Caroline Winterer. American Enlightenments

During the eighteenth century, modern disciplines were in the process of formation, as several scholars have shown. Caroline Winterer’s American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason begins from the idea that application of the new empirical or “scientific” method and of secular reason, together with the “hope” that it was possible to make the future better and happier than the past, led to new discoveries in each burgeoning discipline that problematized, and gradually discredited and altered, traditional world views. Disputing what she calls “the diffusionist theory”—that “enlightenment was hatched in Europe and then traveled to the Americas” (10)—and placing America within a transatlantic “republic of letters” in which information and objects were exchanged, ideas were discussed in epistolary conversations, and people traveled back and forth, Winterer sets out to show that “the Americas changed many things for Europeans, even their sense of where they stood in time” (13), and that individual Americans participated in meaningful ways in the fashioning of each “realm of thought” (10).

Age of Enlightenment · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Happiness · Political science · Realm · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies