Michael Brown, The Irish Enlightenment (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016)
("[T]he central philosophical assumption underpinning the rationalist movement inside European Enlightenment: that man was a moral agent, and that the good life could be discerned by his intelligence." Id. at 59."The term 'Enlightenment' identifies a crucial change in the understanding of the world. It is both a movement and an idea. . . . In the first sense it is sometimes used as a shorthand term for progressive eighteenth-century thought; and this leads to a form of social history. Used in the second sense, the Enlightenment as a philosophical category has involved defining it through reference to a set of progressive principles such as toleration, cosmopolitanism, or democracy. But rather than try to maintain that certain political, philosophical, or religious tenets constitute a definition, the Enlightenment is perhaps better conceived of as an idea with various applications. It offers a method of approach to the universe; a means, not a set of preordained ends." Id. at 7. "This book offers a narrative of the Irish Enlightenment." Id. at 10. "[I]t is the central contention of this book that the Irish Enlightenment was characterized by a concern for the issue of confession, by which is meant the public articulation of faith. If the Scottish Enlightenment was prompted by the parliamentary Union of 1707 with England, and the resultant decay in the possibility of enacting civic virtue, and the American Enlightenment was concerned with issues of dependency, the Irish focus was on how to allow a variety of contending faith communities to worship freely. The Irish Enlightenment engaged in an extended debate about which faith or faiths were sufficiently civil as to be permitted to publicly engage in religious, social, and political discourse. The question at stake was less who was Irish--a nineteenth-century question--than who was enlightened. Who could be trusted teenage impartially in the convention at the common good, and who was excluded as a result of preexisting religious (or atheist) convictions, The ambitions amongst all the literati . . . was to answer this question in either a restrictive of expansive fashion and to thereby create a stable basis for civil society on the island(here intended to imply both he modern sense of the term as a community of apolitical actors, and in its early-modern sense encompassing what is not thought of as society and the state). Thus book tracks precisely the rise and fall of that debate--as the community moved away form the religious conflict at the end of the seventeenth century; as a vision of cross-confessional society became a practical, if limited, reality; and as the question of inclusion of Catholics and dissenters in an explicitly Anglican state fractured and eventually destroyed the possibility of sustaining a civilized discussion, The net result of this fracture was the civil unrest of 1798." Id. at 11. Sound familiar?).
