SOURCE: "Carl Becker's Heavenly City," in The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment, Alfred A. Knopf, 1964, pp. 188-210.

In the following essay, Gay concludes that Becker is ultimately unsuccessful in arguing his central points in The Heavenly City.

Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers was published more than a quarter of a century ago. Its urbane examination of the philosophes has had great and lasting influence; few recent books on European intellectual history have been as widely read and as generously received. It is that rare thing, a work of scholarship that is also a work of literature—a masterpiece of persuasion that has done more to shape the current image of the Enlightenment than any other book. Despite the skepticism of some professional historians, its witty formulations have been accepted by a generation of students and borrowed in textbook after textbook.

When...