A decade of research into the seventeenth and eighteenth century unearths ideas and stories about liberty, democracy and freedom that terrified the ruling classes of the time and formed the foundations of modern revolutions.

A highly ambitious and lucid history of ideas from the very earliest times to the present day.

In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging was not simply a form of punishing transgressors. Rather it evidently served the more sinister purpose - for a privileged ruling class - of forcing the poor population of London to accept the criminalization of customary rights and new forms of private property.

The Reformation was the seismic event in European history over the past 1000 years, and one which tore the medieval world apart. Not just European religion, but thought, culture, society, state systems, personal relations - everything - was turned upside down.

Nowadays, the Enlightenment is often judged harshly for its simplistic optimism. Peter Gay revisits the sources to show that the Enlightenment's increasing scientific method and belief in reason marked the beginning of the modern age.

This work completes the author's reinterpretation begun in The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism . It describes the programme of the philosophes and their views of society, with the aim of providing insights into the Enlightenment's critical method and its human and libertarian vision.