Kanye West’s Bastardization of “Free Thinkers” (as defined by Susan Jacoby)
Susan Jacoby's book provides a template for the latest Jeet Heer piece in the
New Republic.
❝ The term “freethought,” according to Susan Jacoby’s 2004 book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, “first appeared in the late 1600s and flowered into a genuine social and philosophical movement during the next two centuries.” Freethinkers played an especially important role during the American Revolution and the early days of the republic, when they were key in securing the idea of a separation of church and state.
As Jacoby notes, freethinkers ranged from deists to outright atheists, but what they shared, “regardless of their views on the existence or nonexistence of a divinity, was a rationalist approach to fundamental questions of earth existence—a conviction that the affairs of human beings should be governed not by faith in the supernatural but by a reliance on reason and evidence adduced from the natural world. It was this conviction, rooted in Enlightenment philosophy, that carried the day when the former revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to write the Constitution.” [NewRepublic.com]
| SUSAN JACOBY is a New York Times Bestselling author of several books, including The Age of American Unreason. Watch her deliver a keynote on her book Never Say Die below, and learn more about booking Susan for your next event today. |
