Enlightenment Summer School
An Online Six-Week Humanities Course
June 6 – July 18, 2020
$450/person
In my recent book, Repairing Jefferson's America, I described the Enlightenment as follows:
Reason, reform, rationality. A belief in human progress, science, and (for many) the perfectibility of man. Taxonomy: classification of plants, animals, minerals; the periodic table; library classification systems; the varieties of humankind; the constituents of the air; classification of the world’s languages. Encyclopedias, almanacs, and digests of knowledge. Separation of church and state. The rights of man. The Rights of Man.
Coffeehouses, salons, and the second great age of exploration. Captain Cook in Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus. Benjamin Franklin seeking to protect Cook from naval interference during the war with Britain. Alexander von Humboldt detouring to America to meet the great Jefferson and get his copy of Notes on Virginia signed. Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language. The invention of the Noble Savage. The termination of Biblical literalism and the quest for the historical Jesus. Penal reform. The birth of the magazine. Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. The birth of geology. The Longitude Prize. Herschel’s discovery of Uranus. The belief that behind every phenomenon there is a simple law of gravity that we need only discern and then apply by way of reform.
The Enlightenment (1650-1815) is one of the most important eras in human history, as well as an ongoing movement of reason, reform, and the "rights of man." I talk about the Enlightenment all the time on the Thomas Jefferson Hour, in lectures, in my writings. And yet many people don't really know what is meant by the term. This online course of six two-hour sessions will explore the Enlightenment past, present, and future.
We'll begin by trying to ascertain what the Enlightenment was: who were the great figures, what they were attempting to achieve, how it influenced the world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Then we will attempt to understand Henry Steele Commager's thesis that Europe invented the Enlightenment, but American installed in on a landscape. It is certainly true that the US Constitution was drafted during the high water mark of the Enlightenment, and would have been a much different document fifty years earlier or fifty years later. We'll take a particular look at the two great figures of the American Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
Then we will move forward to the Enlightenment's legacy now, with special emphasis on two texts: Yuval Harari's Homo Deus and Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now. Some people believe the Enlightenment was superficial, deeply flawed, and wrong-headed, that the secularization of the world has led to dystopia. Others believe that Phase One of the Enlightenment may be over, but Phase Two is going to move humanity towards perfection.
The course will feature half a dozen books, plus several interviews I have conducted with Enlightenment historians. The references to Thomas Jefferson will be more or less constant. By the time the course is over we will have determined, I hope, where we are and where we are headed.
