According to Harold Kaplan, Americans do not question the effects on the United States of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. But was the Enlightenment a democratic movement? Kaplan wrote:
(more…)“We do not question that the twin roots of American national history were the religious revolution, which broke the Catholic hegemony, and the secular Enlightenment, which finally broke the traditional political structures, monarchical and hierarchical, of Europe…” (p. 14)
((Harold Kaplan, Democratic Humanism and American Literature, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1972, p. 14))