This is a history of the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment that looks at how diverse intellectuals who shared a passion for ideas created our secular world of reason and science, individualism and equality before the law, human rights and political freedom, constitutionalism and capitalism, technology, and a view of life as about human happiness in this life. Our world today desperately needs a rebirth and wider dissemination of Enlightenment ideas and ideals. We could lose it—this world we call "modern" bequeathed to us by the Age of Reason. Today, the attack on that world is far advanced as evident in our universities, the views of “public intellectuals” and politicians, and what we call our “mainstream media” and what it chooses as our nightly fare of “information” and “opinion.” The book ends with an essay on one of the foremost contemporary heirs of the Enlightenment, Ayn Rand, and her reaffirmation, refinement, and present-day application of Enlightenment ideas and ideals.

Its theme relates to the themes of ART with commentary on several novels, philosophical fundamentals and applications, and the disaster of postmodern philosophy.