Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments.

Introduction: Enlightenment as revolution? --The revolution in ideas. The state of nature -- The triumph of reason -- The freedom of thought -- The light of experience -- Rule Britannia? The widening gap -- Imperial rulership -- The Scottish enlightenment -- Revolutionary Americans. An American enlightenment -- Creating the revolution -- Self-evident truths -- The egalitarian movement -- France: rule or ruin? Royal Paris -- The Philosophes and the people -- The unmaking of a king -- Becoming revolutionary -- The madness of the factions -- Transforming American politics. The life of the nation -- The liberty of a person -- The happiness of the people -- The first transformation? -- Britain: the rules of rulership. The inside game -- The revolution that wasn't -- The fractured debate -- Napoleonic rulership. La grande farce -- Power: the supreme value -- The abdication of the people -- Restoration? -- Britain: industrializing enlightenment. Ideas as capital -- The tyranny of the machine -- Property and poverty -- The new radicals -- France: the crowds of July. The liberal revolt -- Tribunes of the people -- Republican rivals -- The American experiment. We are all republicans -- The Democratic majority -- Liberty and equality -- The new world -- Britain: the fire for reform. Strategies of reform -- Ideas as weapons -- Stumbling toward reform -- The dawning of a liberal party -- The negative of liberty. People as property -- The canker of bondage -- The transformation. The liberal triumph -- The clash of ideas -- A new American enlightenment?