The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932 此書有漢譯)； DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE: A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL IDEAS (1922) by Carl L. Becker

Carl Lotus Becker (September 7, 1873 – April 10, 1945) was an American historian.

Contents

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• 1Life
• 2Writing
• 3Political views
• 4Works
• 5Quotes
• 6References
• 7Further reading
• 8External links

Life[edit]

He was born in Waterloo, Iowa. He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1893 as an undergraduate, and while there, he gradually gained an interest in studying history. Remaining for graduate work, Becker studied under Frederick Jackson Turner, who became his doctoral adviser there.^[1] Becker got his Ph.D. in 1907. He was John Wendell Anderson Professor of History in the Department of History at Cornell University from 1917 to 1941.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1923.^[2] Becker died in Ithaca, New York. Cornell has recognized his work as an educator by naming one of its five new residential colleges the Carl Becker House.

Writing[edit]

Becker is best known for The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932 此書有漢譯), four lectures on The Enlightenment delivered at Yale University. His assertion that philosophies, in the "Age of Reason," relied far more upon Christian assumptions than they cared to admit, has been influential, but has also been much attacked, notably by Peter Gay. Interest in the book is partly explained by this passage (p. 47):

In the thirteenth century the key words would no doubt be God, sin, grace, salvation, heaven and the like; in the nineteenth century, matter, fact, matter-of-fact, evolution, progress; in the twentieth century, relativity, process, adjustment, function, complex. In the eighteenth century the words without which no enlightened person could reach a restful conclusion were nature, natural law, first cause, reason, sentiment, humanity, perfectibility....

This isolation of vocabularies of the epoch chimes with much later work, even if the rest of the book is essayistic in approach. Johnson Kent Wright writes:

Becker wrote as a principled liberal.... Yet in some respects The Heavenly City presents an almost uncanny anticipation of the "postmodern" reading of the eighteenth century.

— "The Pre-Postmodernism of Carl Becker", p. 162, in Postmodernism and the Enlightenment (2001), Daniel Gordon editor

"The purpose of the Declaration is set forth in the first paragraph — a striking sentence, in which simplicity of statement is somehow combined with an urbane solemnity of manner in such a way as to give that felicitous, haunting cadence which is the peculiar quality of Jefferson’s best writing."
—from DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE: A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL IDEAS (1922) by Carl L. Becker

Carl L. Becker’s important study is an analysis of the concepts expressed in the Declaration. Here is a lucid explanation of what the Declaration really is, what views it sets forth, where those views arose, and how they have been accepted or modified by succeeding generations. A book that every American should read.