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An Empire of Reason - The Open Ground
A library is only paper. For a century the great ideas of the Enlightenment had been written and shelved in Europe — and Europe remained a continent of kings. This episode leaves the philosophers’ shelf for American soil, and asks the question the whole season has been building toward: why here? Why did the empire of reason get built not in London or Paris but on the far provincial fringe of the West?
The answer is salutary neglect — seventy-five years, from 1689 to the Stamp Act, in which a distracted Britain looked away and the colonies built themselves. No guilds, no entailed estates, no…
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