The Dutch Golden Age was one of the most spectacularly creative episodes in world history. The age of Grotius, Spinoza, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, it was also remarkable for its immense impact in the spheres of commerce, finance, shipping, and technology. This book provides a comprehensive account of t[...]

Arguably the most decisive shift in the history of ideas in modern times was the complete demolition during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - in the wake of the Scientific Revolution - of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief, by the new philosophy and the[...]

The Enlightenment shaped modernity. Western values of representative democracy and basic human rights, gender and racial equality, individual liberty, and freedom of expression and the press, form an interlocking system that derives directly from the Enlightenment's philosophical revolution. This fa[...]