An excellent introduction, up to date in its references but with an argument of its own, is Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago, 2010). A good general survey is Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge, 3rd edition, 2013). Fuller, interpretative, and strong in intellectual history, is Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters (Oxford, 2013).
The most discussed recent interpretation of the Enlightenment is that of Jonathan Israel, in four large volumes: Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2005), Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford, 2011), and Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from the Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton, 2014).
Works of reference include J. W. Yolton, with R. Porter, P. Rogers, and B. M. Stafford (eds), The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1991); and, in four volumes, A. C. Kors (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (Oxford, 2001).
Noteworthy recent publications in other languages include: G. Paganini and E. Tortarolo (eds), Illuminismo: un vademecum (Turin, 2008), a series of twenty short essays on themes in Enlightenment thought, and S. Van Damme, À toutes voiles vers la vérité. Une autre histoire de la philosophie au temps des Lumières (Paris, 2014).
The complete text of the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonnée des sciences, des arts et des metiers (1751–72) is available free from the University of Chicago’s ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, edited by Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe: <http://portail.atilf.fr/encyclopedie/Formulaire-de-recherche.htm>. It reproduces the first, Paris edition and provides summary data as well as the capability to search the text. There is an English translation by Richard Schwab of D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie (Chicago, 1995).
Several paperback series offer accessible editions and translations of the Enlightenment texts mentioned in this book. These include:
Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge University Press): Beccaria, Condorcet, Diderot, Ferguson, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Locke, Montesquieu, Pufendorf, Rousseau, Vico.
Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press): Condillac, Herder, Kant, Shaftesbury, Smith, Voltaire.
The Liberty Press (Liberty Fund, Indianapolis): Bayle, Carmichael, Grotius, Hutcheson, Hume (Essays, History), Locke, Mandeville, Smith.
Oxford University Press publishes several editions of Hume’s philosophical works and a World’s Classics edition of his Essays. It also publishes critical editions of the works of Hobbes and Locke.
For Gibbon, see The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), in the edition in three volumes edited by David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1995).
On the 18th-century uses of lumières: Roland Mortier, Clartés et Ombres du Siècle des Lumières: Études sur le XVIIIe siècle littéraire (Geneva, 1969); on the German debate over Aufklärung, James Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley and London, 1996), which contains the essays by Mendelssohn and Kant in answer to the question ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’
On the Querelle of the ancients and moderns: Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy, esp. chs 3, 5, 6.
On the Scientific Revolution: Lawrence M. Principe, The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2011), although the author disowns the term.
More generally on the history of philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries: M. Ayers and D. Garber (eds), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2003); K. Haakonssen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2006).
On the anti-philosophes: Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment. The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford and New York, 2001).
Historical reconstruction of the Enlightenment: the key early works by literary scholars are Paul Hazard, The European Mind 1680–1715 (first published in French in 1935; English translation London, 1953), and Daniel Mornet, Les origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française 1715–1787 (Paris, 1933). Franco Venturi’s early work included Jeunesse de Diderot (1713–1753) (Paris, 1939).
On the geographical expansion of Enlightenment: Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981). A crucial contribution to its social history was Robert Darnton, ‘The high Enlightenment and the low life of literature in pre-Revolutionary France’, Past and Present, 51 (1971), reprinted in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA, 1982). The study of women in the Enlightenment now starts from Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2005). On the proliferation of Enlightenment ‘languages’, John Pocock, ‘Historiography and Enlightenment: a view of their history’, Modern Intellectual History, 5 (2008).
Jonathan Israel’s case for identifying radical, irreligious Enlightenment as the true Enlightenment is best stated in Radical Enlightenment (2001), the first of his four volumes listed under ‘General introductions’. For the alternative case: H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The religious origins of the Enlightenment’, in his Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London, 1967).
On 17th-century developments in the study of religion, natural and sacred: Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England c. 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2015).
On the late 17th and early 18th century critics of religion, anticipating Israel: Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981); and Ira O. Wade, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750 (Princeton and London, 1938). Curious about rather than critical of religion: Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhart, The Book that Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2010).
On 18th-century Biblical studies: Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton and Oxford, 2005). See also: Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2003).
On the arguments over toleration: O. P. Grell and R. Porter (eds), Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2000); J. Parkin and T. Stanton (eds), Natural Law and Toleration in the Early Enlightenment (Proceedings of the British Academy: 186, Oxford, 2013).
On arguments for and from the ‘rights of man’: Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007).
