Tag: Harold Kaplan

  • Was the Enlightenment Democratic?

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    Was the Enlightenment democratic? According to Harold Kaplan, Americans do not question the effects on the United States of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. He wrote:

    We do not question that the twin roots of American national history were the religious revolution, which broke the Catholic hegemony, and the secular Enlightenment, which finally broke the traditional political structures, monarchical and hierarchical, of Europe…” (p. 14)

    ((Harold Kaplan, Democratic Humanism and American Literature, University of
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