sexta-feira, setembro 03, 2004
The Roads to Modernity: Mais Críticas
Registo mais duas críticas publicadas ao novo livro de Gertrude Himmelfarb.
No Opinion Journal:
As polemic, Ms. Himmelfarb's neat division of the Enlightenment into French, British and American forms works well, for it allows her to show how America today is the most truly "enlightened" of the lot. Whereas the British have "discarded" or forgotten important aspects of their Enlightenment, and the French apparently never adopted them at all, America has "inherited and preserved" the best 18th-century ideas, combining British social virtues with the native politics of liberty to create a modern beacon of light that would force even Kant to shield his eyes. The 18th century, Kant insisted, was an Age of Enlightenment but not an Enlightened Age. Ms. Himmelfarb's contemporary America, it would seem, is both.
No The American Enterprise Online:
Everyone knows the Enlightenment was the Age of Reason. Such eighteenth-century French philosophes as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau proclaimed the primacy of reason over religion, and heralded a new age of liberty and progress, free of sentiment.
Gertrude Himmelfarb audaciously seeks to demolish, or at least dent, that received wisdom. The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, [is] written in the distinguished historian?s usual charming, slightly humble style (...). The title is a bit of misnomer. It is not merely an examination of three related intellectual movements; it is, in the end, an argument for the superiority of the British and American Enlightenments to the French.
posted by Miguel Noronha 11:01 da manhã
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