Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

I tried. I coffee'ed up and put in the time. Multiple reading sessions, high hopes and the kind of determination only an accomplished sufferer of OCD could understand. I didn't want to NOT read this. So 200 pages in and it's over.

Roy just couldn't stop trying to prove his point before he had even bothered to make it. I'm all for backing a dream and making your case strongly. Impassioned authorship typically makes for a great read. There was just too much philosophy and far too little content. Please teach me about the Enlightenment in Britain before trying to talk me into its importance. Making arguments using facts that I have yet to learn (and was hoping to learn in this book) is confusing and de-motivating.

So that's all. I'm quitting show more you book. show less

Disappointing, I liked his history of medicine and keen to follow through on the Enlightenment after reading A C Grayling. This is a kind of omnium gatherum of British intellectual life in the whole period from Restoration to Waterloo. Darts about confusingly in the chronology. But worse, crams in detailed lists about minor figures which further baffled me. Example: "Benjamin Martin lectured in Gloucester Salisbury Newbury Oxford, Chichester Bath Reading York Scarborough and Ipswich" !!! And an annoying stylistic mannerism of alliteration crops up on almost every page, such as "harbingers of hope" , "dark dilapidated and dangerous", reaching its finest flourish with a queer quintet: "fictions, frauds fantasies fables or fallacies". I am show more as great a fan of the Anglo-Saxon manner as any, but this, once noticed, is like watching a speaker with a nervous tic. Perhaps more fundamentally, the book's thesis is that the British aspect of the Enlightenment has been neglected. Well, the "Scottish Enlightenment" certainly hasn't: I've been aware of it since Hume was on my reading lists at Oxford back in the 60s; and it's implied in Edinburgh's soubriquet "Athens of the North". As for the Enlightenment's use of the metaphor of light which forms the base of his opening it was hardly new, even perhaps a cliché of philosophy, going back at least to Plato. show less

Providing an overview of the intellectual discoveries of this exciting period of British history, Roy Porter’s book is dense and benefits from an existing knowledge of the history he wishes to tell. Although an understanding of the changes to religious thought during the period are impotence in understanding why cultural development was different from most of the continent, I unfortunately did not find this engaging.

Starts with consideration of whether there was a British Enlightenment, when it was less theoretical than Voltaire/Rousseau in France. Highlighting that the British Enlightenment started earlier, as a consequence of the political settlement of 1688 which reduced the power of crown and church, and was more pragmatic and show more empirical, rather than revolutionary.
Luck and logic meant that with George I’s succession in 1714, ...the personal powers of the Crown and the pretensions of High-flying bishops were curbed in what proved to be an unshakable commitment to the quadruple alliance of freedom, Protestantism, patriotism and prosperity. (Page 30)
Chapter 3, Clearing away the rubbish, discusses Hobbes and Locke as prime philosophers of the British Enlightenment, championing Empiricism as the basis upon which knowledge should be based.
Print Culture emphasising the importance of the lack of censorship, which had been reintroduced at the Reformation (1660 with return of Charles II) lapsing after the Glorious Revolution (1688 with William III) with the Licensing Act lapsing in 1695. This made British print culture, especially newspapers, very different from the continent, where censorship by Crown and Church was far more widespread. show less

Porter guides the reader through the changes that are hallmarks of the Enlightenment as they transpired in and apply to Britain. Specifically he contends that the Enlightenment was every bit as much a British phenomenon as it was French and German.

Enlightenment > Great Britain/Great Britain > Intellectual life > 18th/century