It would probably come as a surprise to most readers in Europe and America that the Enlightenment spread all the way to Greece in the eighteenth century and spawned revolutionary movements in support ...

There’s something about the Enlightenment. Today, few educated men and women spend much time debating whether Western civilization took a disastrously wrong turn in the High Middle Ages. They do not ...

In this interview, exclusive for CounterPunch, Richard Whatmore discusses his latest book, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis (Penguin, 2023). In a world that demands highly rational ...

CORRECTION: This story was updated on Jan. 21, 2014, to indicate that the Enlightenment occurred from the last decade of the 17th century through the first decade of 19th century. As scientists, we ...

In The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon, Christy Pichichero “aims to bring war and military thought to their proper place in our understanding of ...

When I was in college I took a course in the Enlightenment. In those days, when people spoke of the Enlightenment, they usually meant the French Enlightenment — thinkers like Descartes, Rousseau, ...

Why can’t religion and the Enlightenment be friends? What’s that, you say? They were friends? Why didn’t anyone tell us? Well, David Sorkin has. A professor of history and Jewish studies at the ...

Long ago, before Westerners associated "enlightenment" with meditation or yoga, there was the Enlightenment: the philosophical revolution of the 1600s and 1700s that made the modern West. Before the ...

This striking, luminously illustrated compendium from artist Nabil collects Palestinian folklore from Jerusalem’s Old City. The tales, many of them first-person encounters with Continue reading » ...