Gertrude Himmelfarb, distinguished professor of history emeritus at the City University of New York, delivered the ninth of the 2003-2004 Bradley Lectures on May 10. Edited excerpts follow. The ...

While scholarly interest in the French Enlightenment remains high, Himmelfarb finds that it has no popular resonance except as a “cautionary tale.” The British Enlightenment, too, has suffered a slide ...

WHEN I was in college I took a course in the Enlightenment. In those days, when people spoke of the Enlightenment, they usually meant the French Enlightenment – thinkers like Descartes, Rousseau, ...

When I was in college I took a course in the Enlightenment. In those days, when people spoke of the Enlightenment, they usually meant the French Enlightenment — such thinkers as Descartes, Rousseau, ...

The Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments , by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Alfred A. Knopf, 272 pages, $25. The Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American ...

Courtesy of Britain’s Enlightenment and its “moral philosophers,” the religious virtue of compassion has become a secular one, and a private duty has become a public responsibility, writes Gertrude ...

Everyone knows that. But treating those limits as moral collapse is an evasion, allowing critics to keep the moral ...