"A Mission to Show That the Great Dead Philosophers Have Been Misunderstood"

"Gottlieb has got Hume's geniality down to a T. 'Every philosopher likes to think he has reached his conclusions via rigorous reasoning,' he says, with a collusive wink to his readers; in the 17th century, indeed, 'falling in love with geometry seems almost to have been an occupational hazard'. Take Descartes: he was notable for 'his faith in his own unusually bright light of reason', but 'perhaps he did not have all the answers'. As for Hobbes, he was so 'bedazzled' by a priori geometry that he 'got rather carried away' and ended up 'over-egging his pudding'. But Leibniz is the one you really have to watch, since, poor fellow, he 'did, in effect, tend to confuse his own mind with that of God'."

Jonathan Rée in The Guardian reviews Gottliebb's The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy.

"Too Revolutionary Even for a Revolutionary Age"

"Mr Blom’s book is part biography and part polemic. He sketches the early lives of Diderot, Holbach, Rousseau and other players in the drama, and describes the philosophy they hammered out. It is also an iconoclastic rebuttal of what he describes as the 'official' history of the Enlightenment, the sort of history that he finds 'cut in stone' on a visit to the Paris Panthéon. There the bodies of Voltaire and Rousseau were laid to rest with the blessing of the French state. Neither deserved it, suggests Mr Blom."

The Economist publishes a review of Philipp Blom's A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment.

"Forced to Be Free"

"In recent times, the Bush administration has taken up Rostow's internationalist, crusading mantle and has run with it to potent effect. Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives have been identifiably Rostovian with respect to their reading of international relations: that it is the responsibility of the United States, as the world's most powerful nation, to democratize and do 'good'--at the point of a bayonet, if necessary."

In the Los Angeles Times, David Milne recalls John Kennedy's and Lyndon Johnson's advisor Walt Rostow.