"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 SummerPulitzer 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.

Introduction - Enlightenment as Revolution 1Chapter One - The Revolution in Ideas 12The State of Nature 14The Triumph of Reason 22The Freedom of Thought 33The Light of Experience 46Chapter Two - Rule Britannia? 57The Widening Gap 60Imperial Rulership 75The Scottish Enlightenment 86Chapter Three - Revolutionary Americans 100An American Enlightenment 104Creating the Revolution 111Self-Evident Truths 117The Egalitarian Moment 125Chapter Four - France: Rule or Ruin? 133Royal Paris 137The Philosophes and the People 143The Unmaking of a King 151Leading by Legislating 157The Madness of the Factions 165Chapter Five - Transforming American Politics 173The Life of the Nation 176The Liberty of a Person 184The Happiness of the People 188The First Transformation? 195Chapter Six - Britain: The Rules of Rulership 199The Inside Game 201The Revolution That Wasn't 207The Fractured Debate 214Chapter Seven - Napoleonic Rulership 221Le Grande Farce 223Power: The Supreme Value 230The Abdication of the People 236Restoration? 244Chapter Eight -Britain: Industrializing Enlightenment 248Ideas as Capital 251The Tyranny of the Machine 257Property and Poverty 261The New Radicals 267Chapter Nine -France: The Crowds of July 273The Liberal Revolt 276Tribunes of the People 282Republican Revivals 293Chapter Ten - America: We Are All Republicans 297Leadership by the Virginia Gentlemen 299A Wind Blows in from the West 306Liberty and Equality 313The American Experiment 326Chapter Eleven -Britain: The Fire for Reform 331Strategies of Reform 313Ideas as Weapons 340Stumbling toward Reform 346The Dawning of a Liberal Party 355Chapter Twelve - The Negative of Liberty 361People as Property 363The Canker of Bondage 371Chapter Thirteen - The Transformation 380The Liberal Triumph 383The Clash of Ideas 387A New American Enlightenment? 395Notes 404