Career
Trained as a historian of France, his first book Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity dealt with opposition within France to the Enlightenment legacy in the 18th and 19th centuries. He is also the author of Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Books, 2006), and Divine Fury: A History of Genius (Basic Books, 2013).
