Fire & Light How the Enlightenment Transformed Our World

Praise for "Fire and Light" "With this profound and magnificent book, drawing on his deep reservoir of thought and expertise in the humanities, James MacGregor Burns takes us into the fire's center. As a 21st-century philosopher, he brings to vivid life the incandescent personalities and ideas that embody the best in Western civilization and shows us how understanding them is essential for anyone who would seek to decipher the complex problems and potentialities of the world we will live in tomorrow." -- Michael Beschloss, "New York Times" bestselling author of "Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How they Changed America, 1789-1989 ""James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and "Fire and Light" is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America - for better and for worse - what it is." --Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author "Revolutionary Summer""James MacGregor Burns, one of America's most distinguished historians, has written a superb book. "Fire and Light" is a fluent and wide-ranging history of Enlightenment thinkers and of the many political actors--in Britain, France, and Britain--whom they influenced between the 17th century and the mid-1800s. Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, Montesquieu, Locke, Hume, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Tocqueville, James Watt, James and John Stuart Mill, and Marx are among the host of writers, entrepreneurs, and national leaders who come to life on Burns's pages." --James T. Patterson, Bancroft Prize-winning author of "The Eve of Destruction""Our most eminent scholar of political and intellectual leadership offers a glowing narrative of the emancipation of reason in "Fire and Light." Sweeping across two centuries, James MacGregor Burns's graceful prose etches memorable portraits of the leading thinkers, doers, and movements that transformed England, France, and America in the cause of reason, liberty, and equality. Th