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A. Lincoln, Philosopher: Lincoln’S Place In 19th-Century Intellectual History, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The nineteenth century in Europe and America was an era of second thoughts. Those second thoughts were largely about the Enlightenment, which had been born in the mid-1600s as a scientific revolution and blossomed into the Age of Reason in the 1700s, when it seemed that no puzzle was beyond the grasp of scientific rationality. That blossom was snipped all too quickly by the French Revolution, which drowned rationality in human politics in a spray of Jacobin-terrorized blood, then by the revulsion of European art and music from the Enlightenment’s canons of balance and symmetry in favor of the Romantic …