The eighteenth-century Englightenment marks the beginning of the modern age, when the scientific method and belief in reason and progress came to hold sway over the Western world. In the twentieth century, however, the Enlightenment has often been judged harshly for its apparently simplistic optimism. Here a master historian goes back to the sources to give us both a more sophisticated and a more intriguing view of the philosophes, their world and their ideas.

Peter Gay is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. His other books include his best-selling Freud: A Life for Our Time and his five-volume The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud.

Peter Gay has received numerous awards for his scholarship, including the National Book Award in the category of History and Biography for The Enlightenment: An Interpretation:Vol. I, The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966); the first Amsterdam Prize for Historical Science from The Hague, 1990; and the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1992.