Roy Porter: The Enlightenment [1990] paperback

After having long been dismissed as a shallow irrelevance, the Enlightenment has now been rehabilitated as a major European movement in ideas and culture. Recent historical writing has shown how it was more than the airy philosophisings of a coterie of intellectuals - but rather a massive reorientation of thought, involving modernization, secularization and the application of science on a grand scale. These trends are surveyed and assessed in this book.