The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction — Roy Porter

Porter compresses the Enlightenment into a tight account that is attentive to both its internal diversity and its lasting consequences. He resists the tendency to reduce it to a single narrative — reason versus religion, progress versus tradition — and presents instead a movement of considerable heterogeneity, in which common assumptions about improvement and evidence were applied to very different ends. An ideal entry point to a subject whose influence on the modern world is difficult to overstate, and whose internal contradictions remain unresolved.

Part of Oxford University Press's celebrated Very Short Introductions series. Roy Porter was one of the foremost historians of the Enlightenment in Britain; this was among his final works before his death in 2002. 'Porter at his most lucid and illuminating.' — London Review of Books