Fire and Light - Hardcover

Praise for Fire and Light. 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.James MacGregor Burns, one of America's most distinguished historians, has written a superb book. Fire and Light is a fluent and wide-ranging history of Enlightenment thinkers and of the many political actors--in Britain, France, and Britain--whom they influenced between the 17th century and the mid-1800s. Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, Montesquieu, Locke, Hume, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Tocqueville, James Watt, James and John Stuart Mill, and Marx are among the host of writers, entrepreneurs, and national leaders who come to life on Burns's pages. James T. Patterson, Bancroft Prize-winning author of The Eve of Destruction --Various

JAMES MacGREGOR BURNS is the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox and Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom. He is the author of more than two dozen other books, including The Deadlock of Democracy and Leadership, which remains the seminal work in the field of leadership studies. He is the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government Emeritus at Williams College and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.