The American Enlightenment

Abstract

Henry Blumenthal. American and French Culture, 1800-1900: Interchanges in Art, Science, Literature, and Society. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975. 554 + xv pp. Henry Steele Commager. The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment. Garden City: Anchor Press—Doubleday, 1977. 342 pp. Henry F. May. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. 419 + xix pp. Ironically, while American intellectual history in recent years has suffered a loss of prestige and popularity at the hands of the quantitative and the "new" social historians, some of the finest works ever published in the field have appeared—for example, Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic, and David Brion Davis's two volumes on The Problem of Slavery. Indeed, as historians have increasingly emphasized the role of non-cognitive forces- economic, sociological, and above all psychological—these same works have insisted upon the significance in history of ideas themselves. Furthermore, they have contributed to a field allegedly reserved for quantitative and social historians: comparative history.