The Secular Mind
History of Doubt and Freethought
Doubt has a history, and it is older than its defenders usually claim. These books trace the intellectual and emotional dimensions of unbelief — how it has been generated, suppressed, recovered, and institutionalised across centuries and cultures. The critical question is how well the historical evidence supports the broader theses.
The books gathered here differ sharply in scope and method. Some are sweeping intellectual histories, tracing the transmission of heterodox ideas across centuries; others focus on particular communities — African Americans, radical Enlightenment philosophers, early Christians and their opponents — whose experiences complicate any single narrative of secularisation. What unites them is a shared conviction that unbelief is not simply the absence of faith but a positive intellectual and cultural formation with its own genealogy. Whether that conviction is borne out depends on the quality of the evidence marshalled and the care taken not to project modern categories onto the past.
An Atheist's History of Belief: Understanding Our Most Extraordinary Invention. Bodley Head, 2013.
Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism. Northwestern University Press, 2019.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. Metropolitan Books, 2004.
Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. Oxford University Press, 2001.
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. Harvard University Press, 2019.