Dark Brilliance: The Age of Reason, from Descartes to Peter the Great

The “age of reason” that kicked off the Enlightenment was really “an age of unreason” so chaotic it prompted exceptional minds to seek out order amid the disorder, according to this panoramic account. Philosopher Strathern (The Florentines) depicts Europe’s 17th century as dominated by religious intolerance and constant warfare, as well as fortunes built on the flourishing of the slave trade, the violent extraction of resources from the Americas, and the invention of stock market speculation (with the Tulipmania phenomenon leading to the first market crash). The Enlightenment was therefore not inevitable, Strathern suggests, but the product of canny minds seeking a way through the madness—like Caravaggio’s introduction of a mordant humanism into fine art’s biblical subject matter, or Thomas Hobbes’s attempts to make sense of the volatility of the English Civil War in his political writing. Strathern paints the “unreasonableness” of the era as not merely a retrospective insight, but a quality that was perceptible at the time. That the ever-deluded Don Quixote became the era’s most popular literary character is evidence enough to bolster his case, but Strathern also points to other minor signs (a “prime example” of the era’s habitual absurdity, he writes, is that Oliver Cromwell’s show trial of Charles I was called “Rex v. Rex,” or “King v. King”). It’s an enlightening perspective on a not very enlightened era. (Jan.)