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Anthony’s NotesA personal field guide
From the notebook

Enlightenment Curriculum

  1. The Closing of the Western Mind – Freeman
  2. The Reopening of the Western Mind – Freeman

    Big-picture late-antique → medieval → early-modern backdrop.

  3. Inventing the Individual – Siedentop

    Genealogy of the Christian origins of moral equality and the individual.

  4. Dominion – Holland

    Narrative version of a similar thesis: how Christianity shaped Western moral instincts.

  1. The Religious Enlightenment – Sorkin

    First explicit Enlightenment book, but from inside religion. Shows Protestants, Catholics, and Jews doing Enlightenment without abandoning faith or community. This is your antidote to “Enlightenment = secular atomization” right up front.

  2. The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction / or your Robertson volume – Robertson

    Solid, mainstream survey of Enlightenment thinkers, themes, geography.

  3. The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters – Pagden

    Expands the story with a self-consciously pro-Enlightenment narrative about rights, science, and constitutionalism. Pairs well with Robertson but with a clearer normative tilt.

  4. The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments – Himmelfarb (if you add it)

    Conservative-friendly mapping of three Enlightenments. This gives you the “multiple Enlightenments” lens (British/American virtue-and-religion vs French radicalism) you’ll want in your pocket before you tackle Israel.

  5. Radical Enlightenment – Jonathan Israel

    Now you’re ready for Israel’s “moderate vs radical” schema; Himmelfarb helps you not let his “radical” story swallow the whole period.

  1. In Defence of the Enlightenment – Tzvetan Todorov

    Short, sharp normative defence that distills the best Enlightenment commitments (reason, humanism, anti-despotism) after you’ve seen the historical complexity. Great bridge from the history cluster into the “is this project worth saving?” cluster.

  1. After Virtue – MacIntyre

    Deep philosophical critique of the Enlightenment moral project: why trying to ground ethics on autonomous reason (Kant, Hume, etc.) leads to our current emotivist mess.

  2. Why Liberalism Failed – Deneen

    Political and institutional critique, downstream from exactly the history and philosophy you’ve just read. This is the closest “Haywood-adjacent” diagnosis of how liberal/Enlightenment assumptions dissolve bonds and empower a managerial elite.

  1. Enlightenment Now – Pinker

    Empirical counterpunch: data-driven celebration of Enlightenment reason / science / humanism. Read it after MacIntyre + Deneen so you can constantly ask: “Yes, but at what moral/communal cost?” and “Are the pathologies really from too much Enlightenment, or from its betrayal?”

  2. A Secular Age – Charles Taylor

    Capstone. A massive, reflective synthesis on how we moved from a world where belief was the default to one where it’s an option, in dialogue (explicitly or implicitly) with almost all of the above.