It is generally agreed that great men transcend their time while ordinary men remain rooted in it. This is why, if we want to know what life was like in days gone by, we must study those who were most representative of their age, those individuals who, though they may have achieved a modicum of fame or notoriety, are now, because of their limited abilities and outlook, largely forgotten. The great figures involved in the political and religious controversies that took of the seventeenth century and the beginning place in Holland! towards the end of the eighteenth, men such as Bayle, Jurieu, Le Clerc and others who were in the forefront of what has been aptly termed as the "crise de la conscience europeenne," these figures have been the object of extensive investigation. The minor personages of this period, on the other hand, have received little attention. For this reason, in a previous study,2 I examined the life and work of one of these minor figures, and tried to show how he was representative of those French Huguenots who came to Holland in the latter half of the seventeenth century, who settled in relatively remote places, and who made an effort to integrate themselves and gain acceptance in Dutch provincial society.

Common sense has always been a cornerstone of American politics. In 1776, Tom Paine’s vital pamphlet with that title sparked the American Revolution. And today, common sense—the wisdom of ordinary people, knowledge so self-evident that it is beyond debate—remains a powerful political ideal, utilized alike by George W. Bush’s aw-shucks articulations and Barack Obama’s down-to-earth reasonableness. But far from self-evident is where our faith in common sense comes from and how its populist logic has shaped modern democracy. Common Sense: A Political History is the first book to explore this essential political phenomenon. The story begins in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution, when common sense first became a political ideal worth struggling over. Sophia Rosenfeld’s accessible and insightful account then wends its way across two continents and multiple centuries, revealing the remarkable individuals who appropriated the old, seemingly universal idea of common sense and the new strategic uses they made of it. Paine may have boasted that common sense is always on the side of the people and opposed to the rule of kings, but Rosenfeld demonstrates that common sense has been used to foster demagoguery and exclusivity as well as popular sovereignty. She provides a new account of the transatlantic Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions, and offers a fresh reading on what the eighteenth century bequeathed to the political ferment of our own time. Far from commonsensical, the history of common sense turns out to be rife with paradox and surprise.

'the oldest biography of Spinoza', La Vie de Mr. Spinosa, which in the manuscript copies is often followed by L'Esprit de M. Spinosa. Margaret Jacob, in her Radical Enlightenment, contended that the Traite was written by a radical group of Freemasons in The Hague in the early eighteenth century. Silvia Berti has offered evidence it was written by Jan Vroesen. Various discussions in the early eighteenth century consider many possi ble authors from the Renaissance onwards to whom the work might be attributed. The Trois imposteurs has attracted quite a bit of recent attention as one of the most significant irreligious clandestine writings available in the Enlightenment, which is most important for understanding the develop ment of religious scepticism, radical deism, and even atheism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars for the last couple of decades have been trying to assess when the work was actually written or compiled and by whom. In view of the widespread distribution of manu scripts of the work all over Europe, they have also been seeking to find out who was influenced by the work, and what it represented for its time. Hitherto unknown manuscripts are being turned up in public and private libraries all over Europe and the United States.

A distinguished group of international scholars from the disciplines of history, philosophy, literature and art history offer a reconsideration of the ideas and the impact of the abbé Henri Grégoire, one of the most important figures of the French Revolution and a contributor to the campaigns for Jewish emancipation, rights for blacks, the reform of the Catholic Church and many other causes

This study, based on a large number of sources and treating a broad variety of topics, offers an outline of developments in the early modern intellectual debate on religious liberty, religious toleration, and religious concord in the eighteenth-century Netherlands.