The idea that history is moving ever onwards and upwards is an invention of the middle-class Enlightenment, not of the left.
Her absorbing book is not just about medicine and science but about colour, race, class, superstition and enlightenment, about the painful, transfixing romance of being American.
("I had to take a class on the Enlightenment," she recalled, "and I was like, 'This is garbage!' I don't care what you say, 'Robinson Crusoe' is not that good").
A class on the Enlightenment may highlight the fact that writers like Montesquieu turned to the Middle East to structure a critique of their own religious institutions.
In April, he appeared onstage at Ms. Winfrey's Life Class tour, describing his newfound enlightenment (brought on in part, he said, by weight loss) as a series of "aha orgasms".
In fact, the Houston Zen Center counts an Episcopal priest and a Baptist minister among its members seeking enlightenment through regular classes and group meditation.
Meanwhile, once the $15 for an hour and a half of hatha yoga is paid (classes are twice a day) enlightenment, but not necessarily the kind normally associated with yoga, awaits.
He attended a Jewish religious school (a cheder), but his middle-class family was strongly associated with the Haskalah, the "Jewish Enlightenment", and his father, a watchmaker, arranged that he receive private lessons in German and Russian.
This Enlightenment was spread among the educated classes by the many "societies of thought" that were founded at that time: masonic lodges, agricultural societies, and reading rooms.
A long stay in higher education, complete with many classes across various disciplines, is the path to enlightenment.
The educated classes widely accepted the principles and attitudes of the Enlightenment, although without the sharp hostility to religion that characterized the French philosophes.
