The Wall Street Journal reviews Gertrude Himmelfarb's comparison of French, British, and American Enlightenment thinkers:
"Ever since Immanuel Kant posed his famous question in 1784--'What is Enlightenment?'--critics and commentators have searched for an answer, and they still do. For it is to the Enlightenment--a particular set of 18th-century ideas--that many thinkers trace the political and intellectual origins of the modern world. To pose Kant's question is to ask nothing less than who we are."