Liberty of conscience and freedom of thought are twin, core components of modern life in societies across the world. The ability to pursue one?s vision of the right and the good, coupled with liberty to pursue individual reason and enlightenment, helped produce so much of modern life that we may be apt to forget that libertarian philosophy was not dictated by Nature. Freethought and Freedom surveys the long history of religious and intellectual liberty, exploring their key ideas along the way.

John Toland was notorious. A pamphleteer, a polemicist and a prankster of the first order, modern scholarship has struggled to position his writings within the debates of his day. This study is the first to fully recount his remarkable biography, situating his writings within the controversies that sparked and shaped them.

"The book argues that Toland shaped the republican tradition after the Glorious Revolution into a practical and politically viable programme, focused not on destroying the monarchy, but on reforming public religion and the Church of England. The book also examines how Toland used his social intimacy with a wide circle of men and women (ranging from Prince Eugene of Savoy to Robert Harley) to distribute his ideas in private. It also explores the connections between Toland's erudition and print culture, arguing that his intellectual project was aimed at compromising the authority of Christian knowledge as much as the political power of the Church."--Jacket.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book offers a critical survey of religious change and its causes in eighteenth-century Europe, and constitutes a challenge to the accepted views in traditional Enlightenment studies. Focusing on Enlightenment Italy, France and England, it illustrates how the canonical view of eighteenth-century religious change has in reality been constructed upon scant evidence and assumption, in particular the idea that the thought of the enlightened led to modernity. For, despite a lack of evidence, one of the fundamental assumptions of Enlightenment studies has been the assertion that there was a vibrant Deist movement which formed the “intellectual solvent” of the eighteenth century. The central claim of this book is that the immense ideological appeal of the traditional birth-of-modernity myth has meant that the actual lack of Deists has been glossed over, and a quite misleading historical view has become entrenched.

First full account of the vital struggle for Church and State in England after the accession of George I.

Eric R. Schlereth places religious conflicts between deists and their opponents at the center of early American public life. This history recasts the origins of cultural politics in the United States by exploring how everyday Americans navigated questions of religious truth and difference in an age of emerging religious liberty.

In 1714, king George I ushered in a remarkable 123-year period of energy that changed the face of Britain and ultimately had a profound effect on the modern era. The pioneers of modern capitalism, industry, democracy, literature, and even architecture flourished during this time and their innovations and influence spread throughout the British empire, including the United States. Now this rich cultural period in Britain is effectively surveyed and summarized for quick reference in a first-of-its-kind encyclopedia, which contains entries by British, Canadian, American, and Australian scholars specializing in everything from finance and the fine arts to politics and patent law. More than 380 illustrations, mostly rare engravings, enhance the coverage, which runs the whole gamut of political, economic, literary, intellectual, artistic, commercial, and social life, and spotlights some 600 prominent individuals and families.