The meme now seems well understood – there is a type of person, and it is usually a man, who sort of falls in love with the grade school variation of what history is – dates, names of important people, battle and wars – that only seem interested in Napoleon or some other ‘big figure of history’. These people often do not understand history at all, but only think they do. History is a much broader category, and this is why it is so often misunderstood.
War and battles are interesting (to a certain type of person, I suppose), but there is so much more that can also be interesting. You can have, for instance, a history of the ideas that people were thinking at a given historical period. That’s what The Dark Side of the Enlightenment is all about, it is about the ideas that people were exploring during the enlightenment that did not neccisarily have the lasting impact that other ideas did. And it is a pretty fascinating read.
We remember the enlightenment for the ideas that propeled Europe out of the ‘dark ages’ (and I do love how the author opens this book by dispelling the whole notion of the ‘Dark Ages,’ making it clear that the only reason we have this terms is because of Edward Gibbon and his fetish for Roman antiquity) and into a more scientific age. But it was not, despite this, a time pf pure reason. This book goes into the ideas that existed at the time that were less than scientifically rigorous, and he focuses on some of the very same thinkers that we often associate with the rationality of this time.
This is the kind of book that I wish was more popular. I wish that every child that grows up with the ‘big man’ theory of history (a belief that propels people politically to the right) would recieve a book like this, so that they may start dispelling some of the more harmful beleifs they hold.
Failures in Polymathy 