Freemasonry and Civil Society

Margaret C. Jacob holds the position of Distinguished Chair of Research in History at UCLA. She has a Ph.D. from Cornell University and an honorary doctorate from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Philosophical Society. She is the author of The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans; Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry in Eighteenth Century Europe; The Newtonians and the English Revolution; and The Secular Enlightenment.María Eugenia Vázquez Semadeni has a Ph.D. from El Colegio de Michoacán, Mexico. She has held postdoctoral positions at the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, UNAM, México, and at UCLA, as well as Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford University. She is a member of the Centro de Estudios Históricos de la Masonería Española, and a founding member of the Centro de Estudios Históricos de la Masonería Latinoamericana y Caribeña. She is the author of La formación de una cultura política republicana: El debate público sobre la masonería. México 1821–1830.

• List of Figures – Acknowledgments – Introduction – British Origins – European Lodges in the Age of Enlightenment – Freemasonry in the New World. North America – European Freemasonry in the Age of Nationalism and Imperial Expansion – Freemasonry in the New World: Latin America, 1770 to c. 1830 – United States Freemasonry: From the Civil War to the End of World War II and Beyond – Freemasonry in Latin America and Spain, 1850s–1940s – Conclusion – Bibliography – Index.

"Eminent scholar Dr. Margaret Jacob has been joined by Dr. María Vázquez Semadeni in writing a significant addition to our understanding of the role that Freemasonry played in the creation of civil society in the 18th century. In today’s world, with democracy under attack from so many quarters, and with the growing threat of authoritarianism, this book will help us understand how and why democracy grew out of autocracy in the 18th century. The authors explain how Freemasonry ignited a movement which liberated both men and women to experience for the first time a freedom which reached deep into society. The work is both an accurate history of Freemasonry and its role in the creation of civil society, and a reminder that hard-won liberties can easily be overthrown by those who do not understand the value of a free society and a government that allows that society to flourish."—John L. Cooper III, Ph.D, Past Grand Master, Masonic Grand Lodge of California