This remarkable book reexamines the intellectual history of eighteenth century France and Germany in order to bring to light a richer, more nuanced view of this pivotal period. More specifically, many writers, commonly characterized as "post-modernist," have used the European Enlightenment as a "whipping boy" in order to promote their own vision of the history of ideas. The editors use a very judicious strategy in order to analyze this tendency to attenuate the richness of 18th century European culture: they choose essays that are about the Enlightenment; they also choose essays that expose how the dubious dichotomy, "Postmodernity v. Enlightenment" came into being. Every one of the essays in this collection is of great intellectual rigor and constitutes a serious contribution to the enduring question, "What is Enlightenment?" This volume deals frontally with the important issue of the role of women during this time. The essays in this book are energetically, interestingly argued, and the editors have chosen a very stimulating organizational approach; they have divided the book into three sets of problems: "Enlightenment or Postmodernity?," "Critical Confrontations," and "A Postmodern Enlightenment." Essays dealing with postmodernism tend to be arcane or incomprehensible; the essays in this book are difficult, challenging, and wonderfully readable.

The book presents a very nice documentary narrative of the major events and circumstances of the French Revolution. Some entries are a bit puzzling, like the Diderot passage, and there are some gaps, such as Robespierre's "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen" (1793), but the overall value of the book is not diminished and can be supplemented by online sources (as was done in the class I took). Baker is, of course, a very fine intellectual historian, and his notes always provide sufficient transitions between the documents.