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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 />
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