Carl L. Becker Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Max Lerner

Critical Essay by Max Lerner

SOURCE: "Carl Becker: Historian of the Heavenly City," in Ideas Are Weapons, The Viking Press, 1939, pp. 235-43.

In the following essay, Lerner praises The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers but states that Becker's central argument in this work is weakened by his decision to ignore the economic and social conditions of the period.

[The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers] is a book so simple, so light, so clear, that one feels didactic in pointing out that it is really a scholarly study in the history of ideas, and a bit ponderous in assessing it (as it must none the less be assessed) a classic. It is cast unmistakably in an enduring mold. Into it a lavish scholarship has been poured, but with a hand so deft as to conceal everything except the significant. Those who seek the tortuous in thought and the magisterial in style will do...
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