The case for the Enlightenment

"The Case for the Enlightenment is an important and ambitious comparative study of the emergence of Enlightenment in Scotland and in Naples. Challenging the recent tendency to fragment the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe into multiple Enlightenments, John Robertson demonstrates the extent to which thinkers in two societies at the opposite ends of Europe shared common intellectual preoccupations. Before 1700, Scotland and Naples faced a bleak future as backward, provincial kingdoms in a Europe of aggressive commercial states. Yet by 1760, Scottish and Neapolitan thinkers, led by David Hume and Antonio Genovesi, were in the van of those advocating the cause of Enlightenment by means of political economy. By study of the social and institutional contexts of intellectual life in the two countries, and the currents of thought promoted within them, The Case for the Enlightenment explains this transformation. At its centre is an examination of Giambattista Vico's New Science and David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature and Natural History of Religion as works informed by a similar, Epicurean moral philosophy, and as responses to the notorious argument of Pierre Bayle that a society of atheists was as plausible as a society of idolaters. Unexpected contemporaries, Vico and Hume illuminate the common intellectual foundations of Enlightenment in the two countries, in which Epicurean philosophy was the midwife of political economy."--Jacket.