By Roy Porter The Enlightenment, Second Edition (Studies in European History) (2e) by Roy Porter (PDF)

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Excellent Book

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Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The British enlightenment was just as relevant and influential as that of the French and the German enlightenments. Often unrealized, here in Roy Porter’s labored work, the English enlightenment is unveiled and stands more successful as the others in that it was lessradical. The first half of the work explains that the British enlightenment existed using an extensive analysis of biography. Men and even women such as John Locke, David Hume, and Mary Wollstonecraft play a central role in telling how the enlightenment shaped the upper social classes, which established a new philosophical, scientific, and political framework for the country. While France was more radical, Porter argues that English society was much more subtle due to the absence of absolute monarchy and their already “more conservative” tendencies. England had experienced its radical movements with Charles I, and religious toleration already existed since under William of Orange. In the second half of his work, Porter examines the effects of the enlightenment. The position of women was relatively stable and “good” compared to other European countries at the time. Education became more prominent and encouraged throughout England and its domains as a means to better the quality of life of its people, although it wouldn’t become a central focus until the nineteenth century. The eighteenth century was one of revolutions, leading to major changes, which reshaped the modern age. Britain’s American colonies broke away from the mother country on the grounds of wanting better representation and government. The French also broke away from their crown for similar purposes, although less successful in the long run. Both of these major revolutions impacted England’s enlightenment. Some in England wanted the same “revolutionary” changes as seen in the other countries while others in England wanted to continue reshaping British society gradually. Roy Porter is a British historian who unfortunately died a year after the publication of his major work The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold story of the British Enlightenment. He was known previous to its publication as an expert in the field of historical studies on medicine. Prior to his death, he was the director of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine at the University College in London. Roy Porter takes a “British fleets” worth of facts and skillfully works it into his argument that Britain’s enlightenment is just as important for study, his work is five hundred pages with extensive end notes, as that of the French. This is his bias but it works to his advantage. Porter is a fan boy for his home country and it shows in every defensive commentary and in every analysis of the people, places, events, and times. Often tedious and exhausting, the amount of facts included yet briefly mentioned then only replaced with the next set of information does bog the reader down. There are entire sections in his work that could have been developed into separate chapters. But it does work effectively to prompt its reader to search out more information on the score of historical figures mentioned. Porter writes effectively and his prose is stunning. His use of primary and secondary sources listed among his Notes is worth a reading in themselves. The entire writing and thinking process can be seen played out in the section. A highly effective piece of history that does exactly what Porter intended: the English enlightenment holds equal weight to intellectual revolutions of the French, German and even America.

⭐Overall, I enjoyed reading Roy Porter’s “The Creation of the Modern World.” In the actual text of the book, i found Porter to be fair, or as he said on p. xxi of the introduction, that he did not intend the book to be one of “advocacy or apology,” … that “the Enlightenment is not a good thing or a bad thing.”Yet on that same page, he admits that “i find enlightened minds congenial: I savor their pithy prose, and feel more in tune with those warm, witty, clubbable men than with, say, the agrieved Puritans…” Porter goes on to say that “Enlightened thinkers were ‘broad-minded,’ [surely a compliment?], they espoused pluralism [again, another 20th century compliment] their register was ironic rather than dogmatic.” That last clause is what i have the strongest disagreement with. The enlighteners were nothing if not dogmatic. They would brook no opposition. Their counter-attacks were vicious. They were the more dogmatic for not recognizing that they were. Porter goes on, still p. xxi: “Tolerance was central” [to the enlighters}, and yes, they were tolerant to everyone except those who had the audacity to disagree with them. Yet, the remarkable thing about the book is that i did not find many instances of Porter’s announced proclivity poisoning his the rest of the book.One such slip-up can be found on p. 470, where Porter writes “the most striking instance of the retreat into reaction is Thomas Robert Malthus.” Retreat into reaction? Both of those words, retreat and reaction, are negative derogatory words, which spoil Porter’s objectivity.On p. 340, Porter states that [John} “Locke held the key”, which is one of the lamer puns i’ve ever encountered in a scholarly book.Nonetheless, the book does what it set out to do, raise the profile of the British enlightenment, and thus degrade the alleged French monopoly.

⭐There isn’t too much new information in here if you are an Anglophile, but I got it for like two bucks, so it was fine.

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