In 1783, Johann Friedrich Zöllner, a theologian, posed a question that we are in some ways no nearer to answering. "What", he asked in a footnote to an essay on civil marriages, "is enlightenment?" ...

Two new books offer sweeping critiques of the modern nation-state and the Westphalian international order, each making the case for new forms of supranational cooperation to cope with escalating ...

In the pessimistic words of the ancient historian Herodotus, there will ever be “perpetual enmity” between the globe’s two halves. Pagden (Peoples and Empires), a professor of political science and ...

Like all good liberal intellectuals of the last century, Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog spent a great deal of time agonising over the legacy of the Enlightenment. Cuckolded and divorced, Herzog seeks to ...

You might not have noticed, but for several decades a small war has been raging around the so-called “Enlightenment” of 18th-century Europe. According to its defenders, the Enlightenment gave us many ...

Anthony Pagden’s aim is to consider how empires were delineated and legitimated, which is an inquiry that leads him to focus on political and legal argumentation. Even if empires have been found ...

CORRECTION: This story was updated on Jan. 21, 2014, to indicate that the Enlightenment occurred from the last decade of the 17th century through the first decade of 19th century. As scientists, we ...

We tell the story of our Western past as great blocks of events—Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution and the like. Historians love to take these constructions apart, and revisionism ...

In Anthony Pagden’s sweeping new study, the Enlightenment constitutes a collective intellectual journey away from God toward a new understanding of man. His account of this journey is bookended by ...

A generation or so ago, Anthony Pagden's book would not have needed a sub-title. The Enlightenment has never lacked for enemies, in church or state. It was denounced ...