Two things that amaze me about the European Enlightenment are the brilliance of its achievements and the stupidity with which ...

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The New Rasputins.” ...

The author is clearly as sure-footed an expert on the French Enlightenment as he is a shaky novice when it comes to Russia’s 18th-century Europeanisation. The book suffers from occasional linguistic ...

In mainstream thought, the Enlightenment is commonly perceived as a heroic campaign for secularisation and emancipation led by great thinkers known as philosophes. Voltaire and Hume are often seen as ...

About 250 years ago, the pioneering thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) reinvented childhood. The Swiss-French ...

The Enlightenment marks for many the birth of the Modern Age and evokes ideals of religious tolerance, political emancipation and human betterment. But how were such ideals expressed and what were ...

Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is something you allow." "To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath ...

Hinduism is often imagined as a monolith of arcane and ancient rituals, in spite of the efforts of external invaders. In ...