A wicked company : the forgotten radicalism of the European Enlightenment

 by Phillipp Blom. Blom here returns to the field of an earlier triumph (Enlightening the World: Encylopedie, the Book That Changed the Course of History, 2005) to take the measure of Encyclopedie's editor, Denis Diderot. Placing Diderot in the natural habitat of Enlightenment philosophes, the Parisian salon circa 1750, Blom presents one Diderot habituated, hosted by Baron Paul Thierry d'Holbach. Baron who? readers may wonder, but d'Holbach attracted Diderot, Rousseau, and Hume to his salon and also penned atheistic philosophical tracts. If those endure less in intellectual history than the writings of his guests, d'Holbach's hospitality receives Blom's recognition as an incubator of the Enlightenment. Over the baron's table, as conversationalists volleyed their subversions of the ancien regime and then crystallized the badinage into published works, Blom pauses to summarize its arguments. Those who might not be pleased with such paraphrasing might be placated by Blom's interludes about the relationships among d'Holbach's group, their japes, their lusts, their acrimonies: Rousseau, the great lover of humanity, hated Diderot and Hume. A perceptive, readable portrayal of a seminal coterie in the history of ideas. --Booklist (Check Catalog)