Trousson, Raymond / Vercruysse, Jeroom (dir.), Dictionnaire general de Voltaire. (Champion classiques, references et dictionnaires 18) 1272 p. 2020:10 (Champion, FR) <670-9>
ISBN 978-2-38096-016-7 paper ¥7,064.- (税込) EUR 38.00

Colman, John, Everyone Orthodox to Themselves: John Locke and His American Students on Religion and Liberal Society. (American Political Thought) 256 pp. 2023:7 (U. Pr. Kansas, US) <707-8>
ISBN 978-0-7006-3501-6 hard ¥10,777.- (税込) US$ 49.99 *

Religious liberty is one of the hallmarks of American democracy, but the principal architects of this liberty believed that it was only compatible with a certain form of Christianity-namely, a liberal, rational, Christianity. Conservative and postliberal champions of the freedom of religion often ignore this point, sometimes even arguing that orthodox Christianity was, or should be, at the root of democratic liberty.Everyone Orthodox to Themselves, John Colman's close study of the religious views and political theologies of John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson, shows otherwise. Colman demonstrates that Locke and his three American students specifically took aim at the idea of orthodoxy, which they argued continuously tempted its believers to try to impose an artificial uniformity upon the religious diversity that naturally exists in society and thought it necessary to advance a more rational, non-dogmatic Christianity given the threat they saw religious orthodoxy posed to a free, liberal society.While recent arguments have endorsed the idea that there is a crisis of liberalism that can only be met by the revival of more orthodox forms of religious devotion, Colman argues that, according to some of the most prominent American Founders and their philosophic predecessors, such orthodoxy is incompatible with religious freedom and the right to free inquiry. Everyone Orthodox to Themselves demonstrates that only a non-dogmatic, rationalist Christianity could be made a friend rather than an adversary to the inalienable right of religious liberty.Colman's work reveals how the reform of Christianity, and with it the inculcation of a particular theological disposition, is necessary to secure religious liberty and the right of free inquiry. The book also establishes the importance of Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity for his larger argument for toleration.

Parekh, Surya, Black Enlightenment. 216 pp. 2023:9 (Duke U. Pr., US) <707-9>
ISBN 978-1-4780-2026-4 hard ¥21,549.- (税込) US$ 99.95 *
ISBN 978-1-4780-2519-1 paper ¥5,594.- (税込) US$ 25.95 *

In Black Enlightenment Surya Parekh reimagines the Enlightenment from the position of the Black subject. Parekh examines the works of such Black writers as the free Jamaican Francis Williams (1697-1762), Afro-British thinker Ignatius Sancho (1729?-1780), and Afro-American poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784), placing them alongside those of their white European contemporaries David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). By rethinking the Enlightenment and its canons, Parekh complicates common understandings of the Enlightenment wherein Black subjects could exist only in negation to white subjects. Black Enlightenment points to the anxiety of race in Hume, Kant, and others while showing the importance of Black Enlightenment thought. Parekh prompts us to consider the timeliness of reading Black Enlightenment authors who become "free" in a society hostile to that freedom.

Billing, Andrew, Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-Century Liberal Political Writing: Political Zoologies of the French Enlightenment. (Routledge Studies in French and Francophone Literature) 312 pp. 2023:12 (Routledge, UK) <707-7>
ISBN 978-1-03-260572-2 hard ¥42,735.- (税込) GB￡ 150.00 *

Our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michele Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors-Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Retif de La Bretonne-also constructed a "political zoology" in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as "liberal" political thinkers.