Among neoconservatives, especially since the Iraq war, French bashing has become quite a popular sport. The French, so the sentiment goes, are appeasers, elitists, cowards and (worst of all) ...

Gabrielle Émilie le Tonnelier-de-Breteuil, known as the Marquise du Châtelet after her marriage at age 18, was a brilliant philosopher in the French Enlightenment, whose reputation has too long been ...

There’s something about the Enlightenment. Today, few educated men and women spend much time debating whether Western civilization took a disastrously wrong turn in the High Middle Ages. They do not ...

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 ...

The illiberal view of progress has a terrible record. Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the Terror, invoked Rousseau; ...

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 ...

On 12 May this year, the Nation magazine published an article entitled “Mind the Enlightenment.” It is an intellectually unprincipled and vindictive attack on Professor Jonathan Israel’s multi-volume ...

Join the Alliance Française for an intriguing lecture by Jean-Luc Marion on French Culture and Philosophy: Beyond Post-modernism. After the talk, enjoy a glass of wine as you discuss this view of ...