SOURCE: "The Heavenly City of Carl Becker," in Carl Becker's Heavenly City Revisited, edited by Raymond 0. Rockwood, Cornell, 1958, pp. 189-207.

In the following essay, Gershoy provides an overview of The Heavenly City in the context of Becker's earlier and later work, emphasizing Becker's strong belief in democracy.

Of all of Carl Becker's writings, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, if the number of printings is any criterion, is the most admired. Composed rapidly, between the late fall of 1930 and the spring of 1931, it was easily written because the subject matter of those lectures had been in the forefront of his thinking for many years. On a stylistic level, it is Becker at his most delightful, maintaining an easy legato, wearing his learning gracefully and unobtrusively, witty and charmingly urbane. Yet, for all their beguiling literary attractiveness these lectures derived their importance from the thesis that they advance...