The Question of Enlightenment - Theory and Practice in Eighteenth ...

The Question of Enlightenment: A Conceptual History* 

James Schmidt, Boston University 

T 

he December 1783 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift included a rejoinder by the 

clergyman and educational reformer Johann Friedrich Zöllner to an article published 

in the journal a few months earlier that questioned whether it was necessary for clergy 

to officiate at marriage ceremonies. Zöllner was troubled by the article’s claim that much of the 

population found the presence of clergy at weddings “ridiculous.” Such an attitude, he suggested, 

testified to a far-reaching corruption of public morals and removing clergy from weddings would 

only make matters worse. No state that retained a “paternal concern for the well-being of its 

citizen” could afford to embrace a proposal that would further undermine the sanctity of 

marriage, especially at a moment when “the most horrible blasphemies are spoken with smiles,” 

when libertinism ran rampant, when “French charlatanry” threatened to choke off whatever 

patriotic sentiments still remained, and when — “in the name of enlightenment” — much 

confusion was wrought in the hearts and minds of the citizenry. 1 

Yet if Zöllner was disturbed by the damage that had been done in the name of 

enlightenment, he did not appear to be entirely certain what this thing called “enlightenment” 

actually involved. So he inserted a footnote that asked: 

What is enlightenment? This question, which is almost as important as 

what is truth, should indeed be answered before one begins to 

enlighten! And still I have never found it answered! 2 

He would soon have more than enough answers. Within a year the Berlinische Monatsschrift 

published responses to the question by both Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant. 3 

The 

debate quickly spread to other journals as other writers joined the discussion. 4 By 1790 answers 

to Zöllner’s question had proliferated to the point where an article reviewing responses to the 

question catalogued twenty-one different meanings of the term and concluded that the word had 

* This paper, which draws from a number of previously published articles, is intended as the 

introduction to a study of the history of the concept of “enlightenment” from, roughly, 1784 to 

the close of the twentieth century.

The Question of Enlightenment 2 

become so divorced from any clear conventions of usage that the discussion of the concept had 

degenerated into “a war of all against all” between combatants who marshaled their own 

idiosyncratic definitions. 5 

It is fitting that this first attempt to answer the question “What is enlightenment?” began 

with a complaint and ended in confusion. Two centuries later, neither the complaints nor the 

confusions show any signs of abating. A host of commentators, from a staggering assortment of 

intellectual orientations and ideological commitments, have found one point of agreement: the 

Enlightenment is to blame for much of misery that plagues the modern world. Within a decade 

of Zöllner’s question, the first contributions to what would become an increasingly bizarre 

literature tracing the origins of the French Revolution to the writings of the philosophes had 

begun to appear. 6 

By the close of the twentieth century, critics had added both Nazi genocide 

and the Soviet Gulag to the list of atrocities allegedly inspired by the Enlightenment. 7 From the 

Romantics onward, critics have repeatedly accused the Enlightenment of fostering a 

“disenchantment” of the world that views nature simply as an object to be dominated, 

manipulated, and exploited and charged that, by stripping nature of any moral significance, the 

Enlightenment has reduced moral reasoning to the instrumental calculation of individual 

advantage. 8 Other critics have maintained that the Enlightenment’s emphasis on individual rights 

and liberties shatters any sense of community and creates a world in which nothing binds 

individuals together aside from a motley collection of contracts and entitlements. 9 Still others 

have raised the specter that the Enlightenment’s skepticism towards absolute values erodes the 

capacity of distinguishing between good and evil and have charged that its hostility towards 

history and tradition impoverishes our understanding of the moral and spiritual claims that the 

past makes upon us. 10 The Enlightenment’s alleged assumption that all problems have simple 

and unequivocal solutions has, according to some critics, blinded us to potentially irreconcilable 

conflicts in the values we pursue; its affection for “master meta-narratives” has, according to 

others, only compounded the problem. 11 And over the last several decades it has been regularly 

condemned as racist, sexist, and incapable of appreciating “the Other.” 12


Yet, even as critics of the Enlightenment were framing their indictments, historians of the 

period were finding it increasingly difficult to specify just what, exactly, the Enlightenment was. 

Ambiguity about how to approach the period was already implicit in diverging approaches taken 

by Ernst Cassirer and Paul Hazard in their classic studies from the 1930s. Cassirer’s Die 

Philosophie der Aufklärung (1932) proposed to elucidate the “conceptual origin” and 

“underlying principles” of the Enlightenment, as opposed to “the totality of its historical 

manifestations and results.” Eschewing “a merely narrative account of the growth and vicissitudes 

of the philosophy of the Enlightenment,” it sought instead to “set forth, as it were, the 

dramatic action of its thinking.” 13 

It was, however, precisely the “growth and vicissitudes” of 

Enlightenment thought that occupied center stage in Hazard’s La crise de la conscience 

europeén (1935), a work that traced the transformation in European thought between 1680 and 

1715 in hopes of showing how the “classical mind” of the seventeenth century was criticized and 

a new tradition constructed. 14 

By the 1960s, it was obvious that both approaches had their shortcomings, although it 

was unclear how they might be remedied. As Herbert Dieckmann noted, while Cassirer’s study 

offered “compactness, a solid structure, and coherence,” it tended to submerge individual 

thinkers in an account that “overlooks the curiously oscillating character of intellectual life, 

which rarely will follow a continuous line of development.” Sociological, historical, and political 

factors tended to fall by the wayside, as did the particular significance that ideas might have had 

for individual thinkers. 15 

While Dieckmann was somewhat more sympathetic to Hazard’s 

approach, he argued that the alleged disintegration of the “classical mind” was largely a creature 

of Hazard’s method: whatever did not mesh with his characterization of the “classical mind” 

tended to be treated as evidence of its crisis. By arranging the various thinkers who had 

allegedly broken with the classical worldview in something that resembled a chronological order, 

Hazard sought to convey the impression of historical development. 16 

Yet, in the end, Dieckmann 

questioned whether the term “Age of Enlightenment” might be a “misnomer” and concluded,


“there is only a movement of Enlightenment, which undoubtedly constitutes an essential part of 

the eighteenth century, but which is accompanied or opposed by several other currents.” 17 

Reservations about the coherence of “the Enlightenment” have only grown in the decades 

that followed. 18 In a critique of Cassirer’s work, Peter Gay called for a “social history of ideas” 

that would minimize neither the differences between individual philosophes nor the common 

commitments they shared. 19 Yet his own version of such a history was, in turn, criticized by 

Robert Darnton for remaining bound to older traditions of intellectual history and hence “dealing 

with the Enlightenment in its narrow sense, the philosophy of the philosophes, rather than 

seeking to comprehend the broad climate of opinion comprising the ‘Age of Enlightenment.’” 20 

As scholarly interest in the eighteenth century blossomed, the Enlightenment began to take on a 

host of modifiers: high and low, radical and mainstream, French, German, Scottish, Austrian, 

Neapolitan, Dutch, English, etc. 21 In the face of this wealth of different Enlightenments, a few 

scholars began to question whether it still makes sense to speak of “the Enlightenment” at all. 22 

Such misgivings are hardly unique to discussions of the Enlightenment: they are a 

normal consequence of the progress of scholarship. For instance, in a 1923 lecture to the 

Modern Language Association, Arthur O. Lovejoy reviewed a century of conflicting 

characterizations of Romanticism and suggested that it was time to “learn to use the word 

‘Romanticism’ in the plural.” 23 Likewise, scholars working on the Renaissance long noted that it 

was preceded by a number of other “renascences.” 24 Pat definitions and neat demarcations tend 

to break down under closer scrutiny and it is hardly surprising that it has become more and more 

difficult to characterize periods in ways that will do justice to the wealth of specialized studies 

that scholars have produced. Yet what is peculiar about discussions of the Enlightenment is the 

chasm that has opened between the picture of the Enlightenment that emerges from the works of 

those who study the period and the characterizations of it that populate the writings of its 

erstwhile critics. 25 Those who have criticized the Enlightenment – and, more recently, others 

who have sought to blunt these critiques – confidently offer sweeping claims about a period


whose very coherence has been called into question by those who have devoted their time to 

studying it. 26 

“Enlightenment” and “the Enlightenment”: An Overview of the Argument 

This book will argue that the continuing controversy about ultimate legacy of the 

Enlightenment and the proliferation of definitions of it are two aspects of a single history. It will 

examine how the invention, and subsequent series of reinventions, of a period called the 

Enlightenment has tended to be bound up with a series of arguments about the nature, the scope, 

and the limits of an activity known as enlightenment. By tracing this history we will see that one 

of the chief reasons why the Enlightenment has remained controversial is that it has never been 

entirely clear what the process of enlightenment involves. For this reason, Pastor Zöllner’s 

seemingly innocuous question in the Berlinische Monatsschrift has proved to be remarkably 

persistent. In the chapters that follow, we will be drawing out the implications that a series of 

answers to his question have had both for the genealogy of the Enlightenment as a term used to 

denote a particular historical period and for the way in which we understand the cluster of 

projects, aspirations, and ideals that have, at one time or another, been gathered under the word 

enlightenment. 27 

This book will focus on three pivotal episodes in this history. The first part examines the 

debate sparked by Zöllner’s question. It begins with a discussion of the origin of the question in 

discussions within an elite Berlin secret society that was known to the public (to the extent it was 

known at all) as the “Wednesday Society” (Mittwochsgesellschaft) but which was known among 

its members by a name that provided a clearer sense of its mission: “The Society of Friends of 

Enlightenment.” It then considers two responses to Zöllner’s question, one famous, the other 

less so: those of Immanuel Kant and of Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn’s response offered an 

elegant précis of the concerns that had dominated the discussions within the Wednesday Society;


Kant cast his net more widely and, focusing on the role of public deliberation, sketched a 

conception of enlightenment whose influence shows no signs of diminishing. 

Despite the differences in the definitions those who responded Zöllner’s question offered, 

they shared one assumption: they assumed that they were being asked to characterize a process 

rather than define an historical period. The second part of the book explores how, in the wake of 

the French Revolution, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (a thinker who had, in his youth, 

absorbed much of the debate that had been spawned by Zöllner’s question) sketched the broad 

outlines of the epoch that he designated as the Enlightenment (die Aufklärung). We will retrace 

the path that led Hegel to construct an image of the Enlightenment that would have a pervasive 

influence on both subsequent criticisms of the aims and aspirations of the period and on 

subsequent historical studies of the period. 

The third part of the book deals with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic 

of Enlightenment. Written in the darkest hours of the Second World War, this dense and 

frequently enigmatic work saw the triumph of barbarism in Europe as the consequence of a fatal 

intertwining of myth and enlightenment. While the book was, in large part, patterned on the 

model that Hegel had provided in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Horkheimer and Adorno 

notoriously expanded the reach of enlightenment beyond the boundaries Hegel had set in his 

Berlin lectures on the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy from the 1820s. 

Returning to an earlier convention of usage, Horkheimer and Adorno viewed enlightenment 

chiefly as a process, rather than an historical period, a peculiarity of the book that has been alltoo-often 

overlooked, both by those who, in the decades that followed, would draw on the book 

for support in their criticisms of the Enlightenment and by those who have sought to defend the 

Enlightenment from what they took to be Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique. 

A history of this sort necessarily involves a set of conjectures about how a series of 

attempts – undertaken at a number of different historical moments – to make sense of 

enlightenment and the Enlightenment fit together into a broader narrative. It also involves a 

series of decisions about how this history – a history of concepts, authors, and contexts – should


be approached. The justification for the choices involved in a study of this sort ultimately lies 

with the narrative that they yield: Does it allow us to understand how things fit together? Does 

it clarify how we have arrived at our current set of assumptions? Does it give us a faithful 

account of texts that have sometimes been distorted or misunderstood? But while there is little 

that can be said in advance to justify such choices – every attempt to write a history rests, to a 

certain extent, on a wager that a collection of occurrences, utterances, and actions can be woven 

together into a coherent story – it may help to clarify some of the choices that have guided this 

book. That will be the task of the remainder of this introduction, which will briefly consider 

what is involved in tracing the history of a concept and then, at somewhat greater length, attempt 

a preliminary reconnoitering of the conceptual terrain that the rest of the book will be exploring. 

