October 2026 reading and listening collection
Was there one Enlightenment, or many? Follow a clear route through the arguments, then join the month’s conversation.
1. Start with the central question
Beyond the Age of Reason: Constructing the Enlightenment
Begin here for an introduction to the competing projects, networks and definitions behind the familiar name. As you read, ask what these thinkers shared and where they disagreed.
2. Choose an interview
Both conversations below are available now from the Beyond the Text archive.
Anthony Pagden: Why the Enlightenment Still Matters
Explore the meaning of the Enlightenment and its continuing political inheritance. 1 hour 11 minutes · Originally released February 2024.
Ritchie Robertson: The Enlightenment and the Pursuit of Happiness
Consider happiness, reason, emotion and the ambitions of reform. 53 minutes · Originally released February 2024.
3. Follow a question that interests you
- Freedom and inequality: Rousseau and the problem of modern society. How can progress create new forms of dependence?
- Rights and obligation: Natural Law and Natural Rights. Explore Pufendorf as background to later debates.
- Revolution and reform: Thomas Paine: Revolution and Rights. Read a further perspective on political change.
Widen the historical context
Rethinking the Middle Ages provides a longer view of institutions, learning and intellectual change before the eighteenth century. It helps test stories in which modern knowledge appears only after a uniformly dark medieval past.
Rapin and the history of political party places constitutional disagreement in the early eighteenth century. Bentham on utility, reform and empire follows the ambitions and limits of reform into a different political setting.
As you compare these essays, distinguish earlier conditions, eighteenth-century controversies and later uses of the language of improvement.
Read the introductory guide to intellectual history for the methods behind these questions.
4. Join the monthly debate
Was there one Enlightenment? Bring one example from an essay or interview. You can take part without finishing the whole collection.
For a focused discussion of religion and pluralism, try Where Should Toleration End?.
Share this collection
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