The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans

When first published in 1981, The Radical Enlightenment encountered both praise and blame. In the course of time it became a classic. In the era after 1985 the book was perhaps the first English language scholarly work to address freemasonry seriously.The new edition attempts to modernize the footnotes, removes a few errors in transcription found in quotations used in the first edition, and not least, offers a new preface. The thesis presented in The Radical Enlightenment has withstood the test of time and in the last twenty years been augmented and made more distinct by a variety of historians working on both sides of the Atlantic.The author, Margaret C. Jacob, is a distinguished professor of history at UCLA and in 2002 received an honorary doctorate from the University of Utrecht for the work she has done on the Dutch Enlightenment.