Father Haffner’s Equivocation: Some Reflections on the History of Concepts 

We can begin to get a sense of what happened to the concept of enlightenment in the 

wake of the period that we call the Enlightenment by looking briefly at a long-forgotten book 

from the middle of the nineteenth century. Its author was a thirty-five year old Catholic priest 

named Paul Leopold Haffner, who, after studies at Tübingen and a brief stint teaching 

philosophy, settled into a clerical position in Mainz in 1864. He devoted the rest of his life to the 

spiritual needs of his flock, eventually becoming bishop of the city in 1886, a position he would 

hold until his death in 1899. The book in question – Die deutsche Aufklärung. Eine historische 

Skizze – was published in the same year that he took up his duties in Mainz. 28 

Haffner’s 

historical sketch of the German Enlightenment found little to admire. Like his other major 

scholarly effort, a history of materialism, the intent of his book was to recount the history of an 

intellectual movement that he assumed good Catholics would find appalling. 

Yet, at the very start of the book, Haffner states that he is not entirely sure whether he 

will be recounting a history of “German enlightenment” or of “German endarkenment


[Verfinsternung].” Heeding the advice of Pius IX, who suggested that when attempting to 

understand the meaning of a word, one should return to its origin, Haffner notes, 

Enlightenment is a sublime word, if one goes back to its meaning; it 

means illumination of the spirit through truth, liberation from the 

shadows of error, or uncertainty, of doubt. Enlightenment is, in its 

deepest meaning, the transfiguration (Verklärung) of reason. 29 

To write the history of this enlightenment, one would have to “begin with God and end with 

God.” 

Haffner’s confusion about his topic passes rather quickly: the history he will be writing 

is, of necessity, the history of an enlightenment that has nothing to do with God. He is, he 

confesses, “too much a child of the nineteenth century” to depart so violently from what has 

become the established convention for using the term. So he resigns himself to speaking the 

degraded language of his day, “which exchanges the meaning of light and darkness” and 

produces a literature that regards “the light of Christian centuries as dark gloom” and which 

“greets the shadows of doubt and the progress of religious barbarity as light.” To speak of 

enlightenment in the middle of the nineteenth century is to invoke a concept that, he concludes, 

is “purely negative, destructive, empty; it has no positive content and no productive principle.” 

In order to be counted among the truly enlightened, one must “know nothing” 30 

Haffner’s peculiar equivocation reminds us that enlightenment has been a remarkably 

malleable concept. He was aware that the meaning of the word Aufklärung had undergone a 

dramatic transformation over the last century and, while he recognized that earlier senses of the 

word were now lost to him, he could still provide – if only in passing – a fair imitation of these 

earlier conventions of usage. His alleged confusion about the meaning of the word carries 

echoes from another age. For what, after all, was he doing if not reprising that same stance of 

confusion about the meaning of enlightenment that Johann Friedrich Zöllner had expressed, 

some six decades earlier, in the pages of the Berlinische Monatsschrift? If we turn back to that 

debate we can find something approximating the distinction Haffner was invoking in the


historical sketch of “the history of enlightenment in Germany from the Reformation to Kant” that 

appeared in the first volume of the Berlinische Journal für Aufklärung – a short-lived 

publication that had sprung up in the wake of controversy sparked by Zöllner’s question. The 

article began by noting an ambiguity in the term Aufklärung: it “originally referred only to 

religion and morality” but had, more recently, come to be used more broadly to designate 

“everything that helps the truth or is significant for it.” 31 The details of the historical sketch that 

followed need not detain us, but the contrast it drew between the traditional understanding of 

Aufklärung and the more recent usage of the term warrants attention. For the two usages that 

were contrasted in this article from 1788 bear more than a passing resemblance to the two senses 

of Aufklärung that Haffner would attempt to reinvoke in the middle of the next century. 

For an example of the transformation to which the article in the Berlinische Journal für 

Aufklärung was referring, we need only turn to the most celebrated of the answers to Zöllner’s 

question: Immanuel Kant’s essay in the Berlinische Monatsschrift of December 1784. Its 

famous opening paragraph defined enlightenment as “mankind’s exit from its self-incurred 

immaturity” and explained that “immaturity” was “the inability to make use of one’s own 

understanding without the guidance of another.” Quoting Horace’s Epistle to Lollius Maximus, 

Kant proclaimed that Sapere Aude! (which he translated as “Have the courage to use your own 

understanding!”) was the ‘motto of enlightenment.” 32 During the winter of 1784, Kant’s friend 

Johann Georg Hamann wrote a brief critique of Kant’s essay, concluding with what he 

characterized as a “transfiguration [Verklärung]” of Kant’s definition of enlightenment. Leery of 

what he saw as an attempt by Kant to exercise a new form of “guardianship” over the immature 

under the pretense of “enlightening” them, Hamann insisted that “true enlightenment” was the 

“emergence of the immature person from a supremely self-incurred guardianship.” Playing off 

Proverbs against Kant’s Horace, he argued that “fear of the Lord” – and not the courage to use 

one’s own understanding – was “the beginning of wisdom,” a wisdom that would foster the 

courage needed to oppose “those guardians who at most can kill the body and suck the purse 

empty.” 33 Today, Hamann’s understanding of enlightenment is likely to strike most readers as


quite strange, but this only confirms the transformation in meaning that had been noted by the 

Berlinische Journal für Aufklärung. Hamann was defending an understanding of enlightenment 

that saw “true enlightenment” as ultimately grounded in religion. Kant was offering a definition 

that drew on a more recent understanding of the term, an understanding that saw enlightenment 

as bound up with the advancement of knowledge, the liberation of the understanding from 

traditional restraints, and the growth of what Kant called “the public use of reason.” 

In our own day, Kant’s response to Zöllner’s question is seen as definitive; time and 

again it has been pressed into service whenever a concise and authoritative characterization of 

the Enlightenment is needed. 34 

Hamann’s understanding of enlightenment has had a rather 

different fate: the idea that true enlightenment might be fundamentally religious in character is 

even more lost to us than it was to Haffner. For while Haffner could, at least, imagine that a 

reader might be confused as to whether the term Aufklärung carried spiritual or secular 

connotations, present day readers tend to assume that enlightenment is a word that belongs to 

critics rather than supporters of religion. If any notice is given to Hamann’s peculiar definition 

of enlightenment, it is only in the course of placing him among the ranks of what Isaiah Berlin 

termed the “Counter-Enlightenment.” 35 

Berlin used the term to designate a group of thinkers – which, in addition to Hamann, 

included Giambattista Vico, Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Joseph de 

Maistre – who he argued were bound together by a common rejection of the “central principles 

of the Enlightenment,” which he in turn defined as a commitment to “universality, objectivity, 

rationality,” a belief that all problems have answers that can be reached through the use of 

methods that are available to all rational agents, and a conviction that the answers to all questions 

are mutually compatible. 36 

While Berlin’s notion has passed into general usage, it is not without 

its ambiguities. Critics have questioned whether some of the thinkers Berlin included within the 

Counter-Enlightenment – most notably, Herder – might better be viewed as falling within a 

broader tradition of Enlightenment thought. 37 

Conversely, others have argued for the inclusion 

of thinkers – for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau – who were explicitly excluded by Berlin. 38


While Berlin restricted his use of the term to a group of late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury 

thinkers, some of those who have taken up the notion have proposed extending its use to 

cover “any thinker over the past three centuries who has claimed that the cause of the crisis of 

the age is to be found in the development of modern philosophy.” 39 

Finally, some 

commentators have noted the differences between the various critics of the Enlightenment that 

Berlin attempted to assemble under the banner of the Counter-Enlightenment and questioned 

whether it makes sense to treat it as a single, coherent movement. And so the Counter- 

Enlightenment, like the Enlightenment before it, has begun to appear in the plural. 40 

Whatever its utility in other contexts, the notion of Counter-Enlightenment does little to 

clarify the issues that are of interest in this book. It inevitably privileges one particular 

understanding of what the Enlightenment involved and proceeds to populate the Counter- 

Enlightenment with a group of thinkers who are seen as dissenting from this understanding. Its 

mischief lies not simply in its tendency to posit a drastically simplified conception of “the 

Enlightenment.” Even a more adequate understanding of what the Enlightenment involved, and a 

concomitantly more nuanced account of the various Counter-Enlightenments that opposed it, 

would still have the shortcoming of presupposing the result whose history this book seeks to 

trace: the process by which a series of arguments about the nature, scope, and limits of 

enlightenment (arguments in which, as in the case of Kant and Hamann, all of the contestants 

have sometimes seen themselves as defending their own particular understanding of what 

enlightenment involves) culminated in the invention of something called “the Enlightenment.” 

Tracing transformations of this sort is the concern of an enterprise that German scholars 

call Begriffsgeschichte, or “conceptual history.” Perhaps the most impressive work to come from 

this tradition of research – whose best-known practitioner was the historian Reinhart Koselleck – 

is the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, a multivolume lexicon that attempts to document the 

transformation of political and social discourse in Germany for the period between 1750-1800. 

Aufklärung is among the “fundamental concepts” whose histories are traced in this lexicon. 41 As 

conceived by Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte represented an attempt to avoid the projection of


modern understandings of political and legal arrangements (e.g., the distinction between state 

and civil society) back onto earlier societies and to distance itself from the tendency among 

historians of ideas of ideas of “treating ideas as constants, articulated in differing historical 

figures but of themselves fundamentally unchanging.” 42 To this extent, Koselleck and his 

colleagues have pursued a goal not unlike that of Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, both of 

whom have argued for an approach to the history of political thought that is attentive to the 

relationship of texts to particular historical and linguistic contexts in which they were created and 

thus avoids the habit – rampant among some political theorists – of interpreting political texts in 

the light of their “timeless elements,” “universal ideas,” or their “anticipations” of later 

formulations. 43 There are, however, tensions between these two approaches and a brief 

consideration of these differences may help to clarify the particular concerns of this book. 44 

Some of Skinner’s more emphatic formulations seem to question the very possibility of 

writing a history of concepts. On several occasions he has insisted that “there can be no histories 

of concepts as such” but only “histories of their uses in argument.” 45 Yet, in recent essays he has 

explained that these comments were not directed at Koselleck’s venture per se (of which he was 

unaware at the time) but were instead a criticism of approaches to the history of ideas – for 

example, Arthur O. Lovejoy’s notion of “unit ideas” – that attempted to trace the development of 

a concept in isolation from an examination of the uses to which these concepts have been put by 

different agents at different times: “There is nothing … lying beneath or behind such uses; their 

history is the only history of ideas to be written.” 46 To the extent that Koselleck has stressed the 

need for Begriffsgeschichte to examine the “use of specific language in specific situations, within 

which concepts are developed and used by specific speakers,” his approach would seem to 

satisfy Skinner’s requirement that a history of concepts must be framed as “histories of how 

concepts have been put to use over time.” 47 

There remains, however, a difference between the two approaches, if only in their 

focus. 48 

Drawing a parallel between the approaches of social history and conceptual history 

Koselleck has emphasized that both disciplines “cannot manage without … individual cases, but


it is not their primary interest to investigate them.” Conceptual history, like social history, is 

thus primarily interested in “the long-term conditions that are effective diachronically and that 

make possible each individual case.” 49 Yet it is precisely these individual cases that are of 

greatest importance to Pocock and Skinner. For it is only through an examination of what takes 

place when specific thinkers make their interventions that it is possible to construct a “history of 

things done with language.” 50 Thus, while Koselleck and his colleagues have, as Skinner notes, 

“chiefly been preoccupied with the slower march of time,” he characterizes his own work as 

focusing on the “pointillist study of sudden conceptual shifts.” 51 

While my own work owes much to German discussions of the transformation of the 

concept of enlightenment, the focus of this book is a good deal more circumscribed than the 

studies of Koselleck and his colleagues: its concern lies with a few pivotal episodes in the 

history of things that have been done with the word enlightenment. 52 

While it cannot claim to 

match the breadth of Horst Stuke’s entry on Aufklärung in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, it does 

attempt to look more closely than Stuke has at the ways in which a few individuals, responding 

to particular challenges, altered the way in which enlightenment– and, as a result, the 

Enlightenment – is understood. Unlike the contributions to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 

the attention of this book is directed not at the global transformation of political and social 

language over the so-called Sattelzeit – the century between 1750-1850 – but rather at a series of 

episodes, stretching from the 1780s to the close of the twentieth century, in which the 

understanding of enlightenment changed quite suddenly and quite dramatically. The particular 

emphasis of my study stems, in part, from the fact that the history of the concept of 

enlightenment that I will be tracing does not line up very well with Koselleck’s Sattelzeit: debate 

over the meaning of enlightenment begins in the 1780s, not in the 1750s, and the implications of 

that debate were still being worked out over much of the twentieth century. But, more 

importantly, my decision to narrow my focus stems from a concern that the tendency of 

Koselleck and his predecessors to see the Sattelzeit as a period of rupture that inaugurates the 

modern world is itself the consequence of one particular way of understanding the


Enlightenment: namely, to see it as standing on the threshold of modernity. 53 Rather than simply 

presupposing this understanding of significance of the Enlightenment, this book is interested in 

seeing how the Enlightenment came to be cast in this role. 

