Another fleeting thought

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France, and to a lesser extent Germany, lay claim to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as to a kind of national treasure and heritage; and the rest of the West tends to agree. Yet those elements of the Enlightenment that had a permanent, positive and enduring impact on the West came neither from Paris nor from the university towns of Germany, but from Edinburgh (Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations), Milan (Cesare Beccaria's Crimes and Penalties) and from the fledgling, English-speaking United States of America. No work of any French or German author, not even Voltaire or Kant, compares.

Comments

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And I am not saying that the French and GErmans had no important En. figures - that would be ridiculous. What I am saying is that misguided national prejudice leads to a crass undervaluing of En. figures from Italy, Scotland and elsewhere.

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From my American public education, the major Enlightenment figures who come switfly to my mind are Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Smith, Newton, Leibniz; also Voltaire and Diderot. Hardly seems overly biased to the Continent.

I've certainly heard of Hume, though I didn't have him fixed in time well enough to tag him as Enlightenment. Ditto some of the other names here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Age_of_Enlightenment
Gibbon, Johnson, Goethe, and for that matter Kant.

Then there's the various French thinkers who gave us http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire which was perhaps more positive in its original context, but has certainly been a powerful and permanent term; that article doesn't mention Quesnay, who coached Adam Smith.

My schooling skipped Beccaria, but it also skipped Condorcet. Italy may be undervalued, I don't think France is overvalued. Germany... well, I never thought of it as a primary source of the Enlightenment, so hardly overvalued to me, though Frederick gets mentioned in the enlightened despotism line.