For the Heinz science communication workshop out here at UC Davis, there's a reading I assigned from the Marquis de Condorcet's magnificent 1794 Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. I assign Chapter 8, in which Condorcet, the greatest of enlightenment optimists, explains how the arrival of the printing press basically ensures that reasoned arguments would become widely disseminated, leading to the downfall of irrationality and superstition. Some choice quotations:
A new sort of tribunal had come into existence in which less lively but deeper impressions were communicated; which no longer allowed the same tyrannical empire to be exercised over men's passions but ensured a more certain and more durable power over their minds; a situation in which the advantages are all on the side of truth, since what the art of communication loses in its power to seduce, it gains in the power to ...