The history that will be traced here differs from the accounts that populate the 

Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe in one final respect. As Skinner has emphasized, the history of 

concepts is, among other things, a history of the way in which words have been used as weapons 

in struggles to alter the way in which the world is described and, hence, understood. 54 Because of 

the amount of ground that Koselleck and his colleagues have attempted to cover it is sometimes 

easy to lose sight of extent to which the transformations that they have been mapping were often 

the upshot of contests in which the meaning of terms underwent dramatic reversals. An attempt 

to trace the history of concepts may, from time to time, catch the echoes of what Michel Foucault 

once described as “the distant roar of battles.” If we are to gain a better sense of what is at stake, 

it will be necessary to narrow our focus and take a closer look at the contestants. 

Collecting the Prejudices 

We do not normally think of dictionaries as battlefields. Yet, for over a century, the 

Oxford English Dictionary has offered a definition of the noun enlightenment that bears the scars 

of old contests. It reads as follows: 

1. The action of enlightening; the state of being enlightened …. 

[I]mparting or receiving mental or spiritual light. 

2. Sometimes used [after Ger. Aufklärung, Aufklärerei] to designate 

the spirit and aims of the French philosophers of the 18th c., or of 

others whom it is intended to associate with them in the implied charge 

of shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for 

tradition and authority, etc. 55


Understandably, friends of the Enlightenment have been less than enthusiastic about the second 

definition. More than four decades ago, Peter Gay began an analysis of the persistence of 

various “stubborn misreadings” of the Enlightenment by noting that the virtually identical 

definition in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary had the dubious distinction of “collecting 

most current prejudices in one convenient spot.” 56 

The OED provided three illustrations of the second usage. The first two examples — 

“Deism, Atheism, Pantheism, and all manner of isms due to Enlightenment” and “Shallow 

Enlightenment, supported on such semi-information, on such weak personal vanity, etc.” — were 

taken from James Hutchison Stirling's Secret of Hegel (1865), the first book on the philosophy of 

G. W. F. Hegel to appear in English. The third — “The individualistic tendencies of the age of 

Enlightenment.” — came from Edward Caird’s Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1889). 

The quotations chosen by the OED have also perplexed some dix-huitièmistes. John Lough, for 

instance, observed, “What these examples have to do with French thought it is difficult to see; 

the first source is a book on Hegel and the second one on Kant.” 57 

A glance at the context from which the Caird quotation was taken would have been 

enough to remedy Lough’s confusion. While Caird’s book may have been about Kant, the 

passage quoted was part of a general characterization of eighteenth-century philosophy. It reads 

as follows: 

The individualistic tendencies of the age of Enlightenment, which 

separated each man from the unity of the social organism to which he 

belonged, separated him also from the past out of which his 

intellectual life had grown. Hence to the writers of that time the 

independence of philosophical thought seemed to involve that each 

thinker must begin the work of speculation de novo: and to admit the 

possibility or necessity of a mediation of truth to the individual by the 

communis sensus of humanity was in their eyes the same thing as to 

accept the dictation of an external authority. 58


Caird’s usage of the term is familiar enough, as, indeed, are his criticisms, which still enjoy some 

currency today. Yet a closer look at the examples from Stirling’s Secret of Hegel yields a few 

surprises. For it turns out that in the first extract the OED misquoted Stirling and in the second it 

misrepresented what he was saying. 

Both of the examples are taken from a passage in the Preface to Stirling’s book in which 

he launches a diatribe against Henry Thomas Buckle, a British historian whose materialist 

approach particularly incensed Stirling. At issue in the first is the question of whether Buckle — 

who conveyed to Stirling “the air of a man who is speaking by anticipation, and who only counts 

on verifying the same” — was capable of understanding Kant’s work. The passage runs as 

follows (the portion extracted, and misquoted, by the OED has been underlined): 

He had a theory, had Mr Buckle, or, rather, a theory had him — a 

theory, it is true, small rather, but still a theory that to him loomed 

huge as the universe, at the same time that it was the single drop of 

vitality in his whole soul. — Now, that such redoubted thinkers as 

Kant and Hegel, who, in especial, had been suspected or accused of 

Deism, Atheism, Pantheism, and all manner of isms dear to 

Enlightenment, but hateful to Prejudice — (or vice versa) — that these 

should be found not to fit into his theory — such doubt never for a 

moment crossed even the most casual dream of Buckle! 59 

In the passage misquoted in the OED Stirling speaks not of “isms due to Enlightenment” but 

rather of “isms dear to Enlightenment.” The notion that “Enlightenment” holds Deism, Atheism, 

Pantheism dear, while “Prejudice” finds them hateful conforms rather nicely with our 

conventional understanding of the Enlightenment. Since the Enlightenment is typically seen as 

denouncing as “superstition” everything that the faithful hold dear, it is hardly surprising that 

Stirling would suggest that “Deism, Atheism, Pantheism” are “dear to Enlightenment” but 

“hateful to Prejudice.” What is puzzling about the passage has less to do with what the first 

editors of the OED misquoted than with what they left out: Stirling’s equivocal “or vice versa.”


We can make sense of Stirling’s “vice versa” only if we recognize that the 

“Enlightenment” that he is invoking is something quite different from what we understand as 

“the Enlightenment.” In the passage in question, Stirling would appear to be using 

enlightenment in the first of the two definitions in the OED — “The action of enlightening; the 

state of being enlightened …. [I]mparting or receiving mental or spiritual light” — rather than 

the second. In its non-religious sense (as “mental” rather than “spiritual” light) Enlightenment is 

kin to “Deism, Atheism, Pantheism” and will be viewed with revulsion by the faithful (who, in 

turn, will be regarded by the enlightened as the victims of prejudice). But since Stirling implies 

that it is Buckle — a man who is a victim of his own “anticipations” and who finds in texts only 

what he presumes that he will find there — who is prejudiced, it is simple enough for Stirling to 

reverse the relationship, and make Deism, Atheism, Pantheism “dear” to prejudiced souls such as 

Buckle and hateful to the spiritually enlightened. Hence, while Stirling may have associated 

Buckle with any number of the “isms” that, allegedly, were dear to French philosophers of the 

eighteenth century, the relationship of the word enlightenment to these "isms" is rather unstable: 

it can regard them as either "dear" or as “hateful.” 

Behind the OED’s confusion about how Stirling employed the term enlightenment stands 

a more fundamental problem: Stirling typically did not use the term Enlightenment to refer to the 

French philosophes and their allies was not Enlightenment. His preferred English term was 

Illumination. The attack on Buckle, for example, is preceded by a dismissal of Ludwig 

Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss as representatives of “an inferior Atheistico-Materialist 

sect” which constitutes the “remnants of the Aufklärung, of Eighteenth Century Illumination.” 60 

Buckle — who “still knew nothing and would know nothing but the Illumination” — is placed 

among their ranks. 61 Stirling’s terminology is likely to strike us as peculiar (indeed, almost 

everything about Stirling’s staggeringly prolix book is likely to strike a modern reader as odd), 

but it is not capricious. Enlightenment – used sparingly and never with a definite article — 

denotes an activity that, for lack of a better description, involves “imparting or receiving mental 

or spiritual light”: the first meaning noted by the OED, not the second. 62 

Illumination is


sometimes used in this sense as well, though Stirling generally employs it to designate those 

philosophical tendencies associated with the French philosophes (i.e., the second of the two 

definitions of Enlightenment in the OED): hence his use of the formulation the Illumination. 63 

In using Illumination a way of referring to whatever it is that the German term 

Aufklärung designates, Stirling was drawing on a convention that was in place well before he and 

his colleagues began their struggle with “the uncouth unintelligibleness” of the “extraordinary 

new German” that they confronted in the pages of Hegel's works. 64 Translations appearing in The 

German Museum – an important, albeit short-lived, periodical that between January 1800 and 

July 1801 translated a wide range of late eighteenth-century German texts into English – 

typically rendered Aufklärung as mental illumination. For example, Georg Joachim Zollikofer's 

1783 sermon “Der Werth der grössern Aufklärung der Menschen” appeared in The German 

Museum as “An Estimation of the Advantages arising from the Progress of Mental Illumination” 

and, in a listing of the most important German literature from the 1780s, the Berlinisches Journal 

der Aufklärung is referenced as The Berlin Journal, intended to promote mental Illumination. 65 

There was, however, at least one important place where the editors broke with this convention: 

their translation of Moses Mendelssohn's response to Zöllner’s request for a definition of 

Aufklärung opted for the phrase “enlightening the mind.” 66 A similar use of enlightening — 

rather than enlightenment — can also be found a few years earlier in John Richardson’s 

translation of Kant’s essay “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” 67 He rendered the 

famous opening sentence of the essay as, “Enlightening is, Man’s quitting the nonage occasioned 

by himself,” and concluded the opening paragraph as follows: Sapere aude! Have courage to 

make use of thy own understanding is therefore the dictum of enlightening.” 68 

However 

awkward these translations may sound to our ears, they faithfully captured a crucial feature of 

late eighteenth-century usage: enlightenment, like Aufklärung, generally denoted an activity in 

which one engaged, not a period in which one lived. 

This is not to deny that these terms, especially in their adjectival forms, could sometimes 

be used to characterize historical periods. If enlightenment referred to an activity, it was but a


small step to describe those historical periods in which this activity flourished (ancient Greece 

was often invoked) as “enlightened times.” Since many of those who lived during what we now 

call the Enlightenment held that their own era was an age marked by vigorous efforts at 

enlightenment, it was only natural for them to refer to their own times as enlightened. Thus, as 

early as 1741, an article in the Hamburg Stats- und Gelehrte Zeitung suggested that efforts to 

make science more accessible to the public held out the promise that “our age could be called an 

enlightened age [aufgeklärte Zeiten].” 69 Kant followed suit, describing his own age in the 

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) as “an enlightened age [einem aufgeklärten 

Zeitalter].” 70 His response to Zöllner, however, took pains to emphasize that a good deal more 

enlightening was still necessary. 

If it is asked “Do we now live in an enlightened age?” [einen 

aufgeklärten Zeitalter] the answer is “No, but we live in an age of 

enlightenment[einem Zeitalter der Aufklärung]. 71 

The development of the term Aufklärung thus parallels the course followed by at least one other 

designation for an historical period. As Reinhart Koselleck has noted, Renaissance humanists 

“favored verbs and adjectival expressions” to refer to the process of renewal and awakening in 

which they saw themselves engaged; it was not until the eighteenth century that the term 

Renaissance came into regular usage. 72 This delayed arrival of terms used to denote epochs 

should come as no surprise: Minerva’s owl, as Hegel reminds us, arrives to survey the battlefield 

only after the contestants have abandoned it. 73 As the eighteenth century came to a close, a good 

deal about what had been happening remained hotly contested. 

