Volume 40, Number 5 · March 4, 1993
The Last Charmer
By Stuart Hampshire
Diderot: A Critical Biography
by P.N. Furbank
Knopf, 524 pp., $30.00
'This Is Not a Story' and Other Stories by Denis Diderot
translated with an introduction by P.N. Furbank
University of Missouri Press, 166 pp., $27.50
In the epilogue of his very well-written biography, under the heading 'The Afterlife of Diderot,' Mr. Furbank complains about the definite article in the English phrase 'The Enlightenment': a phrase that distorts the thought of eighteenth-century philosophy and that is particularly a barrier to understanding, and celebrating, Diderot. A false unity is implied, traceable, he thinks, to its origin in Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, which set a fashion for countless histories of ideas. Up to the present day, conservatives have too blandly assimilated very diverse thinkers to a common pattern as all apostles of Reason in politics.
Review, 5767 words
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