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Philadelphia's Enlightenment, 1740-1800 Kingdom of Christ, Empire of Reason
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Nina Reid-Maroney
Book Code: GM1472
ISBN: 0-313-31472-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-31472-8
216 pages, photos, lineart
Greenwood Press
Publication: 11/30/2000
List Price: $119.95 (UK Sterling Price: £70.00)
Availability: Out of stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects:
Series Title: Contributions to the Study of World History
Series Number: 81
Reviews:
  • Reid-Maroney offers an elegant and reasoned inteleectual history of a group that viewed the intellect with skepticism, and this offers a fine example of finding synthesis where we did not expect it to be.
    —Technology and Culture     October 2003
  • [C]learly deserves a place in the front rank of those who have tested May's thesis and found it full of rewards. What Fiering did for Harvard, and Noll and Loetscher for Princeton, Reid-Mahoney has now done for Philadelphia, and with greater stylistic charm and ingenuity.
    —The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography     April 2003
  • [R]eid-Maroney's monograph is an important book; more significantly, this study gives us, at long last, a necessary corrective to previous interpretations that have made the American Enlightenment either a pragmatic episode in which Americans "practiced" what Europeans only theorized or an intellectual movement dominated by "reason" and deism.
    —Isis     December 2002
  • This is a graceful and persuasive study. Those interested in the dissemination of the Scottish Enlightenment, in the history of medicine, in early Philadelphia, and in the history of religious thought will find much to please them.
    —Eighteenth-Century Scotland     Spring 2002
  • [A] provocative and pioneering work.
    —Journal of Presbyterian History     Winter 2001
Description: Rather than treating the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment as defining opposites in 18th century American culture, this study argues that the imperatives of the great revival actually shaped the pursuit of enlightened science. Reid-Maroney traces the interwoven histories of the two movements by reconstructing the intellectual world of the "Philadelphia circle." Prophets of the Enlightenment had long tried to resolve pressing questions about the limitations of human reason and the sources of our knowledge about the created order of things. The leaders of the Awakening addressed those questions with a new urgency and, in the process, determined the character of the Enlightenment emerging in Philadelphia's celebrated culture of science. Tracing the influence of evangelical sensibility and the development of a Calvinist parallel to the philosophical skepticism of enlightened Scots, Reid-Maroney finds that the Philadelphians"love of science" rested on a radical critique of human reason, even while it acknowledged that reason was the "dignifying and distinguishing property of human nature." Benjamin Rush alluded to an enlightenment wrought by grace in his image of the Kingdom of Christ and the Empire of Reason. In the post-Revolutionary period, the redemptive Enlightenment of the Philadelphia circle reached its greatest cultural power as a vision for scientific progress in the new republic.
Table of Contents:
  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • Awakening: Science and Culture
  • "To Glorify God in Harmonious Quiet"
  • A Balm in Gilead
  • Awakening and Enlightenment in the New Side Academies
  • A "Hotbed of Hypothesis": The Edinburgh Medical School
  • The Enthusiast-Practitioner: Benjamin Rush
  • The Circle Widens: Samuel Stanhope Smith
  • The Kingdom of Christ and the Empire of Reason
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Index
LC Card Number: 00-032795
LCC Class: BR520
Dewey Class: 277
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