False Enlightenment: Dr. Zimmermann’s Diagnosis 

The history of concepts, as understood by Koselleck and his colleagues, is not the same 

thing as a history of words. A concept can, after all, be designated by a number of different 

words. 74 

Hence, it could be argued that while the OED got the history of the word enlightenment


wrong (Stirling did not use enlightenment “to designate the spirit and aims of the French 

philosophers of the 18th c., or of others whom it is intended to associate with them in the implied 

charge of shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for tradition and 

authority, etc.”) the error is a trivial one from the standpoint of the history of concepts. 75 For 

while Stirling did not use the word enlightenment to designate the concept that we have come to 

designate as the Enlightenment, he had another word that performed the same function: 

illumination. Once we make the necessary translations, it could be argued that it is clear enough 

what Stirling was up to. 

Yet in one essential respect, such a translation fails to capture what Stirling was doing: it 

pays insufficient attention to the degree to which the choice of one word rather than another 

sometimes matters. Skinner has suggested that the best evidence that “a group or society has 

entered into the self-conscious possession of a new concept is that a corresponding vocabulary 

has been developed, a vocabulary that can then be used to pick out and discuss the concept in 

question with consistency.” 76 

The reverse would also appear to be true. The plethora of 

alternative terms that Stirling employed to designate what we now term the Enlightenment 

should be enough to warn us that perhaps he did not understand the period in the same way as we 

do. His vacillation about how to designate the period that preceded him was very much in 

keeping with the way in which that period talked about itself. Indeed, one of the most striking 

features of late eighteenth-century texts is their almost obsessive concern that certain terms have 

been misused, their conviction that certain words can no longer be used in the way in which they 

would like to use them, and the zeal with which they attempt to draw connections between the 

different words that are in play. 

For one striking example, let us briefly consider a passage from Johann Georg von 

Zimmermann’s Fragmente über Friedrich den Grossen zur Geschichte seines Lebens, seiner 

Regierung, und seines Charakters (1790). 77 

The work is (as advertised) a collection of 

anecdotes about Frederick the Great, with little tying them together beyond their interest in 

illuminating various aspects of the monarch’s life and reign, as they appeared to a man who had


served as court physician in Hannover before being called to Berlin to treat Frederick during his 

final illness. 78 

His self-aggrandizing account of his conversations with the dying monarch –as 

Klaus Epstein has noted, its chief purpose seems to be to present Frederick “as a mere foil for 

Zimmermann’s brilliance” – included a number of attacks on members of the Berlin 

Enlightenment. The attacks were quickly returned in kind. In the Fragmente, Zimmermann 

responded to his critics, with particular attention to the responses to Frederick’s death among the 

members of what he calls the “Berlin Aufklärungssynagoge.” Initiating a series of comparisons 

between German and French terms (a comparison that is not, in itself, unusual, since French was 

the language of the Court and Berlin had a sizable Huguenot population), Zimmerman 

downplayed the religious implications of the term and suggested that Synagoge was simply a 

synonym for the French clique, a word that he proceeds to define through a reference to the 

Schattenriss von Berlin. In this motley collection of sketches of Berlin life –some fairly risqué – 

dating from 1788 clique had been defined as “the union of various persons towards the 

advancement of their needs.” 79 

The Berlin that emerges from the Schattenriss is a city populated 

by Litterarcliquen that “take pride in working toward the enlightenment of the people.” In the 

wake of Frederick’s death, Zimmermann notes that these groups sought “to enlighten” Friedrich 

Wilhelm II, the new monarch. Yet, Zimmermann immediately warns his readers that the 

prejudices these groups harbor “are entirely contrary to enlightenment.” 80 

Zimmermann’s text contains more than enough to perplex a modern reader. The ascent of 

Friedrich Wilhelm II to the throne is typically viewed today as the event that marks “the end of 

the Enlightenment in Prussia.” 81 

Within a few years, Friedrich Wilhelm responded to what we 

have come to call “the Berlin Enlightenment” with edicts on religion and on censorship. These 

edicts touched off a vigorous pamphlet war in which champions of Aufklärung gathered under 

the banner of freedom of the press and championed a decidedly unorthodox interpretation of 

Christian beliefs that has come to be called “neology.” 82 Zimmermann, however, sees what is 

taking place rather differently than later historians. He was quite well-disposed towards 

Friedrich Wilhelm yet also saw himself as a defender of what he understood as


“enlightenment.” 83 

His conception of enlightenment, however, diverges markedly from what he 

takes to be the notion current among members of the Berlin Aufklärungsynagoge. “Germany’s 

true enlightenment,” he insists, “hangs on countless threads, it is the consequence of a multitude 

of causes, it does not have an exclusively Berlin origin, it is not at all a Berlin monopoly.” 84 

Where, he asks, is there a more enlightened land than England, and what do the members of the 

Berlin enlightenment clique really know about conditions in England? Only in a madhouse, he 

continues, could it be claimed that the fall of the Bastille (an event which, for the moment at 

least, he applaudes) was “the fruit of the Berlin Enlightenment.” 85 

He concludes that while there 

may be widespread affection for the word Aufklärung in Germany, the respect for the word is 

rarely accompanied by much attention to the actual thing. 86 

Zimmermann’s work can be read, in part, as yet another contribution to the debate that 

had been touched off by Zöllner’s question in the Berlinische Monatsschrift. But in the wake of 

the French Revolution, the controversy over the meaning of enlightenment had become much 

more charged politically. There is, Zimmermann observes, much confusion about what might 

properly be called enlightenment, and the members of the Berlin Aufklärungssynagoge appear to 

be speaking a far different language than the one that he – and, one would assume, his implied 

audience – speaks. So he translates their terminology back to its mother tongue: 

The entire initiative in Berlin is now called Aufklärung 

(Illuminatisme); the members of the synagogue are called Aufklärer 

(Illuminants); and Aufgeklärte (Illuminés) are the blind slaves of this 

sect. Of the true enlightenment (progrès des lumières) nothing is 

spoken in the Berlin Aufklärungssynagogue. 87 

Aufklärung, in short, has come to mean different things to different groups and the debate over 

the question “What is enlightenment?” has increasingly become a struggle in which “true 

enlightenment” must be distinguished from various imposters. 88 

What makes Zimmermann so puzzling for a modern reader is that he is attacking what we 

understand as the Enlightenment in the name of something that he calls enlightenment. To read


him is to return to a period when the meaning of enlightenment is being contested by parties who 

seem to be committed, at all costs, to claiming the term for their side. In rhetorical contests of 

this sort much of the work is done by adjectives and by the last decade of the eighteenth century, 

this distinction between true enlightenment and false enlightenment has come to occupy a 

central place in disputes over the nature of enlightenment. A particularly succinct formulation of 

the difference can be found in a 1792 text by Friedrich Karl von Moser, the editor of the New 

Patriotic Archive – a journal whose support for a moderate version of enlightenment was neatly 

epitomized by its motto: “to illuminate, not to inflame.” It reads as follows: 

[A]ll enlightenment that is not grounded in and supported by religion, 

all enlightenment that does not grow out of the dependence of the 

created on its Creator and on the goodness and care of the Creator for 

His human creations, all enlightenment that draws back from the 

duties of love, reverence, gratitude, and obedience to His will, His 

commandments, and the institutions of His great world government, 

all enlightenment that leaves man to his own willfulness, vanity, and 

passions and inspires him with Lucifer’s pride to see himself as his 

sole, independent, ruler and to make his own arbitrary natural law — 

all such enlightenment is not only the way to destruction, immorality, 

and depravity, but also to the dissolution and ruin of all civil society, 

and to a war of the human race within itself, that begins with philosophy 

and ends with scalping and cannibalism. 89 

Like Hamann before him, Moser associates “true enlightenment” with religion. But, in contrast 

to Hamann, he is writing at a moment when the political stakes are much higher and the rhetoric 

much more strident. We can still hear a dim echo of this attempt to associate true enlightenment 

with religious faith in the introduction to Haffner’s account of the German enlightenment. But 

by then, the battle would be lost, and the anachronism of attempting to wrest Aufklärung from


the opponents of organized religion was apparent to Haffner even as he trotted out the trope for 

one last time. 

For Moser and his late eighteenth-century contemporaries, however, the battle was not 

yet lost. Hence their persistence in distinguishing “true” from “false” forms of enlightenment, 

their diligence in cataloguing the errors they found in their opponents use of terms, and their 

inventiveness in coining neologisms such as Auflärerei and Aufklärling as ways of designating 

the pseudo-Enlightenment they saw themselves as battling. 90 Aufklärerei – which might roughly 

correspond to “Enlightenish,” were such a word available in English – went on to enjoy some 

currency among German Romantics (including Schelling and the young Hegel) and it was 

presumably a dim acquaintance with this formulation that led the editors of the OED to include 

it, alongside Aufklärung, as a possible paradigm for the second definition of enlightenment. 91 In 

doing so they fell into the trap that later historians of concepts would do well to avoid. It is all 

too easy to view the elaborate accounts of terminology that can be found in late eighteenth 

century discussions of enlightenment as evidence of evolving patterns of usage that might serve 

as the raw material for a conceptual history. But there is an important distinction to be made 

between eighteenth-century discussions and later conceptual histories: the primary goal of these 

discussions is not to get the history of concepts right; it is to make one’s opponents look bad. 

The Plague of Philosophism: New Words, Perverse Usages, Unprecedented Horrors 

While Moser, unlike Haffner, still struggled to rescue the word Aufklärung from those 

who he viewed as misusing it, he nevertheless realized that another word was now lost to him. 

His discussion of its loss can serve as reminder that the battle over the term Aufklärung was the 

sequel to a struggle that had been waged several decades earlier. At the start of his essay, he 

defined enlightenment as the intellectual power that “progresses in equal proportion to the 

oppression of a people” and serves as a counter-weight to the “arts of seduction and delusion” by 

which despots maintain their power and which will eventually gain the strength that is necessary


“to shake and topple despotism’s innermost foundations.” He notes, however, that rather than 

using enlightenment to denote this force, he “would have liked to use the word philosophy 

instead, if she were still the pure, chaste daughter of the heavens, come from the hand of the 

Creator through the godly gift of reason.” 92 

By the 1780s, Philosophie had already taken on 

many of the unsavory associations that the Oxford English Dictionary would later associate with 

enlightenment. In lamenting the mischief that had befallen the word, Moser was reprising a 

struggle that had been raging in France for some time over the proper use of the terms 

philosophie and philosophe. 93 

From the middle of the eighteenth century those French thinkers that we (like the OED) 

tend to think of when we speak of “the Enlightenment” had used the word to describe the activity 

in which they were engaged. D’Alembert’s Essai sur les éléments de philosophie suggested that 

his century might come to be known as “the century of philosophy.” 94 Diderot echoed this 

characterization in the entry he wrote on “Encyclopedia” for his Encyclopédie, claiming that his 

great project had played a fundamental role in transforming the eighteenth century into a siècle 

philosophe. 95 Just as German Aufklärer recognized that there were other “ages of 

enlightenment,” so too the philosophes understood that there were other “philosophical 

centuries.” In the history of philosophy D’Alembert sketched in his Preliminary Discourse to the 

Encyclopédie, the eighteenth century is characterized as a time of “regeneration” following in the 

wake of a “long interval of ignorance” that had, in turn, been preceded by “centuries of light” 

[siècles de lumiere]. 96 That the eighteenth century, like other centuries before it, might be a 

“century of light” was a hope shared by those who named themselves, after their predecessors in 

earlier centuries of light, philosophes. But they were certainly under no illusion that they or their 

century had any exclusive claim to such titles. 97 

Their claim to the mantle of philosophie for their efforts and the title of philosophe for 

themselves did not passed unchallenged. The 1760s saw an explosion of literature, increasingly 

polemical, which questioned whether what was presented as philosophie by the philosophes was 

worthy of the name. 98 

Over the course of these exchanges, a picture of the philosophes as


materialists, enemies of religion, insufficiently appreciative of tradition, and politically 

dangerous began to be constructed. Among the rhetorical strategies deployed was one that 

would be reprised in the German distinction between “true” and “false” enlightenment and the 

subsequent construction of neologism such as Aufklärerei: the distinction between a “true 

philosophy” that found its basis in religious doctrine and an upstart that was variously labeled 

fausse philosophie, nouvelle philosophie, prétendu philosophie, misophie, in-philosophie, 

philosophie moderne, and a host of neologisms including philosophâille, philosopherie, 

philosophesque, philosophizer, philosophisme, and philosophiste. 99 The last two terms, which 

were tailor-made to convey the sense that the various philosophes formed a single sect that 

pursued a common aim, would go on to have a brief, but eventful, career in English in the wake 

of the French Revolution. 

Philosophism entered English thanks in part to the Abbé Barruel's use of it in his rapidly 

translated and widely read Memoires pour servir à l'histoire du Jacobinism (1797-1798). 100 

“Philosophism [philosophisme],” as Barruel defined it, “is the error of every man who, judging 

of everything by the standard of his own reason, rejects in religious matters every authority that 

is not derived from the light of nature.” 101 By the last years of the eighteenth century, the word 

had become the favored term of abuse employed in the pages of conservative journals such as the 

Anti-Jacobin Review to refer to supporters of the French Revolution. 102 A review of the English 

translation of Barruel's Memoirs offered readers an etymology lesson that borrowed heavily from 

Jean-François La Harpe, a disciple of Voltaire who, in the space of a few years, went from 

praising the philosophes for providing the intellectual impetus for the Revolution to condemning 

them for the corruption of language and mores that made the Terror possible: 

From philosophy sprang philosophism, a word which … signifies the 

love of sophism, the love of falsehood, as philosophy imparts the love 

of wisdom, the love of truth. In the Greek language the terms sophism 

and sophists sufficed to mark the abuse; in the French language, as in 

our own, this is not the case, because the sophists of modern times


bear no resemblance to those of antiquity. The latter never disturbed 

the earth; the former endeavour to enslave it and to bring back the 

reign of chaos. Here then is a love of evil, and consequently much 

more than error. 103 

Those who embraced philosophism were not “systematic infidels who … rallied around some 

positive dogma.” Rather they were “men without any fixed principles, inconsistent in their 

conduct” bent on “establishing their empire on the ruins of the truths which they labour to 

destroy.” Aiming at the annihilation “not only of the Christian religion, but of all positive 

religion whatever,” philosophism represented “nothing more than scepticism applied to the 

leading principles of metaphysics, morality, and religion;” it was no older than the work of Pierre 

Bayle. 104 The circulation of terms between French, German, and English that we have been tracing 

is in keeping with the way contributors to the Anti-Jacobin Review understood the enemy they 

faced: philosophism was a movement that was international in scope. They alerted readers of the 

journal that ever since Frederick the Great (or, as Barruel preferred to call him, “Frederick the 

Sophister”) introduced French philosophy into his domains, philosophism had become 

“fashionable throughout Germany;” at present “ninety-nine out of every hundred German writers 

adopt the revolutionary jargon of the French.” 105 The Review found these Germans to be 

unpleasant creatures indeed. “A German writer,” it informed its readers, “is, in general, a man 

that is discontented with every thing about him; his chief happiness, and glory consist in 

publishing a successful journal.” 106 In no land was the “itch for writing and publishing” so 

pervasive. One correspondent reported that there were 

about eight or ten thousand persons in Germany who derive their 

livelihood entirely, or the greater part of it, from scribbling, or, as they 

call it, enlightening the public mind. 107 

In some German universities, the Review reported in horror, “not a single professor is to be 

found who dares admit the existence of a God.” 108


While we tend today to think of the Enlightenment in Germany as a somewhat timid 

affair, the picture that emerges from the pages of the Anti-Jacobin Review was terrifying indeed. 

Here was a land where “upwards of 8,000 writers and scribblers of all descriptions … 

continually direct and lay siege to the public opinion;” where students “go about the country 

arrayed in Republican uniforms” and band together in secret clubs “which are the scenes of 

perpetual broils, riots, and disorders;” where the low cost of college tuition allowed every farmer 

and burgher to train their sons to take up “the trade of book-making; ” and where “the boundaries 

which separate virtue from vice appear to be entirely removed, and the best cement of society is 

consequently dissolved.” 109 

In short, such a scene of corruption as Germany now exhibits, an 

English mind shudders to contemplate. The young women, even of 

rank, uncontrolled by that natural diffidence, unchecked by that innate 

modesty, which at once heighten the allurements of, and serve as a 

protection to, beauty, but which have been destroyed by the fatal 

infusion of philosophical principles, consider the age of puberty as the 

period of exemption from every social restraint, and sacrifice their 

virtue to the first candidate for their favour, who has the means either 

of captivating their fancy, or gratifying their avarice; while the 

dreadful number of abortions serves to proclaim the frequency and 

extent of their crimes! 110 

But however horrible it might have been for English minds to reflect on the prospect of young 

women ruined by reading German philosophers, there was of one specter that was even more 

terrifying: the Illuminati. 

Founded by Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria in 1776, the Illuminati was a secret society that 

flourished briefly in early 1780s, combining Masonic rituals, egalitarian political ideals, and an 

organizational structure that borrowed much from its arch-enemies, the Jesuits. 111 

It was 

suppressed by the Bavarian government in 1785 and its documents were published, allowing the


movement to attain a notoriety in legend that far exceeded its limited achievements. The 

Illuminati figured prominently in the great exercises in conspiracy-mongering that gripped the 

European reading public at the close of the eighteenth century: John Robison's Proofs of a 

Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe (1797), Barruel's Memoirs, 

and Johann August Starck’s Der Triumph der Philosophie im 18. Jahrhundert (1803). 

The shadow of the Illuminati also fell across the English language. When Robert Clifford 

translated the third volume of Barruel’s work into English in 1799, he attached a footnote to the 

book’s “Preliminary Observations” that is indicative of the difficulty he had finding words equal 

to the task of capturing the enormity of the crimes that the Illuminati had in mind. 

The translator thinks it proper to inform the Reader, that, considering 

how much the abuse of terms, such as of Philosophy, Reason, &c. &c. 

has contributed to diffuse the new-fangled doctrines, he has adopted in 

the present volume … the words Illuminee, Illuminize, and 

Illuminization, though Illuminate and Illumination might perhaps be 

more correct expressions. Every reader will feel, that the illumination 

of the world, and to illuminate mankind, are objects worthy of the true 

philosopher. But may the man be ever accurst who shall attempt to 

illuminize his countrymen, or aim at the illuminization of the world! 112 

Clifford's concern echoed Barruel’s own sense that much of the success of the conspiracy 

launched by the philosophes lay in its ability to redefine the meaning of words. 113 Indeed, what 

made this cabal of philosophists and illuminizers so insidious was its ability to advance its 

program under the cover of a language that seemed so innocent. Who, after all, could object to 

“philosophy,” to “reason,” or to the “illumination of the world”? 

For this reason, words had to be chosen with care. Entire vocabularies had become 

intensely political and a number of words were now charged with connotations that signaled, 

prior to any argument or discussion, how they were to be judged. But while a battle raged in 

English over terms like philosophy, sophist, and illumination, enlightenment seems to have


remained above the fray. Barruel’s translator Clifford used enlighten in a passage where Barruel 

had employed éclairer and used enlightened to deal with an appearance of aufgeklärte in one of 

the Illuminati documents that Barruel quoted. 114 Robison, working his way through other 

Illuminati documents, offered a footnote that explained that the "only proper translation" of 

"Auffklarung" [sic] "would be clearing up, or enlightening" but finally concluded that 

"Instruction seems the single word that comes nearest to the precise meaning of Auffklarung." 115 

When the Anti-Jacobin Review, in an attack on Fichte (or, as the Review carelessly wrote 

"Furchte”), spoke of the "noble discoveries of this enlightened man," the second adjective, like 

the first, was used ironically. 116 This usage mimicked Edmund Burke’s use of the phrase “this 

enlightened age” in a number of passages in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that are 

drenched in sarcasm: alluding to the execution of Charles I he observed sardonically, “The last 

century appears to me to have been quite as much enlightened.” 117 In the rhetoric of the anti- 

Jacobins, most of the work was done by the terms philosophism and illumination; enlightened 

and enlightenment played, at best, a negligible role. 

The reason is not difficult to understand. The image of the light of truth banishing the 

darkness of error was far too powerful a trope for opponents of the Revolution to surrender to 

their enemies. So they used it themselves. The frontispiece of the first volume of the Anti- 

Jacobin Review was an engraving by James Gillray entitled “A Peep into the cave of 

Jacobinism.” It depicts a woman wearing a banner on which is inscribed the word “Truth.” 

Holding a torch in her hand, she enters the cave in which “Jacobinism” — a creature that is halfhuman 

and half-snake — sits surrounded by books bearing the titles “atheism,” “ignorances,” 

“anarchy,” “sedition,” and “libels.” The light from Truth’s torch not only frightens the creature 

in cave (causing its mask to pop off, revealing the hideous face beneath); its rays also cause the 

equally monstrous books surrounding the creature to burst into flames. What is striking about the 

imagery employed in the engraving is how familiar it seems. Change the name of the creature in 

the cave to “Jesuitism” and alter the titles on the books to “fanaticism,” “enthusiasm,” and


and which, if not the chief cause, was certainly the guiding genius of 

the French Revolution. The word “Illuminati” (signifying the members 

of an imaginary confederacy for propagating the open secret of the 

day), might suggest “Illumination,” as an equivalent for the German 

“Aufklärung”: but the French “Éclaircissement” conveys a more 

specific idea. 119 

The peculiarity of Sibree’s footnote goes beyond its failure to explain just what “specific idea” 

the French éclaircissement is supposed to convey. Its two sentences also seem to work at crosspurposes. 

By 1857 it would appear that there was a more or less “current” English term 

designating the “intellectual movement” that was the “guiding genius of the French Revolution” 

and that this term was precisely the word from which Sibree sought to distance himself in the 

footnote’s second sentence: illumination. His dilemma thus lay not with the lack of an English 

equivalent for Aufklärung, but instead with a reluctance to use a word that had become laden 

with a host of pejorative implications. 

For his part, Stirling held that Aufklärung had been “badly rendered” by Sibree. 120 His 

fellow Hegelians seem to agree and for the much of the nineteenth century, Hegel’s Anglophone 

translators and commentators either followed the paradigm used in the German Museum and 

rendered Aufklärung as Illumination or simply left the word in German. 121 It was not until J. B. 

Baillie’s 1910 translation of the Phenomenology that Enlightenment was used to translate 

Aufklärung in any of Hegel’s works. 122 

The same pattern holds for nineteenth-century 

translations of German histories of philosophy. The American Julius H. Seelye – apparently a 

man singularly ill-equipped for the task that faced him – rendered the chapters in Albert 

Schwegler’s Geschichte der Philosophie im Umriss (1847) entitled Die französische Aufklärung” 

and “Die deutsche Aufklärung” as “The French Clearing Up” and “The German Clearing Up;” a 

decade later, in Stirling’s retranslation of the book, the chapters appeared as “The French 

Illumination” and “The German Illumination.” 123 It was not until 1893 that a translator of any 

German history of philosophy employed the phrase “the philosophy of the enlightenment” to


refer to eighteenth-century philosophy and, as late as 1933 the English philosopher J. H. 

Muirhead noted that this usage, at least in England, carried “a certain suggestion of a nickname.” 

124 

There is much, then, that is wrong with the second definition of “enlightenment” offered 

by the OED, though its failings are somewhat different than its critics have typically supposed. 

The entry, in effect, makes three claims: 1) that the English usage is modeled on the German 

terms Aufklärung and Auklärerei, 2) that the English term refers, in the first instance, to 

philosophical tendencies in France, and 3) that the term carries with it a decidedly negative 

judgment on these philosophical tendencies. The third of these claims has become a bête noir 

among dix-huitièmistes because of the ease with which it blends definition and defamation, but 

their displeasure could be written off as a case of blaming the messenger if, in fact, the OED had 

accurately conveyed nineteenth-century pasterns of usage. The problem with the definition, 

however, lies elsewhere: the connection between the English enlightenment and the German 

Aufklärung is a good deal more complicated than the OED suggests. The standard nineteenthcentury 

translation of Aufklärung was illumination, not enlightenment, and the two citations from 

Stirling cannot be read as illustrations of the meaning under which they are grouped. The OED 

provides only one example — the passage from Caird, which appeared twenty-four years after 

the passages from Stirling — in which Enlightenment is used to designate “the spirit and aims of 

the French philosophers of the 18th c.” and the general thrust of Caird’s discussion is far less 

negative in its implications than the definition in the OED would have its readers believe. The 

OED appears, then, to have connected a set of attitudes that were associated with what had been 

termed the Illumination with the word enlightenment. Nevertheless, even those who have been 

most troubled by the treatment of enlightenment in the OED have failed to see that the entry is 

rather badly botched. The reason for this oversight is not far to seek: in the century since the 

OED’s definition of enlightenment appeared, we have become quite used to hearing the 

Enlightenment criticized along the lines outlined in the OED’s badly mangled definition.


In the end, Stirling was treated almost as badly by the OED as the Enlightenment: the 

quotations make it appear as if he is using words in a way that, on closer examination, he clearly 

was not. One final peculiarity in his use of terminology drives this point home: Stirling’s 

preferred term for referring to eighteenth-century philosophy turns out not to be an English word 

at all. Throughout the Preface to The Secret of Hegel, the German word Aufklärung regularly 

appears, untranslated, and while a reader will search Stirling’s text in vain for “the 

Enlightenment,” the macaronic composite “the Aufklärung” can be found quite often. 125 While 

Stirling may have chided Sibree for lapsing into French is search of a word to render Aufklärung, 

it appears that he was not entirely persuaded that illumination did the trick. In the end he seems 

to have concluded that Aufklärung was one of those words that that — like Gemütlichkeit and 

Schadenfreude — designates something only Germans fully understand. 

Five years before the publication of The Spirit of Hegel, Stirling wrote an essay on the 

historian Thomas Babington Macaulay that contains a passage which goes a long way towards 

explaining the peculiar attachment that the author of The Spirit of Hegel to a German word that 

would appear, at least to us, to have a rather straight-forward English translation. 126 

After noting 

that English commentators were inclined to associate eighteenth-century philosophy with 

“infidelity, free-thinking, deism, atheism, of scepticism in religion, of sensualism in philosophy, 

and of republicanism in politics,” Stirling observed, 

[T]o apply any of these terms to the philosophy of the eighteenth 

century would be to name it badly, for, though the doctrines and 

opinions implied in such expressions are certainly concomitants and 

attendants of that philosophy, they are, in reality, only phenomenal and 

temporary forms. English thinkers, whichever side they have taken, 

have been content to remain with a very indistinct, obscure, and 

confused consciousness on these points; and the consequence is, that at 

this moment we know of no single really intelligent and fully 

enlightened discussion of this subject in the English language. The


Germans, on the contrary, have coolly turned upon it, lifted it, looked 

at it, and examined it piecemeal, till now, having at length fairly filled 

and satisfied themselves with what of instruction, negative or positive, 

they could extract from it, they have long since packed it up, and laid it 

on the shelf, labeled Aufklärung. 

Noting that “in its ordinary use” the word Aufklärung meant simply “enlightenment — up 

lighting or lighting up,” Stirling suggested that it might best be translated “with reference at once 

to the special up-lighting implied, and a certain notorious exposition of that up-lighting, the ‘Age 

of Reason.’” 127 

Good Hegelian that he was, Stirling was suggesting to his readers that, in order to take 

the measure of an historical epoch, it is necessary to have passed beyond it. For this reason, we 

will never be able to understand the deeper significance of the eighteenth century as long as we 

are still fighting its battles. This explains his peculiar attachment to the term Aufklärung: he saw 

it as condensing in one word the results of a process of reflection and conceptualization that, 

while completed in Germany, still remained to be accomplished in England. It also explains 

why, try as he might, he could never find a suitable English translation. Stirling granted that 

England had seen a series of “partial re-actions against the Aufklärung,” including a “Prudential 

Re-action” triggered by “Public considerations” (presumably a reference to British opponents of 

the French Revolution), a “Re-action of Poetry and Nature” (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 

Shelley), and finally a “Germanico-Literary Reaction” (Carlyle and Emerson). But these 

reactions, he insisted, remained incomplete and had been overwhelmed by the “retrograde reaction 

— a Revulsion — and of the shallowest order, back to the Aufklärung again” that had 

been mounted by Feuerbach, Buckle, and others. 128 As a result, a battle continued to rage in 

England between partisans and critics of the various “concomitants and attendants” of 

eighteenth-century philosophy, with no party fully comprehending what was at stake in the 

conflict. Indeed, even as Stirling suggested that perhaps Aufklärung might be rendered as “The 

Age of Reason,” his own characterization of Paine’s book as “notorious” only served to confirm


his argument that the English, unlike the Germans, had yet to gain the requisite distance from 

eighteenth-century controversies to allow them to cast an impartial eye on what had occurred: 

Stirling was incapable of mentioning Paine’s work without immediately taking a pot-shot at it. 

Far-fetched though Stirling’s argument may seem, there is something to be said for it. 

The transformation of a process known as enlightenment into a period known as the 

Enlightenment does appear to have moved at a different pace in Germany and in Britain. In 

Germany, the transformation was well underway by the time Hegel delivered his Berlin lectures 

on the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy. For the rest of the century, 

Aufklärung would have a long and productive career in German histories of philosophy. From 

the middle of the nineteenth century onward, English translators of these histories and of Hegel’s 

own works struggled to find English equivalents for this curious German word, initially 

employing the politically charged term Illumination but, by the end of the century, settling on the 

Enlightenment. 

A watershed of sorts was reached in 1910 with the publication of John Grier Hibben's 

The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, the first study of eighteenth-century philosophy to employ 

the Enlightenment in its title. 129 Hibben, an American Hegelian, offered a sensible, 

comprehensive account of eighteenth-century thought, which exhibits none of the prejudices and 

distortions that the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary associated with the term. Indeed, 

twenty years before Ernst Cassirer’s similarly titled work, Hibben produced a survey that 

exhibited many of the virtues of Cassirer’s now-classic account. 130 Thus, far from carrying — as 

the OED would have it — an "implied charge of shallow and pretentious intellectualism, 

unreasonable contempt for tradition and authority," at the end of the nineteenth century the 

designation the Enlightenment seems to have had the virtue, unlike the Illumination, of steering 

clear of the political battles that had raged in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 

While the Enlightenment might still be criticized for various philosophical shortcomings, it was 

— unlike the Illumination —not something to be feared and despised.


Subsequent discussions of the Enlightenment have not, however, followed the course that 

Stirling projected: the Enlightenment has not remained on the shelf. Critics of various 

persuasions continue to feel the need to take it down from time to time and bash it around. 

Despite the best efforts of its admirers, it has come to serve as a convenient scape-goat on which 

those who are ill at ease in the modern world can vent their frustrations. At the same time, 

historians working in the area of eighteenth-century studies have found themselves in need of 

more shelf space. The cubbyhole labeled the Enlightenment has not proved capacious enough for 

the various Enlightenments that have come into prominence over the last half century. Those 

who have been taking the Enlightenment off the shelf to slap it have paid little attention to those 

who have been finding that the Enlightenment does not really fit into the slot into which it was 

crammed at the close of the nineteenth century. Those who have been busy finding new species 

of enlightenment in places where its presence was, at best, a rumor, have understandably devoted 

little time to defending the Enlightenment from its critics. And neither group has had much 

interest in exploring the vicissitudes of the concept of enlightenment over the last two centuries. 

Making sense of some of the more important turning points in that history will be the task of the 

chapters that follow.


Notes 

1 

Johann Friedrich Zöllner “Ist es rathsam, das Ehebündniß nicht ferner durch die Religion zu sanciren?”, 

Berlinische Monatsschrift II (1783) 509-10, 512 [reprint: Norbert Hinske, ed., Was ist Aufklärung? Beiträge aus der 

Berlinischen Monatsschrift, 2nd. Edition (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977)]. 

2 

Zöllner, 516. The question “What is truth?” had been the subject of a well-known 1776 essay by Christoph 

Martin Wieland. 

3 

Mendelssohn’s essay appeared in the September 1784, Kant’s in December 1784. See Moses 

Mendelssohn, “Über die Frage: was heisst aufklären?”, in Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften Jubiläumsausgabe 

Vol. 6/1 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1981) 115-119 [translated in What is Enlightenment ? 

Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 

University of California Press, 1996) 53-57] and Immanuel Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?”, 

in Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften Akademie Ausgabe Vol. VIII (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1923) 33-42 [translated 

in What is Enlightenment? 58-64]. 

4 

For an overview of this discussion see H. B. Nisbet, “‘Was is Aufklärung?’: The Concept of Enlightenment 

in Eighteenth Century Germany,” Journal of European Studies XII (1992) pp. 77-95 and Werner Schneiders, Die 

wahre Aufklärung (München: Karl Alber, 1974), which includes a comprehensive bibliography. 

5 

Anonymous article, “Kritischer Versuch über das Wort Aufklärung zur endlichen Beilegung der darüber 

geführten Streitigkeiten,” in Deutsche Monatschrift, Vol. III (September-December 1790) pp. 11-43 and 205-237. 

Reprinted in Zwi Batscha, ed. Aufklärung und Gedankenfreiheit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977) pp. 45-94. For a 

sample of definitions from the 1780s see the materials cited in Horst Stuke, “Aufklärung” in Geschichtliche 

Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett, 1972) I:244-245, 250- 

265. 

6 

Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789-1832 (Cambridge, Mass: 

Harvard University Press, 1988).


7 

For the Gulag, see Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1990) pp. 124-133, 135- 

138. For a discussion of the “affiliation” between Enlightenment ideals of universality and Nazi genocide see Berel 

Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) pp. 165-206. For a review 

of other works purporting to find linkages between the Enlightenment and modern totalitarianism, see see Graeme 

Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments : From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006). 

8 

William Ophuls, Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment and the Challenge of the 

New Millennium (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). 

9 

10 

James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: The Free Press, 1993) pp. 244-250. 

Leszek Kolakowski, “The Idolatry of Politics,” Atlantic Community Quarterly 24 (Fall 1986) 223), that its 

belief that human beings are “entirely society-made” leaves us “conceptually defenseless in the fate of totalitarian 

doctrines, ideologies, and institutions” (224), and that its “erosion of historical consciousness” leads to a (227). 

Kolakowski is reprising, in part, an argument that had been made in Lester G. Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man and 

World in Eighteenth Century French Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959). For a critique of Crocker’s 

argument, see Peter Gay, “An Age of Crisis: A Critical View,” The Journal of Modern History 33:2 (1961) 174-177 

11 

For the former charge, see Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: John Murray, 1990) 

pp. 33-34, 39-40, 51-52, 183. For the latter, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: 

University of Minnesota Press, 1984) pp. 31-37). 

12 

On racism, see Richard H. Popkin, “The Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism” and “Hume’s Racism” 

reprinted in The High Road to Pyrrhonism (San Diego: Austin Hill Press, 1980) pp. 79-102 and 267-276 and Cornel 

West, Prophesy Deliverance! (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982) pp. 61-65 For a discussion of feminist 

critiques of the Enlightenment, see Robin May Schott, “The Gender of Enlightenment,” in Schmidt, What is 

Enlightenment, Sandra Harding, “The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory,” Signs 11:4 

(1986) pp. 645-664 esp. p. 655-657 and Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,” 

Signs 12:4 (1987) pp. 621-643. For a discussion of the issue of “the Other,” see Manfred Frank, “Two Centuries of


Philosophical Critique of Reason and Its ‘Postmodern’ Radicalization,” in Reason and Its Other, edited by Dieter 

Freundlieb and Wayne Hudson (Providence, RI: Berg, 1993) 67-86. 

