Margaret Jacob has written extensively on Newtonian mechanics and the early Industrial Revolution, as well as the Enlightenment. Her most recent book is The Secular Enlightenment, Princeton 2019.
Of the many forms of new social behavior to become an integral part of enlightened culture during... more Of the many forms of new social behavior to become an integral part of enlightened culture during the eighteenth century, Freemasonry has been the most difficult to understand. Secretive, ritualistic, devoted in many Grand Lodges to hierarchy that would be one set of characteristics. Benjamin Franklin's Freemasonry warrants further consideration for what it can tell one about the role of Freemasonry in the Enlightenment and vice-versa. Indeed there are a host of major themes emerging out of Franklin's relationship to Freemasonry. Freemasonry played a significant and complex role in the development and transmission of intellectual currents in Enlightenment thought as well as in the revolutionary creation of democratic republics on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, and other European locales before the middle of the eighteenth century, women were welcomed as members of lodges, sometimes in the same lodges as men. Keywords: Benjamin Franklin; democratic republics; enlightenment naturalism; European locales; Freemasonry
This is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in ... more This is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. The book reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. It takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions, their failures as the result of blind economic forces.
Through the reinterpretation of evidence long available but still underutilized, the authors expl... more Through the reinterpretation of evidence long available but still underutilized, the authors explore the role of mechanical and technical knowledge in the making of the industrial revolution in cotton. Traditionally, science — understood in eighteenth-century Britain to be largely, although not exclusively, the science of mechanics — has been seen to have little to do with spinning machines and power weaving. But the steam engine required a degree of technical knowledge which the leaders in Manchester cotton manufacturing possessed. Furthermore, this study of Manchester in the period from 1790 to 1820 focuses on the urban setting as a locus of innovation and the chapel life of Unitarians as providing a site for the inculcation of religious values compatible with an ethic for both entrepreneurs and workers. The article contributes to the growing (and often neo-Weberian) cultural history of the first Industrial Revolution. M’Connell and Kennedy led the Manchester cotton industry for over two decades and they stamped their values and knowledge base into the community through their avid participation in scientific societies and chapel life. Their manuscripts at the John Rylands Library, Deansgale, Manchester form the core of this article.
International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 2020
Written as a polemical piece, the essay confronts the detractors of the Enlightenment and moderni... more Written as a polemical piece, the essay confronts the detractors of the Enlightenment and modernity. It asks if science is simply a social construction, how can we put so much faith in it to help solve the current crisis brought about by COVID-19? If we turn away from the Enlightenment and its values, how can we deploy liberal solutions to work in our current predicament and preserve what is progressive within modernity?
... As for the present, it is, in corollary fashion, either the blessed age of prog-ress ... of t... more ... As for the present, it is, in corollary fashion, either the blessed age of prog-ress ... of this kind of history motivated by the desire to substitute explanation for narration, but at ... to pure narrative: the possibility of a rational interpretation of history, the recognition of certain regularities in ...
Of the many forms of new social behavior to become an integral part of enlightened culture during... more Of the many forms of new social behavior to become an integral part of enlightened culture during the eighteenth century, Freemasonry has been the most difficult to understand. Secretive, ritualistic, devoted in many Grand Lodges to hierarchy that would be one set of characteristics. Benjamin Franklin's Freemasonry warrants further consideration for what it can tell one about the role of Freemasonry in the Enlightenment and vice-versa. Indeed there are a host of major themes emerging out of Franklin's relationship to Freemasonry. Freemasonry played a significant and complex role in the development and transmission of intellectual currents in Enlightenment thought as well as in the revolutionary creation of democratic republics on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, and other European locales before the middle of the eighteenth century, women were welcomed as members of lodges, sometimes in the same lodges as men. Keywords: Benjamin Franklin; democratic republics; enlightenment naturalism; European locales; Freemasonry
This is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in ... more This is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. The book reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. It takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions, their failures as the result of blind economic forces.
Through the reinterpretation of evidence long available but still underutilized, the authors expl... more Through the reinterpretation of evidence long available but still underutilized, the authors explore the role of mechanical and technical knowledge in the making of the industrial revolution in cotton. Traditionally, science — understood in eighteenth-century Britain to be largely, although not exclusively, the science of mechanics — has been seen to have little to do with spinning machines and power weaving. But the steam engine required a degree of technical knowledge which the leaders in Manchester cotton manufacturing possessed. Furthermore, this study of Manchester in the period from 1790 to 1820 focuses on the urban setting as a locus of innovation and the chapel life of Unitarians as providing a site for the inculcation of religious values compatible with an ethic for both entrepreneurs and workers. The article contributes to the growing (and often neo-Weberian) cultural history of the first Industrial Revolution. M’Connell and Kennedy led the Manchester cotton industry for over two decades and they stamped their values and knowledge base into the community through their avid participation in scientific societies and chapel life. Their manuscripts at the John Rylands Library, Deansgale, Manchester form the core of this article.
International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 2020
Written as a polemical piece, the essay confronts the detractors of the Enlightenment and moderni... more Written as a polemical piece, the essay confronts the detractors of the Enlightenment and modernity. It asks if science is simply a social construction, how can we put so much faith in it to help solve the current crisis brought about by COVID-19? If we turn away from the Enlightenment and its values, how can we deploy liberal solutions to work in our current predicament and preserve what is progressive within modernity?
... As for the present, it is, in corollary fashion, either the blessed age of prog-ress ... of t... more ... As for the present, it is, in corollary fashion, either the blessed age of prog-ress ... of this kind of history motivated by the desire to substitute explanation for narration, but at ... to pure narrative: the possibility of a rational interpretation of history, the recognition of certain regularities in ...
In the late 18th century, during a key moment of the Enlightenment and the consolidation of natio... more In the late 18th century, during a key moment of the Enlightenment and the consolidation of nation-states and their respective civil societies, Western Europe underwent a process of intellectual and political transformation. Therefore, my thesis demonstrates how Freemasonry played a particular role in this and how it foreshadowed the role that it would have on the political life of the next century (19th), especially in Catholic countries in Europe and Latin America. We can see the role of Freemasonry in the adoption of secular reforms visible in the political and intellectual history of European Freemasonry since the 1770’s. This research serves as an example of the analysis of change in Freemasonry towards a proposal to concrete actions in search of the transformation of the state. Some of the works used to create this thesis include works from Gotthold Lessing, the Comte de Mirabeau, Herder, Frederick Schlegel, Lord Ramsay, and the cases of the national organizations of grand lodges in the Netherlands, Britain, Germany and the United States.
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