The Empire Of Reason Summary

Henry Steele Commager, in The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment, portrays a glorious beginning for the United States based upon the ideas of the Enlightenment. Commager asserts that it was Americans who not only embraced the body of Enlightenment principles, but wrote them into law, formed them into institutions, and put them to work. Just as the winning of independence and creation of the nation was, the formation of American principles forged through ideas of the Enlightenment, was the American Revolution. The central tenet is that more than any other nation at its founding, the United States was the fulfillment and culmination of the Enlightenment.
Commager’s eloquent volume pursues its thesis by examining the ideas both of American and of European philosophes—the worldly community of intellectuals, educators, revolutionaries, and rationalists who applied reason to all areas of learning and inquisition. Their guiding principle, however, was that order was a necessity. In fact, they were obsessed with organization, classification and systematization. From Montesqueiu’s Spirit of the Laws, to the System of Nature of Carl Linnaeus, to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and to the work of many others, order was considered highly imperative.
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They were also dedicated to improvement and progress. Philosophes during this time period, and especially in America, used their critiques of the past as a tool for analyzing and organizing the present. They were convinced that the future could and should be better, and who better to facilitate that progress than themselves. They were able to achieve their goals without pushback from “the Establishment” or any tyrannical authority because “they were the Establishment” (page