On the civil and the sacred in 18th-century historiography, the rich, multi-volume study of Gibbon and his contexts by John G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols: I The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (1999), II Narratives of Civil Government (1999), III The First Decline and Fall (2003), IV Barbarians, Savages, and Empires (2005), V Religion: The First Triumph (2010), VI Barbarism: Triumph in the West (2015).
General: M. Goldie and R. Wokler (eds), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2006).
On natural law and moral philosophy, T. J. Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2000); Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 2001).
On historical writing: Hugh Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment (New Haven and London, 2010); M. S. Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain 1740–1820 (Princeton, 2000); Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender and the Limits of Progress (Basingstoke and New York, 2013); and Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion, esp. IV Barbarians, Savages and Empires. On Hume as philosopher and historian: James Harris, David Hume: An Intellectual Biography (New York and Cambridge, forthcoming 2016).
On the origin of languages debate: Avi Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2012).
On Rousseau: R. Wokler, Rousseau (Oxford, 1995).
On the critique of empire: S. Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton and Oxford, 2003).
On political economy: I. Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), is now fundamental.
On Hume (both his account of sociability and his political economy) and Genovesi: John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005).
On Adam Smith there is an excellent, readable intellectual biography by Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London, 2010).
For the concept of the ‘public sphere’: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Oxford, 1989; translation of the German original, published in 1962).
Good general historical treatments are: James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001); and Thomas Munck, The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History 1721–1794 (London, 2000).
On coffee and other alimentary issues: E. C. Spary, Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760 (Chicago and London, 2012).
On Freemasonry: Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1991).
On the salons: Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London, 1994), answered by Antoine Lilti, The World of the Salons: Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford and New York, 2015; abridged translation of the French original of 2005).
On academies: Daniel Roche, Le siècle des lumières en province: Académies et académiciens provinciaux 1680–1789, 2 vols (Paris, 1978), and Jeremy Caradonna, The Enlightenment in Practice: Academic Prize Contests and Intellectual Culture in France, 1670–1794 (Ithaca, 2012); for the Berlin Academy, Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment.
On publishing the Encyclopedia, the brilliant article by Robert Darnton, ‘The Encyclopédie wars of pre-revolutionary France’, American Historical Review, 78 (1973).
On the Scots, their London publishers, and much more: Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland and America (Chicago and London, 2006).
On Enlightenment, governments, and reform: Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971); Derek Beales, Joseph II, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1987, 2009); John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions 1780–1860 (Oxford, 2006); Paschalis M. Kitromilides, Enlightenment and Revolution: The Making of Modern Greece (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2013); Gabriel Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire 1759–1808 (Basingstoke, 2008), and Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian world c. 1770–1850 (Cambridge, 2013).
On economic improvement, in agriculture and manufactures: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven and London, 2013); Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850 (New Haven and London, 2012).
On Enlightenment, opinion, print, and revolution: Keith M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990); Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (London, 1996).
Understanding of the relation between revolutionary political thought and its Enlightenment predecessors has been transformed by the studies of Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton and Oxford, 2007), and Sans-culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton and Oxford, 2008).
Besides editing What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, James Schmidt is the author of a series of helpful articles on the modern debate over ‘Enlightenment’: see, for example, ‘Misunderstanding the question: “What is Enlightenment?”: Venturi, Habermas, and Foucault’, History of European Ideas, 37 (2011). See now also, Vincenzo Ferrone, The Enlightenment. History of an Idea (Princeton and Oxford, 2015).
The major philosophical critics have been: Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (German edition, 1944; in English, New York, 1972, London, 1997); Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (in German, 1959; English translation, Oxford, 1988); Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. H. Hardy (Oxford, 2013), which includes works published from the 1960s; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 1970); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London, 1977); The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, ed. Paul Rabinow (London, 1984), which contains the lecture ‘What is Enlightenment?’; Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London, 1981); Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, Princeton, 2009).
For the defence: Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ, 1951); Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; K. M. Baker and P. H. Reill (eds), What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford, 2001), containing Richard Rorty’s essay ‘The continuity between Enlightenment and postmodernism’; Samuel Fleischacker, What is Enlightenment? (Abingdon and Oxford, 2013); Genevieve Lloyd, Enlightenment Shadows (Oxford, 2013).
For the historians Israel and Pagden, see references under Chapter 1.
For an egregious example of the global extension of ‘modernity’: Sebastian Conrad, ‘Enlightenment in global history: a historiographical critique’, American Historical Review, 117 (2012).