In an interview on The Enlightenment

Before we get to your second Foucault book, The Order of Things, let’s look at the only novel on your list. It’s by Neal Stephenson and it’s called Quicksilver­ – the first in a trilogy I think? – set in the time of Newton and Leibniz and framed by their struggle to develop calculus.

Lots of things are interesting about this book. Neal Stephenson has this unbelievably capacious and exciting mind that links things in entirely unexpected and convincing ways. This is a book about late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century Europe and also America, and is really the template for me of what an historical novel should be. It feels completely contemporary. The research is just unbelievably detailed and perceptive, yet is presented in a way which feels entirely familiar and vivid. It’s a great historical novel. It’s also not the easiest. It’s intellectually very dense. Newton’s one of the main characters in the early part of the book and basically what Stephenson’s doing in the Baroque Cycle in general I think is to draw together all the threads of the Enlightenment - the scientific Enlightenment, the philosophical Enlightenment, revolutions in finance and credit. At the same time the English colonial adventure is reaching its height and in particular the relationship between England and America is approaching its revolutionary crisis. He has a magisterial understanding of how all these different ways of understanding the world are coming together, resonating with each other, and yet at the same time how each requires a different form of expertise. So that in the Enlightenment the idea of the renaissance man, the well rounded man, the man accomplished in all branches of art and science, is replaced by admiration for the expert or specialist. This is what intellectual rigor comes to look like.

Clearly if you wanted to understand the Enlightenment you would want to read a novel that simply makes you feel as though you were living there?

Yes, I think this novel makes you understand why people felt that they were standing at the beginning of a new age, the modern world… Why it felt like a series of changes were taking place that fundamentally altered what it meant to be human – altered what it meant in a good way. It was a profoundly optimistic period in many ways.