Gay, Peter - John Raymond (review date 24 April 1970)

John Raymond (review date 24 April 1970)

SOURCE: Raymond, John. “Meet the Family.” New Statesman 79, no. 2041 (24 April 1970): 585–86.

[In the following review of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Volume II: The Science of Freedom, Raymond praises Gay's work as a “masterful” study.]

In 1765 Horace Walpole, revisiting Paris after an age prolonged by the Seven Years' War, ‘to see French plays and buy French china,’ defined the philosophes in a letter to his cousin, General Conway:

Do you know who the philosophers are, or what the term means here? In the first place it comprehends almost everybody; and in the next, means men who, avowing war against popery, aim, many of them, at a subversion of all religion and, still many more, at the destruction of regal power.

Fifteen years before, in his early thirties, when he first read Montesquieu and found De l'esprit des...

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