan I. (2001) Radical Enlightenment, Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650 - 1750 OUP

Advanced theoretical critiques of the Enlightment:

  • ADORNO, Theodor & Max Horkheimer (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York, Herder and Herder.
  •  FOUCAULT, Michel (1970) The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, London, Tavistock Press.
  •  HABERMAS, Jurgen (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, MIT. 

A useful series of essays written by former Essex Enlightenment lecturers:

  • HULME, Peter & Ludmilla Jordanova eds. (1990) The Enlightenment and Its Shadows, London, Routledge

Encyclopaedias in Reference Section of Library:

  • KORB, Alan Charles ed. (2003) Encylopedia of the Enlightenment, OUP
  • REILL, Peter and Ellen Wilson eds. (1996) Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, New York, Fact on File.
  • SPENCER, Mark G. Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment (Hardcover - Dec 2010) - not available until 2010.
  • YOLTON, John.  Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment.  

For encyclopaedic knowledge as a triumph of Enlightened Reason see:

  • BLOM, Philipp (2004) Encyclopédie: The Triumph of Reason in an Unreasonable Age, London, Fourth Estate.  

Before the Enlightenment

  • LOVEJOY, A.O. (1936) The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) Sidney Painter (1951), Medieval Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press)
  • TILLYARD, E.M.W. The Elizabethan World Picture
  • TATON, Rene. Ancient and Medieval Science from Pre history to AD1450.
  • GRANT, Edward. A Source Book in Medieval Science.
  • GRANT, Edward. The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: their religious, institutional, and intellectual contexts.
  • GRANT, Edward. Physical Science in the Middle Ages.
  • THOMAS, Keith, Man and the Natural World: changing attitudes in England 1500-1800.
  • LINDBERG, David. C. Science in the Middle Ages.
  • LINDBERG, David C. The Beginnings of Western Science: the European scientific tradition in philosophical, religious and institutional context, 600 B.C. to A.D 1450.
  • Aristotle pages on the web: http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/browse-Aristotle.html; http://www.newadvent.org./cathen/01713a.html;  http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/34560/

America and the Enlightenment

  • BROGAN, Hugh (1985) Longman History of the United States, London and New York, Longman.
  • COMMAGER (2000) The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment.
  • JEFFERSON, Thomas (1776) Declaration of Independence (available on Website)
  • GREENE, Jack & J. R. Pole eds. (1991) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, Oxford, Blackwell.  [see especially Isaac Kramnick’s essay ‘Ideological Background’ pp. 84-91]
  • McDONALD, F. (1985) Novus Ordo Seculorum: the Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, Kansas, Laurence University Press.
  • PANGLE, Thomas (1988) The Spirit of Modern Republicanism : the Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke, Chicago UP
  • WILLS, Garry (1979) Inventing America, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, New York, Vintage
  • WOOD, Gordon S. (1991) The Radicalism of the American Revolution, How a Revolution Transformed a Monarchical Society into a Democratic One Unlike Any that had Ever Existed, New York, Knopf

Burke and Paine

  • BUTLER, M. ed. (1984) Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolutionary Controversy Cambridge.
  • HERZOG, Don (1991) ‘Puzzling Through Burke’, Political Theory, Vol. 19, n.3.
  • MITCHELL, W. J. T. (1986) Iconology, Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago UP [Chapter 5]
  • MUSSELWHITE, David (1990) ‘Reflections on Burke’s “Reflections”’ in The Enlightenment and its Shadows eds. Peter Hulme and L. Jordanova, Routledge
  • POWELL, David (1985) Tom Paine: The Greatest Exile, London, Hutcheson
  • WHITE, Stephen (1993) ‘Burke on Politics, Aesthetics and the dangers of Modernity’, Political Theory, vol. 21, n.3.
  • WHITE, Stephen (1994) Edmund Burke, Politics and Aesthetics, Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications 

Crime and Punishment

  • FOUCAULT, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London, Allen Lane.

Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

  • COETZEE, J. M. (1986) Foe, Penguin
  • DANON, Ruth (1985) Work & the English Novel, the Myth of Vocation, London, Croom Helm.
  • HILL, Christopher (1985) The Collected Essays, Vol I, London, Harvester Press
  • HULME, Peter (1986) Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, London
  • SCHONHORN, Manuel (1987) Defoe’s Politics, Parliament, Power, & Kingship and Robinson Crusoe, CUP.
  • TOURNIER, Michel (1967) Vendredi: ou les limbes du Pacifique, trans Norman Denny [1969] as Friday: Or the Other Island, London, Collins
  • WATT, Ian (1963) The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, London, Penguin.
  • WATT, Ian (1996) Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe, CUP 

Descartes

  • BENJAMIN, Andrew ed. (1987) The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy 1630 – 1800, Manchester UP [Chapter 2]
  • BLOOM, Paul (2004) Descartes’ Baby: How Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human, London, William Heinemann.
  • CHOMSKY, Noam (1966) Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought, New York, Harper & Row.
  • COTTINGHAM, John ed. The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, CUP
  • DREYFUS, Hubert (2000) ‘Telepistemology: Descartes’ Last Stand’, in Ken Goldberg ed. The Robot in the Garden, Telerobotics & Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, MIT
  • DAMASIO, Antonio R. (1994) Descartes’ Error, Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, New York, Putnam
  • DEVLIN, Keith (1997) Goodbye Descartes: The End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the Mind, New York, John Wiley
  • KENNY, A. (1968) Descartes Penguin
  • POULET, Georges Studies in Human Time
  • SCHOULS, Peter A (1989) Descartes and the Enlightenment, Edinburgh UP.
  • SORELL, Tom (1987) Descartes, OUP
  • TODES, Samuel (2001) Body and World, MIT. [Chapters 1 & 2] 
  • REE, Jonathan (1987) Philosophical Tales, New York, Methuen.
  • WRIGHT, Crisp (1991) ‘Scepticism and Dreaming’, Mind, vol. 100.

