Alan Charles Kors

Students of the Enlightenment have long assumed that the major movement towards atheism in the Ancien Régime was centered in the circle of intellectuals who met at the home of Baron d'Holbach during the last half of the eighteenth century. This major critical study shows, contrary to the accepted views, that in fact, atheism was not the common bond of a majority of the members and that, far from being alienated figures, most of the members were privileged and publicly successful citizens devoted to peaceful and gradual reform. Alan Charles Kors determines the coterie's membership and discovers it to have been a diverse assemblage of philosophes, men of letters, and scientists. Analyzing the thought and behavior of those members who lived past 1789, the author argues that the hostility to the Revolution expressed by the coterie's survivors was fully consistent with their world view. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

lecture 1. Introduction : intellectual history and conceptual change -- lecture 2. The dawn of the 17th century : Aristotelian scholasticism -- lecture 3. The new vision of Francis Bacon -- lecture 4. The new astronomy and cosmology -- lecture 5. Descartes's dream of perfect knowledge -- lecture 6. The specter of Thomas Hobbes -- lecture 7. Skepticism and Jansenism : Blaise Pascal -- lecture 8. Newton's discovery -- lecture 9. The Newtonian revolution -- lecture 10. John Locke, the revolution in knowledge -- lecture 11. The Lockean moment -- lecture 12. Skepticism and Calvanism : Pierre Bayle -- lecture 13. The moderns, the generation of 1680-1715 -- lecture 14. Introduction to deism -- lecture 15. The conflict between deism and Christianity -- lecture 16. Montesquieu and the problem of relativism -- lecture 17. Voltaire, bringing England to France -- lecture 18. Bishop Joseph Butler and God's providence -- lecture 19. The skeptical challenge to optimism, David Hume -- lecture 20. The assault upon philosophical optimism, Voltaire -- lecture 21. The philosophes : the triumph of the French Enlightenment -- lecture 22. Beccaria and enlightened reform -- lecture 23. Rousseau's dissent -- lecture 24. Materialism and naturalism, the boundaries of the Enlightenment.

John Stuart Mill is the critical transitional figure between the classical liberalism of the 19th century, with its emphasis upon the creative power of free individuals unfettered by government or social interventions, and the welfare-state liberalism of the 20th century, with its combination of individual choice in matters of belief and lifestyle and the political redistribution of wealth. In On Liberty and The Subjection of Women , Mill offered a defense of self-sovereignty and voluntary association that appeared to extend explicitly to the economic spheres. Both works are celebrations of the productive and moral enhancements of individual liberty. In The Principles of Political Economy , however, Mill's categorical distinction between “production” and “distribution” assigned the latter to the “expedient” discretion of the state, inviting, in theory, a democratic redistributionist state. Mill's posthumous Essays on Socialism reveal that he was no friend of socialism or Marxism, but that he welcomed a more active and interventionist state. One of individual liberty's most notable defenders, paradoxically, provided the theoretical underpinning of its current diminution

This article discusses the meanings, origin, context, scope, and central intellectual claims of atheism in the Age of the European Enlightenment. It emphasizes debates about proofs of the existence of God and about the problem of categorical naturalism, that is, of whether or not the world we observe and its seeming design could be the product of unintelligent causes. It explores the philosophical origins of Enlightenment atheism both in prior heterodox and Epicurean thought, and, of even greater importance, in the orthodox debates, scholarship, and mutual contestations that generated so many of the themes and often arguments of Enlightenment atheists. It pays special attention to the complexity of the relationship between philosophical skepticism and atheistic thought. Given the flowering of explicitly atheistic thought in the late French Enlightenment, the article looks closely at the work of Denis Diderot, the baron d’Holbach, and Jacques-André Naigeon.

Defining the Enlightenment as the "long eighteenth century," the Encyclopedia focuses on the entire range of philosophic and social changes engendered by the Enlightenment. It extends the conventional geographical boundaries of the Enlightenment, covering not only France, England, Scotland, the Low Countries, Italy, English-speaking North America, the German states, and Hapsburg Austria but also Iberian, Ibero-American, Jewish, Russian, and Eastern European cultures. Nor does the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment limit itself to major centers like Paris in France and Edinburgh in Scotland, but shares the rich lode of recent scholarship on "secondary" and "provincial" centers such as Berlin and Geneva; Philadelphia and Milan. The Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment brings a similar spirit of inclusion to the new theoretical and methodological approaches that have flowered in the humanities during the past two decades. Including feminist and various post-modernist reassessments alongside more traditional perspectives, the four volumes offer the broadest possible range of current knowledge. Accessibility combined with scholarly rigor make the encyclopedia the first choice for researching any aspect of the Enlightenment. Designed and organized for ease of use, its special features include more than 700 signed articles; annotated bibliographies following each article to guide further study; an extensive system of cross-references; a synoptic outline of contents; a comprehensive topical index providing easy access to networks of related articles; and high quality illustrations, including photographs, line drawings, and maps.

