The End of Enlightenment

Historian Richard Whatmore argues that, for many people at its centre, the Enlightenment was a failure rather than a triumphant Age of Reason. By the early eighteenth century there was widespread hope that Enlightenment could be joined to toleration, the progress of commerce and an end to the wars of religion, with liberty kept alive in free states and absolute monarchies such as France coexisting with free states like Britain. Whatmore shows how that hope collapsed as states pursued wealth and empire through war. He traces the changing views of economists, philosophers, politicians and polemicists including David Hume, Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft and Edmund Burke, who witnessed terror, revolution, corruption, commercial excess and violent colonialism.

Tyler Cowen included it on his list of the best non-fiction of 2024.