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Jeffrey D. Burson, Alan Charles Kors. Epicureans and Atheists in France, 1650–1729; Alan Charles Kors. Naturalism and Unbelief in France, 1650–1729., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1741–1743, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy357
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In his Atheism in France, 1650–1729 (1990), Alan Charles Kors influentially argued that the possibility of atheism ironically emerged as the unintended consequence of philosophical and theological argument over such issues as the nature of the soul and the question of whether humanity was originally monotheistic or polytheistic. This volume was originally conceived as a multivolume study of the contingent emergence of atheism in French discourse many years before the fullest flowering of the French Enlightenment. The two very closely related works under examination, both published in 2016, constitute the long-awaited completion of Kors’s endeavor. Together, these two books, Naturalism and Unbelief in France, 1650–1729, and Epicureans and Atheists in France, 1650–1729, further extend what Kors refers to in the former as the “meta-thesis” of this trilogy: that “early-modern French learned culture” played an “unintended role in the generation of the possibility, then the reality, of actual atheism” (2). In other words, as Kors ingeniously quips in the introduction to Epicureans and Atheists, “Orthodoxy begat heterodoxy from its own substance” (3).
