Carl Lotus Becker (September 7, 1873 – April 10, 1945) was an American historian.
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He was born in Waterloo, Iowa. He studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Frederick Jackson Turner was his doctoral advisor there. Becker got his Ph.D. in 1907. He was John Wendell Anderson Professor of History in the Department of History at Cornell University from 1917 to 1941. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1923.[1]
Cornell has recognized his work as an educator by naming one of its five new residential colleges the Carl Becker House.
He is best known for The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), four lectures on The Enlightenment delivered at Yale University. His assertion—that philosophies in the "Age of Reason" relied far more upon Christian assumptions than they cared to admit—has been influential, but has also been much attacked. Interest in the book is partly explained by this passage (p. 47):
In the thirteenth century the key words would no doubt be God, sin, grace, salvation, heaven and the like; in the nineteenth century, matter, fact, matter-of-fact, evolution, progress; in the twentieth century, relativity, process, adjustment, function, complex. In the eighteenth century the words without which no enlightened person could reach a restful conclusion were nature, natural law, first cause, reason, sentiment, humanity, perfectibility […].
This isolation of vocabularies of the epoch chimes with much later work, even if the rest of the book is essayistic in approach. Johnson Kent Wright writes
Becker wrote as a principled liberal […]. Yet in some respects The Heavenly City presents an almost uncanny anticipation of the "postmodern" reading of the eighteenth century.—"The Pre-Postmodernism of Carl Becker", p. 162, in Postmodernism and the Enlightenment (2001), Daniel Gordon editor