Lecture 1. Locke's theory of knowledge, guest lecture / by Alan Kors ; lecture 2. Locke's political theory, guest lecture / by Dennis Dalton ; lecture 3. montesquiey and the beginnings of political science ; lecture 4. Berkeley's idealism and the critique of materialism ; lecture 5. Hume's epistemiology ; lecture 6. Hume's theory of morality ; lecture 7. Smith's wealth of nations ; lecture 8. Rousseau's dissent, the challenge to the idea of progress, guest lecture / by Alan Kors ; lecture 9. Kant's copernicus revolution, epistemiology and the critique of metaphysics ; lecture 10. Kant's moral philosophy ; lecture 11. Burke and the birth of enlightened conservatism ; lecture 12. naturalism and materialism, the boundaries of the enlightenment, guest lecture

Ann Thomson's Bodies of Thought is simultaneously an outgrowth of her prior work and a new direction in her scholarship. She has done rigorous and original study of the mid-eighteenth-century French materialist Julien Offray de La Mettrie, offering important critical editions and major articles. She also has done fruitful studies of broader issues of eighteenth-century medicine, vitalism, Epicureanism, and clandestine literature. These endeavors immersed her in precisely the consequences—both intended and unintended, in France, above all—of the sorts of debates that she examines here. She knows well the early modern issues and implications of debates about mind and body, and she can explain them with precision and fluency.

Atheism was the most fundamental challenge to early-modern French certainties. Leading educators, theologians and philosophers labelled such atheism as manifestly absurd, confident that neither the fact nor behaviour of nature was explicable without reference to God. The alternative was a categorical naturalism. This book demonstrates that the Christian learned world had always contained the naturalistic 'atheist' as an interlocutor and a polemical foil, and its early-modern engagement and use of the hypothetical atheist were major parts of its intellectual life. In the considerations and polemics of an increasingly fractious orthodox culture, the early-modern French learned world gave real voice and eventually life to that atheistic presence. Without understanding the actual context and convergence of the inheritance, scholarship, fierce disputes, and polemical modes of orthodox culture, the early-modern generation and dissemination of absolute naturalism are inexplicable. This book brings to life that Christian learned culture, its dilemmas, and its unintended consequences.

Atheism was the most foundational challenge to early-modern French certainties. Theologians and philosophers labelled such atheism as absurd, confident that neither the fact nor behaviour of nature was explicable without reference to God. The alternative was a categorical naturalism, whose most extreme form was Epicureanism. The dynamics of the Christian learned world, however, which this book explains, allowed the wide dissemination of the Epicurean argument. By the end of the seventeenth century, atheism achieved real voice and life. This book examines the Epicurean inheritance and explains what constituted actual atheistic thinking in early-modern France, distinguishing such categorical unbelief from other challenges to orthodox beliefs. Without understanding the actual context and convergence of the inheritance, scholarship, protocols, and polemical modes of orthodox culture, the early-modern generation and dissemination of atheism are inexplicable. This book brings to life both early-modern French Christian learned culture and the atheists who emerged from its intellectual vitality.

There is no “after socialism.” There will not be in our or in our children's lifetimes an “after socialism.” In the wake of the Holocaust and the ruins of Nazism, anti-Semitism lay low a bit, embarrassed by its worst manifestation, its actual exercise of state dominion. In the wake of the collapse of Communism, socialism's only real and full experience of power, socialism too lays low for just a moment. Socialism's causes in the West, however, remain ever with us, the product of the convergence of two extraordinary achievements: liberal free enterprise and political democracy. The former creates wealth that has transformed all human possibility, but it also gives rise to particularly deep envy. The latter allows ambition a route to power by an appeal to the democratic state to seize and redistribute wealth in the name of social equality. As Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises understood perfectly, the bounty of free enterprise leads the unproductive to believe that such wealth is a fact of nature, there for the taking