Diderot

  • BRADBURY, Michael (2000) To the Hermitage, London, Picador
  • FURBANK, Philip (1992) Diderot, London, Secker & Warburg

Shelley, Frankenstein

  • BANN, Stephen ed. Frankenstein: Creation and Monstrosity  PR 5397.F7
  • BOTTING, ed. Frankesntein: Mary Shelley, Casebook PR 5397. F7
  • JORDANOVA, L. ‘Melancholy Reflection’, Frankenstein: Creation, Monstrosity, Chap3  (Short Loan)
  • LANGTON, Christopher (1995) Artificial Life: An Overview, MIT.
  • MUSSELWHITE, David (1987) Partings Welded Together  PR 868.P6 – the chapter on Frankenstein.

French Revolution

  • CARR, John L. (1972) Robespierre, London, HBC
  • HOBSBAWM, Eric (2002 [1962]) The Age of Revolution 1789-1840 Abacus (Chapter 3)
  •  MELZER, Sara E. & Leslie W.Rabine es. (1992) Rebel Daughters: Women in the French Revolution California University Press.
  • CLR James (1963) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution Vintage Books.

Hobbes & Locke

  • ARNEIL, B (1996) John Locke and America: the Defence of English Colonialism Oxford
  • ASHCRAFT, Richard (1987) Locke's Two treatises of government London, Allen & Unwin.
  • BUCKLE, Stephen (1991) Natural law and the theory of property : Grotius to Hume, Oxford  Clarendon Press,
  • CHAPPELL, Vere (1994) The Cambridge Companion to Locke, CUP.
  • GAUTHIER, David (1969) The logic of Leviathan: the moral and political theory of Thomas Hobbes, Oxford, Clarendon P.
  • HAMPTON, Jean (1986) Hobbes and the social contract tradition, CUP
  • KRAMER, M. (1997) John Locke and the Origins of Private Property, CUP Philosophical Explorations of Individualism, Community and Equality,
  • MACPHERSON, C. B. (1964) The Political Philosophy of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, OUP
  • Iain Hampsher-Monk, A History of Modern Political Thought: Major Political Thinkers from Hobbes to Marx (1992) contains a clear, accessible chapter on each thinker.
  • PANGLE, Thomas (1988) The Spirit of Modern Republicanism : the Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke, Chicago UP
  • PARRY, Geraint (1978) John Locke, London, George Allen & Unwin.
  • SIMMONS, John A. (1992) The Lockean theory of rights, Princeton UP
  • SKINNER, Quentin (1996) Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, CUP
  • SOMMERVILLE, Johann Thomas Hobbes : political ideas in historical context, Basingstoke Macmillan.
  • SORELL, Tom (1986) Hobbes, Routledge

Kant ‘What is Enlightenment?’

  • FOUCAULT, Michel ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in The Michel Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, Penguin, pp. 32-50.

Music and the Enlightenment

  • TILL, Nicholas (1992) Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas, New York, Norton.

Rousseau

  • BLUM, Carol (1986) Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution, Cornell UP
  • CRANSTON, Maurice (1983-98) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, three-volume biography, Penguin.
  • HUIZINGA, Johan Hermann (1976) The Making of a Saint : the Tragi-comedy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, London, H. Hamilton
  • SCHWARTZ, Joel (1984) The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Chicago UP
  • SHKLAR, Judith (1978) ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Equality’, Daedalus, 107.
  • STAROBINSKI, Jean (1978) ‘The Accuser and the Accused’, Daedalus, 107.
  • STAROBINSKI, Jean (1988)  Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago.
  • WOKLER, Robert ‘The Discourse…and its Offspring’ in Simon Harvey, Hobson, Kelly eds. Reappraisals of Rousseau

Voltaire

  • DAVIDSON, Ian (2004) Voltaire in Exile: The Last Years, 1753-78, London, Atlantic Books
  • ANDREW, Edward. Patrons of Enlightenment. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006    
  • CRYLE, Peter and O’Connell, Lisa. Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty, and Licence in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. [electronic resource]
  • DELUMEAU, Jean, Catholicism between Luther and Voltairde: a New View of the Counter-Reformation. London: Burns & Oates ; Philadelphia : Westminster Press, 1977.
  • DURANT, Will. The Age of Voltaire: a History of Civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to 1756. With Special Emphasis on the Conflict Between Religion and Philosophy. New York : Simon and Schuster, 1965. ·    
  • GARGETT, Graham, Voltaire and Protestantism, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 1980. ·    
  • ISRAEL, Jonathan, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2010. ·    
  • JACOB, Margaret, The Enlightenment: a Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001 ·    
  • PESSIN, Andrew. The God Question: What Famous Thinkers from Plato to Dawkins have said about the Divine. Oxford: Oneworld, 2009. ·    
  • STRATCHEY, Lytton. Voltaire and Frederick the Great, ed. Geoffrey Sauer.  1997. http://books.eserver.org/nonfiction/strachey/voltaire-and-frederick.html ·     from Books and Characters, French and English ·    
  • Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. 1956-2002 [Store resource: you will need to order these volumes – ask at the library information desk]. 

Some suggested extra reading and sources:      

Read the introductions to different editions: