The Enlightenment: A Beginner's Guide

Central European History, 1997

Margaret C. Jacob, The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001),, 2003

The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, 2024

Enlightenment Past and Present is an impressive collection of essays, most of them previously published during the author's prolific career as a (self-described) "contextual intellectual historian." Although its chapters range from academic essays to extensive book reviews to pieces blending confessional prose with bibliographical details, they come together as a surprisingly unified argument about the Enlightenment's extraordinary ideological force in its time and impact on our culture today. Its coherence is given by an eloquent introduction that delivers on the promise of the title: that is, to delve into how the Enlightenment thought shaped the very tenets of modernity while, at the same time, reflecting on the author's intellectual and professional choices, his disciplinary methods, and his formative influences as a historian of the Enlightenment. The Preface and Introduction to this volume are purposely reflective on the author's approaches to his field of study, which makes for delightfully engaging prose. As the author candidly states, "I wanted to come at eighteenth-century constructs not through the lenses of later political ideologies, but by recovering their positional meaning in relation to what preceded them." This candor is counterpoised by a remarkable erudition and an uncanny ability to bring various sources into conversation with each other and delve deeply into their arguments.

Come list ye the praise of the Radical School, So enlighten'd in all that relates to the state, That that Legislator they deem but a Fool[.] 1 During the last couple of decades we have moved away from Peter Gay's portrayal of the Enlightenment as a single, harmonious project. 2 A plethora of scholars have found it both necessary as well as useful to distinguish between two kinds of Enlightenments: on the one hand, a moderate or conservative Enlightenment that sought to find a compromise between reason and tradition by preserving the status quo of the political and religious powers that be and, on the other hand, a radical or revolutionary Enlightenment based on human reason alone that strove to establish a new society by active reform, root and branch, of the old one. Radicals and moderates were locked in battle with the anti-revolutionary Counter-Enlightenment. 3 Before discussing the contents of this companion, which is intended for both the newcomer to the field and the more advanced expert, the reader will be provided with a brief overview of the relevant literature and the state of the art.

1992

Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment? "We have for quite some time needed a reasoning age when men would no longer seek the rules in classical authors but in nature, when men would be conscious of what is false and true about so many arbitrary treatises on aesthetics; . . ." Denis Diderot, "Encyclopedie" ". . . all the intellectual activities of man, however different they may be in their aims, their methods, or the qualities of mind they exact, have combined to further the progress of human reason." Condorcet, "Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind" "The toleration of those who hold different opinions on matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel and to reason, that it seems monstrous for men to be blind in so clear a light." John Locke, "A Letter on Toleration" ". ..though a person exempt from prejudices seems in his outward circumstances to have little advantage over others, the cultivating of his reason will be the chief study of his life . . . John To land, "The Origin and Force of Prejudices" Page 13 '1Pkr7"q4YT111:1.7Tw.rlik. Jr=

European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire, 2006

The essays gathered in this issue explore possibilities for re-conceptualising the historical topography of the European Enlightenment through an examination of its communicative practices. By what means did the Enlightenment emerge, how did it take root in particular places, and how did it unfold in time and space-as local experience, as a Europe-wide movement and as a global phenomenon? It is an adventure in a new form of cultural geography; it rejects a simple mapping of cultural forms and movements on to purportedly deeper economic, social and political structures and instead proposes that culture be understood as a historical force in its own right, which, through the elaboration of a series of institutions, practices and systems of signification played a constitutive role in the reshaping of economic, social and political structures along new lines. Arguably, no cultural movement, at least since the advent of Christianity, presents a more compelling case for the constitutive claims of culture than the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. For much of the twentieth century the Enlightenment was studied almost exclusively as a chapter in the history of ideas, a story of great thinkers, of philosophical systems and debates that unfolded among a cosmopolitan elite of European men of letters. The historical question was posed (paraphrasing Kant) as follows: 'What was the Enlightenment?' 1 In this historiography the questions of where or how the Enlightenment made itself manifest mattered little or their answers seemed self-evident-it occurred in the minds of a few men who were well positioned to be in dialogue with one another. But a generation ago, a group of scholars of the European eighteenth century, notably Robert Darnton, Daniel Roche, Roger Chartier, Roy Porter and Jürgen Habermas, began posing a different series of questions: How did the