13 

14 

Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment 

Paul Hazard, La Crise De La Conscience Europeénne (1680-1715) (Paris: Boivin,1935) [translated by J. 

Lewis May as The European Mind (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1963) xv]. 

15 

Herbert Dieckmann, “Themes and Structure of the Enlightenment,” in Herbert Dieckmann, Harry Levin, 

and Helmut Motekat, Essays in Comparative Literature (St. Louis: Washington University Studies, 1961) 45-6. 

For another evaluation of Cassirer and Hazard, see Robert Niklaus, “The Age of the Enlightenment,” in The Age of 

the Enlightenment: Studies Presented to Theodore Besterman, edited by W. H. Barber, J. H. Brumfitt, R. A. Leigh, 

R. Shackleton, and S. S. B. Taylor (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1967) 395-412. 

16 

17 

18 

Dieckmann 51-2 

Dieckmann 56 

See, among many other possible examples, Franklin L. Ford, “The Enlightenment: Towards a Useful 

Redefinition,” Studies in the Eighteenth Century, edited by R. F. Brissenden (Canberra: Australian National 

University Press, 1968) 17-29 and Lester G. Crocker, “The Enlightenment: What and Who?” Studies in Eighteenth- 

Century Culture 17 (1987) 335-347. 

19 

Peter Gay, “The Social History of Ideas: Ernst Cassirer and After,” in The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honor 

of Herbert Marcuse, ed. Kurt H. Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). See also Gay, 

“The Unity of the French Enlightenment,” in The Party of Humanity 114. 

20 

Darnton, “The Social History of Ideas,” reprinted in The Kiss of Lamourette (Boston: Faber and Faber, 

1990) 238, 222. For critical appraisals of Darnton’s work (and a response by Darnton) see Haydn T. Mason, editor, 

The Darnton Debate: Books and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998). 

21 

Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 

1982), Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Roy Porter and


Mikulás Teich, editors, The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 

Siegfried Jüttner and Jochen Schlobach, editors, Europäische Aufklärung(en) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992). 

22 

For an overview, see Fania Oz-Salzberger, “New Approaches towards a History of the Enlightenment: Can 

Disparate Perpectives Make a General Picture?” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte XXIX (2000) 171- 

182. 

23 

Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” in Lovejoy, Essays on the History of Ideas 

(New York: Capricorn Books, 1960) 235 

24 

25 

Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm, 1965). 

For an early discussion of the discrepancy, see Peter Gay, “The Enlightenment in the History of Political 

Theory,” Political Science Quarterly 69:3 (1954) 374-389. 

26 

See, for example, two attempts to “reclaim” the legacy of the Enlightenment for the Left, neither of which 

displays much interest in the recent historical literature on the period: Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the 

Enlightenment: Towards a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) and Neil 

Postman, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future (New York: Knopf, 

2000). For a similar effort, from the Right, see Gertrud Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, 

and American Enlightenments (New York: Vintage, 2005), which – whatever its shortcomings – displays a greater 

awareness of the recent historical literature. For a comparison of Bronner and Himmelfarb, see Bernard Yack, 

“Naming and Reclaiming the Enlightenment,” European Journal of Political Theory 5 (2006) 343-354. For more 

on the shortcomings of Bronner’s study, see my review in Government and Opposition [forthcoming]. 

27 

Throughout this book, I will follow the convention I used in my collection What is Enlightenment? and use 

“the Enlightenment” to designate an historical period and “enlightenment” to refer to a process that is not 

necessarily confined to the period known as “the Enlightenment.” 

28 

29 

P. L. Haffner, Die deutsche Aufklärung. Eine historische Skizze (Mainz: Franz Kirchheim, 1864). 

Haffner,1 The “origin” to which Haffner was returning would appear to have been one of the Catholic 

encyclopedias from this period, in which definitions of this sort could still be found. See the discussion in Horst


Stuke, “Aufklärung,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, editors, Geschichtliche 

Grundbegriffe: Historische Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprace in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1972) 

I:319-321. 

30 

31 

Haffner, 1864, 4 

Daniel Jenisch, “Skizze einer Geschichte der Aufklärung in Teutschland, von der Reformation an bit auf 

Kant; und wie weit wir in der Aufklärung kommen können, wenn wir diesen Philosophen folgen?,” Berlinischen 

Journal für Aufklärung I (1788) 71. 

32 

33 

34 

Kant, WE? 58 

Hamannn, Briefwechsel [What is Enlightenment? 147-8]. 

For example, Peter Gay appeals to Kant’s definition on the opening page of the “Overture” to The 

Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Knopf, 1966-1969), Vol. I, 3; it is invoked at the start of Dorinda 

Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Robert Anchor, The Enlightenment 

Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) holds off until page 7. This list could be extended. 

35 

Berlin first employed the concept in his contribution to the Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: 

Scribner’s, 1968-73) Volume II:100-112 [reprinted in Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of 

Ideas (New York: Viking, 1980) 1-24]. Prior to Berlin’s essay, the term had been employed, in passing, by William 

Barrett in his Irrational Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958) 244 and, with a much greater historical 

sophistication, in Lewis White Beck’s Early German Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 

1969) 361-392. For a survey of uses of the term, see Graeme Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: From the 

Eighteenth Century to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) 2-5. For a collection of essays on the 

notion, see Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler, eds., Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment (Philadelphia, PA: 

American Philosophical Society, 2003). 

36 

See Against the Current 3-4, 5, 18-20 and the earlier formulation, reiterated on a number of subsequent 

occasions, in The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999) 21-22.


37 

See, for example, Robert E. Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: 

Cornell University Press, 1991) 8, 48, 54-55, 83 and the earlier exchanges between Berlin and Hans Aarsleff in the 

London Review of Books 5-18 November 1981 6-7, 5-18 November 1981 7-8, 3-16 June, 1982 4-5. Berlin viewed 

Herder as a peculiar case and characterized him as “not an enemy but a critic of the French Enlightenment,” see 

“Reply to Hans Aarsleff,” London Review of Books, 5-18 November 1981, 7-8. 

38 

See Arthur M. Melzer, “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of 

Sincerity,” American Political Science Review 90:2 (June 1996) 344-360 and Graeme Garrard, Rousseau’s Counter- 

Enlightenment (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003). See also Darrin McMahon’s case for 

including Catholic opponents of the philosophes – another group that Berlin excluded (see Against the Current 1) – 

in his essay “The Real Counter-Enlightenment: The Case of France,” in Wokler and Mali, 91-104 and, at greater 

length, in Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment : The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making 

of Modernity (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 

39 

Mark Lilla, “What is Counter-Enlightenment?” in Wokler and Mali, 4. See the even broader use of the 

term in essays collected in Jochen Schmidt, ed., Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung in der europaischen Literatur, 

Philosophie, und Politik von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989). 

40 

Garrard argues that “it makes little sense of refer to ‘the Counter-Enlightenment as though it were a single 

movement” and suggests that it is ‘necessary to deconstruct ‘the Counter-Enlightenment’ into many different 

Counter-Enlightenments,” Counter-Enlightenments 10. Likewise, Lilla observes that every Enlightenment seems to 

have been “stalked by its own Counter-Enlightenment,” see “What is Counter-Enlightenment,” in Wokler and Mali 

11. 

41 

42 

Horst Stuke, “Aufklärung,” in Geschichtlich Grundbegriffe 

Reinhart Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History,” in Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics 

of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) 80. This project had rather disquieting origins. Otto 

Brunner – Koselleck’s senior partner in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe – first formulated the notion of 

Begriffsgeschichte in the latter part of the 1930s, inspired in part by critics of Weimar liberalism such as Carl


Schmitt and Hans Freyer, in order to demonstrate that “the liberal-bourgeois order of the nineteenth century was 

historically contingent, destined to be superseded by the New Order of National Socialism,” James van Horn 

Melton, “Brunner and the Ideological Origins of Begriffgeschichte,” in Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter, eds., 

The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte (German Historical Institue, 

Washington, D.C., Occasional Paper No. 15, 1996) 22. See also Jerry Z. Muller, “Begriffsgeschichte: Origins and 

Prospects,” History of Euorpean Ideas 25 (1999) 3-7. Neither Melton nor Muller suggests that Koselleck’s 

understanding of the project had anything in common with Brunner’s political orientation. 

43 

For the classic formulations of this position, see Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the 

History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969) 3-53 [reprinted in a shortened, and somewhat less pugnacious, 

version, along with later essays, in Skinner, Visions of History. I. Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2002) 57-89], J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1973) 3-41, 

and Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 1-34 

44 

For discussions, see Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts (Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 1995) 124-142 and Iain Hampsher-Monk, “Speech Acts, Languages or Conceptual History,” in 

Iain Hampshire-Monk, Karin Tilmans, and Frank van Vree, eds., History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives 

(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1988) 37-50, and my “How Historical is Begriffsgeschichte?,” History 

of European Ideas 25 (1999) 9-14. 

45 

Skinner, “Reply to My Critics” in James Tully, ed.., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics 

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) 283, which reprises the argument of “Meaning and Understanding” 

35-39. 

46 

Skinner, Visions of Politics I:176. Also relevant in this context is Skinner’s critique of Raymond Williams’ 

Keywords, “The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon,” in Visions of Politics I:158-174. 

47 

Koselleck, “A Response to Comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,” in The Meaning of Historical 

Terms and Concepts, 62-63; Skinner, Visions of Politics I:177-78. This concession may explain why Skinner has


now dropped his unequivocal opposition to the writing of histories of concepts from the revised version of “Meaning 

and Understanding” (cf. “Meaning and Undesrtanding” 30-39 and Visions of Politics I:67-72). 

48 

For an attempt to reconcile these two approaches, see Kari Palonen, “Rhetorical and Temporal Perspectives 

on Conceptual Change,” Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 3 (1999) 41-59. 

49 

50 

Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) 31-32. 

J. G. A. Pocock, “Concepts and Discourses: A Difference in Culture? Comment on a Paper by Melvin 

Richter,” in The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts 53. 

51 

52 

53 

Skinner, Visions of History180; see also Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History31-32 

Cite Stuke and other discussions, in German, of the concept 

See Koselleck, “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity,” in The Practice of Conceptual 

History 154-169 and Koselleck, “’Neuzeit’: Remarks on the Semantics of the Modern Concepts of Movement,” in 

Koselleck, Futures Past 238. 

54 

55 

On this point, see Skinner, Visions of Politics, 145-57, 175-87 

First published in 1891, the “E” volume was sub-edited during 1881 and 1882 by Philip Whittington Jacob, 

a former alderman and mayor of Guilford, who subsequently revised the volume in 1884-85, incorporating 

additional examples. The definition of enlightenment has survived, unchanged, into the on-line 3 rd edition. In 1933, 

the same definition was carried over without substantial modification into the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary but 

has been revised in more recent editiosn of the Shorter Oxford. 

56 

Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959) 263. See also the 

criticisms of the definition found in Karl R. Popper, “Kant’s Critique and Cosmology,” in Conjectures and 

Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965) 176, John Lough, 

“Reflections on Enlightenment and Lumières,” The British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 8:1 (1985): 1-2, 

and Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: 

Norton, 2000) 5.


57 

John Lough, “Reflections on Enlightenment and Lumières,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 

8:1 (1985) 1-15, 1. 

58 

Edward Caird, The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1889) 

69; see also 46-53. For an earlier usage of the term see Caird, Hegel (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1883), which 

observes that Hegel’s thought evolved from a study of Greek literature “and the so-called Enlightenment of the 

eighteenth century.” (15). 

59 

James Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel, Being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and 

Matter “New Edition, Carefully Revised” (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1898) xxxii. 

