Wicked Company

I noticed a review of this book in the Saturday FT. Subtitled 'freethinkers and friendship in pre-revolutionary Paris', it is a brilliant portrait of the age and its leading thinkers especially Holbach and Diderot, but also Voltaire, Rousseau and even David Hume, who spent some considerable time in Paris. The book combines biography with the history of ideas, especially at a time when leading thinkers were emancipating themselves from the power of the Church and started to formulate a materialistic and atheistic philosophy. A key period was the 1760s and especially Holbach's salon, which met regularly every Thursday and Sunday to forge ideas which have come to typify modernity. The narrative is highly engaging, informing the reader about episodes involved in researching the book, for instance trying to find where Holbach and Diderot were buried, and even finding the location of Holbach's house in a completely redesigned the city. Network readers may not find this radical materialist philosophy to their liking, but these thinkers performed an essential service of emancipating the human mind from the shackles of mediaeval superstition. We now need to go beyond some of the limitations of the Enlightenment in terms of ways of knowing and the deeper realities of consciousness.