A review by jonfaith
The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind by A.C. Grayling

4.0

The Age of Genius is a strange book, the arguments are layered in enormous amounts of detail, whether it be the troop movements in the Thirty Year war or the particulars of a Rosicrucian treatise. Ultimately Grayling asserts it was the defeat of Catholicism and other static, autocratic tendencies which allowed skeptical discourse to improve upon science and government. Grayling lifts the possibility that this trend continued into the arts but abandons it almost immediately. Grayling appears to echo Niall Ferguson in noting the significance of certain networks of people who proliferated these liberal ideas and (mostly) avoided the ultimate punishment. I enjoyed great parts of this text and yet groaned throughout entire chapters.