Minsik
Discover
Jan 1, 1923 — —· 103 yrs

GERMANY AUTHOR · HISTORY · INTELLECTUAL LIFE

Peter Gay

28
BOOKS
3.5
AVG RATING (4)
0
READERS
Berlin, Germany
Wikipedia

IN THE CENTURY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT, educated Europeans awoke to a new sense of life.

— from The Enlightenment: an interpretation

Most acclaimed

#1

My German question

0.0 (0)

In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, antireligious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939 - "the story," says Peter Gay, "of a poisoning and how I dealt with it." Gay describes his family, the life they led, and the reasons they did not emigrate sooner, and he explores his own ambivalent feelings - then and now - toward Germany and the Germans. Even before the events of 1938-39, culminating in Kristallnacht, the family was convinced that they must leave the country. Gay describes the bravery and ingenuity of his father in working out the agonizing emigration process, the courage of the non-Jewish friends who helped his family during their last bitter months in Germany, and the family's mounting panic as they witnessed the indifference of other countries to their plight and that of others like themselves. Gay's account - marked by candor, modesty, and insight - adds an important and curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry.

#2

Modern Europe

0.0 (0)
#3

The Enlightenment: an interpretation

0.0 (0)

Peter Gay will inevitably leave his stamp on our conception of the Enlight- ment for decades to come. The sheer bulk of his writing on the subject alone will ensure that. He began his re-interpretation of the movement in 1959 with Voltaire's Politics: the Poet as Realist, showing the foremost philosophe to have been a much more liberal and practical political thinker than had often been assumed. There followed in 1964 The Party of Humanity, a series of essays in which Gay challenged some of the commonplace characterizations of the philosophes, especially the notion that they were impractical idealists. Then in 1966 he published The Rise of Modern Paganism, the first volume of his interpretation of the Enlightenment. He completed this analysis in 1969 with a second tome entitled The Science of Freedom. Finally last year he capped his work with The Bridge of Criticism, a debate among Lucian, Eras- mus, and Voltaire which the author admits amounts to a polemic on behalf of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile he had propagated his view of the movement in the introductions to his translations of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary and Candide, his anthologies of the works of Deists and of Locke on educa- tion, and his numerous articles and public lecture. -- Description from (April 17, 2012).

Books

Newest First