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REVIEW ARTICLE<br />

A WAR O� WORDS? OLD AND NEW PERSPECTIVES<br />

ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT<br />

by Michael Schaich<br />

MARGARET C. JACOB, The Enlightenment: A Brief History with<br />

Documents, The Bedford Series in History and Culture (Boston: Bedford/St<br />

Martins, 2001), 237 pp. ISBN 0 312 17997 9. £8.99 (paperback)<br />

JONATHAN I. ISRAEL, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the<br />

Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,<br />

2001), 810 pp. ISBN 0 19 820608 9. £30.00<br />

PETER CLARK, British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800: The Origins of an<br />

Associational World, Oxford Studies in Social History (Oxford:<br />

Clarendon Press, 2000), xii + 516 pp. ISBN 0 19 820376 4. £60.00<br />

PAMELA E. SELWYN, Everyday Life in the <strong>German</strong> Book Trade: �riedrich<br />

Nicolai as Bookseller and Publisher in the Age of Enlightenment, 1750-<br />

1810 (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 2000), 419 pp.<br />

ISBN 0 271 02011 3. £56.50<br />

ECKHART HELLMUTH, IMMO MEENKEN, and MICHAEL<br />

TRAUTH (eds), Zeitenwende? Preußen um 1800: �estgabe für Günter<br />

Birtsch zum 70. Geburtstag (Stuttgart: frommann-holzboog, 1999), 327<br />

pp. ISBN 3 7728 2014 X. DM 158.00<br />

MAIKEN UMBACH, �ederalism and the Enlightenment in <strong>German</strong>y,<br />

1740-1806 (Hambeldon: The Hambledon Press, 2000), 232 pp. ISBN<br />

1 85285 177 5. £38.00<br />

Over the last two decades or so, the Enlightenment has had a bad<br />

press in intellectual circles on both sides of the Atlantic. With the<br />

advent of postmodernism the legacy of the Age of Reason was held<br />

responsible for such diverse phenomena as the authoritarian nature<br />

of the modern state, the suppression of emotions in bourgeois society,<br />

and the destruction of the natural environment. Such criticism<br />

was not without precursors. In 1947 Theodor W. Adorno and Max<br />

Horkheimer had already pointed out the inherently retrogressive<br />

29

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