Enlightenment Thought: An Anthology of Sources trans. and ed. by Margaret L. King (review)

All anthologies contain implied narratives of their subjects, and what narrative could be more troublesome than "The Enlightenment?" There is little agreement about its nature and legacy, and relatively recent studies by Rosalind Carr, Tita Chico, Margaret Jacob, Anton M. Matytson and Dan Edelstein, Anthony Pagden, Peter H. Reill, John Robertson, James Schmidt, Justin E.H. Smith, Clifford Siskin and William Warner, and Joanna Wharton (to name but a few) have complicated its traditional periodization as a unified movement. A more diffuse field of criticism means, of course, no consensus for teaching and a need for revised curricula. Renaissance scholar Margaret King's Enlightenment Thought: An Anthology of Sources (her third in a series that includes Renaissance Humanism: An Anthology of Sources and Reformation Thought: An Anthology of Sources) tells a somewhat updated—though mainly familiar—story of the Enlightenment, and one that I think subtly adopts the premises of some twenty-first century scholars while quietly rejecting others. For better or for worse, it generally avoids overt mention of major scholarly debate about the period.

There is a dire need for Enlightenment anthologies, for there are few available in English. Peter Gay's Enlightenment: A Comprehensive Anthology is out of print, leaving us with Isaac Kramnick's Portable Enlightenment Reader, Paul Hyland's good but typographically unappealing The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader, and Margaret C. Jacob's The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents, along with a very few other possibilities. Interpretive questions aside, the first thing to know about this new anthology is that it contains extremely readable new translations by King herself for most of its sources (in contrast to some anthologies that contain dated or even unattributed translations); the second is that it restores women writers to their proper importance in the thread of Enlightenment thought. These two features alone mean that anyone teaching an Enlightenment class should consider it.

Enlightenment Thought is broken up into twelve chapters, three of which are dedicated to Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau, respectively. Fully two chapters are dedicated to women writers and gender; these chapters contain some of the anthology's most interesting material. Chapter One, "Casting Out Idols: 1620–1697," contains selections from Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, and Bayle; Chapter Four, "All Things Made New: 1725–1784," is dedicated to new models for understanding nature and society and excerpts Vico, Linnaeus, Turgot, d'Alembert, and Kant; Chapter Five, "Mind, Soul, and God: 1740–1779," consists of Hume, La Mettrie, Helvétius, d'Holbach, and Lessing; Chapter Seven, "Toward the Greater Good: 1748–1776," focuses on political theory and chooses Montesquieu, Quesnay, Beccaria, Ferguson, and Smith. Chapter Eight: "Encountering Others: 1688–1785," provides material from Behn, Montagu, Raynal, James Cook, and Herder; Chapter Eleven, "American Reverberations" presents Franklin, Paine, Madison, Paine, and the American Declaration of Independence; and Chapter Twelve, "Enlightenment's End: 1790–1794," ends the anthology with Burke and Condorcet.

Chapter Two, "The Learned Maid: 1683–1740" does a lot of important work. Its contextual material carefully links the work of van Schuman, Cavendish, Makin, Maintenon, and Châtelet to the work of their male contemporaries while explaining to students the radical nature of women writers using formal logic to structure arguments for women's rights. It also contains a wonderful excerpt from Cavendish's science-fiction-ish romance The Blazing World that argues for imaginative thinking and presents its female protagonist employing Baconian philosophy to reject her advisors' limited reasoning. In general, King's contextual material—there are both substantial chapter introductions as well as introductions to individual writers—does a careful and effective job of linking the anthology's selections so that students can see connections among them and there are useful italicized explanatory remarks that bridge gaps in excerpted texts so readers can follow. The explanatory introductions for Locke and other chapters are as clear and helpful as one could ask for. Pleasingly, too, there are several selections...