Introduction - Enlightenment as Revolution 1
Chapter One - The Revolution in Ideas 12
The State of Nature 14
The Triumph of Reason 22
The Freedom of Thought 33
The Light of Experience 46

Chapter Two - Rule Britannia? 57
The Widening Gap 60
Imperial Rulership 75
The Scottish Enlightenment 86

Chapter Three - Revolutionary Americans 100
An American Enlightenment 104
Creating the Revolution 111
Self-Evident Truths 117
The Egalitarian Moment 125

Chapter Four - France: Rule or Ruin? 133
Royal Paris 137
The Philosophes and the People 143
The Unmaking of a King 151
Leading by Legislating 157
The Madness of the Factions 165

Chapter Five - Transforming American Politics 173
The Life of the Nation 176
The Liberty of a Person 184
The Happiness of the People 188
The First Transformation? 195

Chapter Six - Britain: The Rules of Rulership 199
The Inside Game 201
The Revolution That Wasn't 207
The Fractured Debate 214

Chapter Seven - Napoleonic Rulership 221
Le Grande Farce 223
Power: The Supreme Value 230
The Abdication of the People 236
Restoration? 244

Chapter Eight -Britain: Industrializing Enlightenment 248
Ideas as Capital 251
The Tyranny of the Machine 257
Property and Poverty 261
The New Radicals 267

Chapter Nine -France: The Crowds of July 273
The Liberal Revolt 276
Tribunes of the People 282
Republican Revivals 293

Chapter Ten - America: We Are All Republicans 297
Leadership by the Virginia Gentlemen 299
A Wind Blows in from the West 306
Liberty and Equality 313
The American Experiment 326

Chapter Eleven -Britain: The Fire for Reform 331
Strategies of Reform 313
Ideas as Weapons 340
Stumbling toward Reform 346
The Dawning of a Liberal Party 355

Chapter Twelve - The Negative of Liberty 361
People as Property 363
The Canker of Bondage 371

Chapter Thirteen - The Transformation 380
The Liberal Triumph 383
The Clash of Ideas 387
A New American Enlightenment? 395
Notes 404

"With this profound and magnificent book, drawing on his deep reservoir of thought and expertise in the humanities, James MacGregor Burns takes us into the fire's center. As a 21st-century philosopher, he brings to vivid life the incandescent personalities and ideas that embody the best in Western civilization and shows us how understanding them is essential for anyone who would seek to decipher the complex problems and potentialities of the world we will live in tomorrow." --Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989
"James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and Fire and Light is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America - for better and for worse - what it is." --Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Revolutionary Summer
Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment
In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments. Fire and Light brings to vivid life the galaxy of revolutionary leaders of thought and action who, armed with a new sense of human possibility, driven by a hunger for change, created the modern world. Burns discovers the origins of a distinctive American Enlightenment in men like the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and their early encounters with incendiary European ideas about liberty and equality. It was these thinker-activists who framed the United States as a grand and continuing experiment in Enlightenment principles.
Today the same questions Enlightenment thinkers grappled with have taken on new urgency around the world: in the turmoil of the Arab Spring, in the former Soviet Union, and China, as well as in the United States itself. What should a nation be? What should citizens expect from their government? Who should lead and how can leadership be made both effective and accountable? What is happiness, and what can the state contribute to it? Burns's exploration of the ideals and arguments that formed the bedrock of our modern world shines a new light on these ever-important questions.