Philosophy and Literature, 2002

If the Enlightenment did not exist, postmodernism would have had to invent it. It performs the same function, Daniel Gordon argues in his introduction to Postmodernism and the Enlightenment (hereafter, P&E), that the Ancien Regime did for the French revolutionaries: as the "other of postmodernism," it represents "the modern that postmodernism revolts against" (P&E 1). Indeed, the image of the Enlightenment that emerges from the postmodern critique does seem, in large part, to be an invention. As Keith Michael Bake and Peter Hans Reill suggest in the introduction to their collection What's Left of Enlightenment? (hereafter WLE?) the various strands of thought commonly grouped under the label postmodernism "have at least one thing in common: "they all depend upon a stereotyped, even caricatural, account of the Enlightenment" which sees the Enlightenment as the point of origin for the "rationalism, instrumentalism, scientism, logocentrism, universalism, abstract rights, eurocentrism, individualism, humanism, masculinism, etc." that defines the modernity which postmodernity hopes to supersede (WLE? 1). One consequence of the inclination to trace the origin of the various failings of modernity to the Enlightenment is that arguments about the "legacy of the Enlightenment" tend to get out of hand. In a particularly sharp-sighted contribution to the Baker and Reill collection David Hollinger notes that it is all too easy for a critic of Enlightenment to argue that "I'm hot stuff because I'm not only refuting you, my puny opponent, but … every great thinker from Descartes to Popper" and, conversely, all too enticing for those

of this period (some of whom might be classified just outside the Enlightenment), assuming this literature is fairly well known or easy to look up. In fact, in addition to the secondary literature, this list contains a number of titles that are relevant to the historical periods just prior to and immediately following the Enlightenment in Europe. The history and myriad consequences of the Enlightenment must today of course be placed within a global and cosmopolitan framework in which the triune principles and virtues of liberté, égalité, and fraternité (including the obligations and imperatives of social justice) are the birthright of every human being. The

We still ask the question 'What is Enlightenment?' Every generation seems to offer new and contradictory answers to the question. In the last thirty or so years, the most interesting characterisations of Enlightenment have been by historians. They have told us that there is one Enlightenment, that there are two Enlightenments, that there are many Enlightenments. This has thrown up a second question, 'How Many Enlightenments?' In the spirit of collaboration and criticism, I answer both questions by arguing in this article that there are in fact three Enlightenments: Radical, Sceptical and Liberal. These are abstracted from the rival theories of Enlightenment found in the writings of the historians Jonathan Israel, John Robertson and J.G.A. Pocock. Each form of Enlightenment is political; each involves an attitude to history; each takes a view of religion. They are arranged in a sequence of increasing sensitivity to history, as it is this which makes it possible to relate them to each other and indeed propose a composite definition of Enlightenment. The argument should be of 1 This article, originally written in 2018, is indebted to John Robertson-whom I met by chance at a conference about another subject-for a suggestion about the writings of J.G.A. Pocock which though slight (the suggestion, not the writings) was fundamental and led me to redraft the second half of the article in 2019 and thus to sharpen the eventual argument. interest to anyone concerned with 'the Enlightenment' as a historical phenomenon or with 'Enlightenment' as a philosophical abstraction.

History Compass, 2010

This article focuses on the 'relationship' between 'science' and 'religion' in the 'Enlightenment'. It shows through a 'historiographical' survey of the last half-century how our understanding of the 'Enlightenment' has evolved, and with it the assumptions pertaining to the relationship between religion and science have undergone a series of revisions. From seeing the Enlightenment as a single-minded project aiming to rid the world of organized religion and its concomitant superstitions to appreciating the multifaceted nature of the century with its local variations has made historians question the very idea of an Enlightenment. The old consensus narrative invoked by a 'rise of modern paganism' theory along with a tendency to view the secularizing effects upon society as inevitable have by now ceased its hold over the 'historical imagination'. The situation was remarkably different in country to country: In France, 'Materialist' 'philosophes' such as Voltaire, d'Holbach, and Diderot launched a vituperative campaign to erase what they saw as the infamy of organized religion. Across the channel, however, the situation was far from that polarized. In Britain, a number of the most prominent 'natural philosophers' of the day were actually devout believers despite their scientific interests. From seeing the 'Enlightenment' as a 'teleological project' which apotheosis was 'secularizing' eighteenth century society, we now have a much more nuanced and complete picture of the 'long eighteenth century' and its relationship between science and religion. It has thus been suggested that there were several enlightenments spread both in terms of geography and time. Portraying a spectrum of Enlightenments, either compartmentalized in a national context or thematically distinguished -recent revisionist literature has come a long way from the old consensus thesis.