60 

61 

62 

Stirling xxvi-xxvii. 

Stirling xxvii. 

See, for example, the two uses of "enlightenment" in the continuation of Stirling's attack on Buckle. Stirling 

discounts Buckle’s praise of German philosophers and suggests that “Mr Buckle’s sanguine expectations, indeed, to 

find there but mirrors of the same small Enlightenment and Illumination which he himself worshipped, are to be 

applied, not in determination of Kant and Hegel, but of Mr Buckle himself” (xxxiv). On the next page Stirling, in a 

jibe aimed at English followers of Darwin, writes “Sink you pedigree as man, and adopt for family-tree a procession 

of the skeletons of monkeys — then superior enlightenment radiates from your very person …” (xxxv) 

63 

One of the remaining two uses of "enlightenment" in the Preface employs the term as a synonym for 

"Illumination" understood as an activity, not a period: “Aufklärung, Illumination, Enlightenment, destroyed Greece; 

it lowered man from Spirit to Animal …” (lvii). The remaining use of "enlightenment" likewise employs the term to 

as a name for a process: “When Enlightenment admits at all the necessity of control, the what and how far of this 

control can be argued out from this necessity — and self-will is abandoned” (liii). In both cases it may be significant 

that Stirling capitalizes the noun; in the critique of Buckle it is not capitalized. 

64 

65 

Stirling, Secret of Hegel, xvii. 

For Zollikofer see The German Museum, I (May 1800): 396-403. For the reference to the Berlin Journal 

see the supplement to Volume I: 590. For other translations of Aufklärung as mental illumination, see I:77, 211,


304, 392, 435. For a brief discussion of the journal and its editor, J(ames?) Beresford, see Bayard Quincy Morgan 

and A. R. Hohlfeld, editors, German Literature in British Magazines 1750-1860 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of 

Wisconsin Press, 1949) 47-49. 

66 

67 

Moses Mendelssohn, "On Enlightening the Mind," The German Museum II (July 1800): 39-42. 

For a discussion of Richardson's translations, which — at one time or another — had been wrongly credited 

to the book’s publisher, William Richardson, to A. F. M. Willich, and to J. S. Beck, see Giuseppe Micheli's 

introduction to the Thoemmes reprint, xiii-liii. 

68 

Immanuel Kant, Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political, and Various Philosophical Subjects (London: 

William Richardson, 1798) [Reprint: Bristol: Thoemmes, 1993] 3. Four decades later Sarah Austin – the wife, and 

editor, of the English jurist John Austin and member of a circle that included Jeremy Bentham and James Mill – 

would employ “Enlightenment” in her translation of the essay, but then immediately apologized to the reader for 

“the use of this very awkward word, which is the exact translation of Aufklärung.” Fragments from German Prose 

Writers, trans. Sarah Austin (New York: Appleton, 1841) 228. She suggested that a more appropriate title for the 

article would be “A plea for liberty of philosophizing.” 

69 

Stats- u. Gelehrte Zeitung Des Hamburgischen unpartheyischen Correspondenten Nr. 71, LXXXI. Stück 

(May 5, 1741), 4a, cited by Putz, 14. 

70 

71 

72 

AA 383 

Kant, [62]. 

Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated by Keith Tribe 

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) 236. 

73 

Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Moldenhauer and Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970) VII:28 

[Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952) p. 13]. 

74 

Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History,” in Futures Past 85-6. See the discussions in Richter, 

The History of Political and Social Concepts 47-8 and Hans Erich Bödeker, “Concept-Meaning-Discourse: 

Begriffsgeschichte Reconsidered,” in Hampher-Monk, et al., History of Concpets 53-57.


75 

For a discussion of some of the limitations of the OED as a history of concepts, see Richter, The History of 

Political and Social Concepts 143-157. 

76 

77 

Skinner, Visions of Politics I:160. 

Johann Georg von Zimmermann, Fragmente Über Friedrich Den Grossen Zur Geschichte Seines Lebens, 

Seiner Regierung, Und Seines Charakters (Leipzig: Weidmannischen Buchhandlung, 1790). 

78 

Since the Elector resided in London and ruled Britain as George III, Zimmermann’s appointment in 

Hannover carried few responsibilities, which gave him the time to cultivate a successful practice as a society doctor, 

catering especially to those who spent their summers at the Bad Prymont, a fashionable spa. For a sketch of his 

career, see Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) 486- 

490. 

79 

Ibid. 259-60. This construction parallels English usage from the same period where “synagogue” was 

employed, in controversial literature, as a term of abuse from gatherings devoted to the pursuit of ends which stand 

in opposition to those of the pious. To cite a few examples from the Oxford English Dictionary.: Milton referred to 

the Scots Presbytery in Belfast as an “unchristian Synagogue” while, in 1674, Hickman expressed the wish that “no 

Arminians had … forsaken the Church of England, and took sanctuary in the Synagogue of Rome.” 

80 

81 

Ibid. 252-3. 

See, for example, Stephen Lestition, "Kant and the End of the Enlightenment in Prussia," Journal of 

Modern History 65 (1993). 

82 

The classic study of this episode is Paul Schwartz, Der Erste Kulturkampf in Preussen Um Kirche Und 

Schule, 1778-1798 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1925).Schwartz (1925). But see two recent discussions, which question 

much in this account: Ian Hunter, “Kant’s Religionand Prussian Religious Policy,” Modern Intellectual History 2 

(2005) 1-27 and Michael J. Sauter, “Visions of Enlightenment: Johann Christoph Woellner and Prussia’s Edict on 

Religion of 1788, in H. Blom, J. C. Laursen, and L. Simonutti, eds., Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment: 

Liberty, Patriotism, and the Public Good.


83 

Epstein notes that, prior to Zimmermann’s “gratuitous attack” on the Berlin Enlightenment, he had “always 

been considered an Aufklärung figure himself” (487). 

84 

85 

86 

87 

88 

Zimmermann, Fragmente 288. 

Ibid. 289. 

Ibid. 295. 

Ibid. 282. 

For a discussion of the career of the notion of “true enlightenment” see Werner Schneiders, Die Wahre 

Aufklärung: Zum Selbstverständis Der Deutschen Aufklärung (Freiburg: Alber, 1974). 

89 

90 

91 

Moser 

For the appearance of these, and other neologisms, see Stuke 286. 

For examples of the Romantic usage, see Stuke 306-310. The only critic of the OED’s definition to note 

the significance of Aufklärerei is Karl Popper, though he was unaware of the pre-Romantic uses of the term and 

argues that it was “exclusively used by the Romantics, the enemies of the Enlightenment,” Conjectures and 

Refutations 176. 

92 

93 

Moser 

For a helpful overview of French controversies over philosophie and philosophe, see Hans Ulrich 

Gumbrecht and Rolf Reichardt, "Philosophe, Philosophie," in Handbuch Politisch-Sozialer Grundbegriffe in 

Frankreich 1680-1820, ed. Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt (Munich: R. Oldernbourg Verlag, 1985). 

94 

D’Alembert, “Essai sur les éléments de philosophie,” in Oeuvres de D'Alembert (Paris:Belin, 1821) Vol I, 

Part 1:122. See the discussion in Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment 3-6. 

95 

Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” in Encyclopédie Tome Cinquième (Paris, 1755) [Reprint: New York: Pergamon 

Press, 1969] 644a, see also 636a. For a discussion of the role that a consciousness of time plays in the Encyclopédie, 

see Daniel Rosenbert, “An Eighteenth-Century Time Machine: The Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot,” in Daniel 

Gordon, editor, Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual 

History (New York: Routledge, 2001) 45-66.


96 

97 

D’Alembert, Disours Préliminaire in Encyclopédie Tome Premier (Paris, 1751) xix-xx. 

Dumarsais’s article “Philosophe” in Encyclopédie Tome Douzième (Neufchastel, 1765) 509-11 offers a 

quick sketch of how the Philosophes understood themselves. For a sense of how they used the terms “philosophe,” 

“philosophie,” and “philosophique,” consult the citations collected under the entries for these terms in the 

Encyclopédie’s Table Analytique et Raisonnée Tome Second (Paris & Amsterdam, 1780) 434-5. 

98 

For an overview of this period, see Gumbrecht and Reichardt, "Philosophe, Philosophie." For an account of 

religious opponents of the philosophes, see Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment : The French 

Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 

99 

For a discussion of the neologisms, see Gumbrecht and Reichardt, "Philosophe, Philosophie." 59-60. For 

examples of these formulations, see McMahon, Enemies. 

100 

For discussions of early uses of the term, see Darline Gay Levy, The Ideas and Careers of Simon-Nicolas- 

Henri Linguet: A Study of Eighteenth-Century French Politics (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1980) 179 

and Jean Balcou, Fréron contre les philosophes (Genève-Paris: Droz, 1975) 185-88. 

101 

Abbé Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, translated by Robert Clifford (Hartford: 

Hudson & Goodwin for Cornelius Davis, 1799) I:2-3. For a discussion of Barruel's account, see Amos Hofman, 

"Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel's Theory of Conspiracy," Eighteenth-Century Studies 27:1 

(Autumn 1993) 27-60. 

102 

See, for example, the criticism of "French Economists and Philosophists of modern times" who are said to 

spread "principles, subversive of social order, and, consequently, destructive of social happiness," in the 

"Prospectus" to Volume 1 (July-December 1798) 4. For a discussion of the early history of the journal and its 

contributors, see Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins 1798-1800: The Early Contributors to the Anti- 

Jacobin Review (London: MacMillan, 1988). 

103 

Anti-Jacobin Review, Appendix to Volume IV (August to December 1799) 560. The explanation of the 

etymology of "philosophism" if lifted from J. F. de La Harpe, Lycée ou Cours de Litterature Ancienne et Moderne 

(Paris: Agasse, 1800) VII:195. It also echoes La Harpe, Du Fanatisme dans la langue révolutionnaire ou de la


persecution suscitée par les Barbares du dix-huitième Siècle, contre la Religion Chrétienne et se Ministres (Paris: 

Migneret, 1797). For a discussion of the impact of this work, see McMahon, Enemies 115-120. 

104 

105 

Anti-Jacobin Review, Appendix to Volume IV, 561. 

Anti-Jacobin Review, Appendix to Volume III (May-August 1799) 552; for the characterization of 

Frederick, see Barruel I:99 

106 

107 

108 

109 

110 

111 

Anti-Jacobin Review, Appendix to Volume VI (April to August 1800) 566-7. 

Anti-Jacobin Review, Appendix to Volume V (January-April 1800) 573 

Anti-Jacobin Review, Volume I (December 1798) 729-731. 

Anti-Jacobin Review, Volume III 553; Preface to Volume IV ix, xii, xii-xiii 

Anti-Jacobin Review, Volume IV, xii 

For discussions of the movement, its suppression, and its prominence in conspiracy theories, see Epstein, 

The Genesis of German Conservatism 87-104; Richard van Dülmen, The Society of the Enlightenment: The Rise of 

the Middle Class and Enlightenment Culture in Germany, translated by Anthony Williams (New York: St. Martin's 

Press, 1992) 104-118; and Richard van Dülmen, Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 

1977), which includes a selection of documents. 

112 

113 

114 

Barruel, Memoirs III:vii 

Hofman, 49-50. 

For éclairer see Barruel, Memoirs I:31 and III:183; for aufgeklärte see III:106. III:118 employs the image 

of the diffusion of light to deal with an appearance of Aufklärung in another Illuminati document. 

115 

John Robinson, Proofs of a Conspiracy(Boston: Western Islands, 1967) 174. However, on the next page he 

opts for "mental Illumination" as the translation for Aufklärung in a discussion of a text by Carl Friedrich Bahrdt. 

116 

Preface to Volume IV (August to December 1799) viii; the same is true of the characterization of Kant's 

followers as "enlightened" in the Appendix to Volume V (January-April 1800) 569.


117 

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987) 

57. A search of an electronic text edition of the Reflections confirms that while “enlighten” and “enlightened” occur 

frequently, Burke employs neither “the Enlightenment” nor, surprisingly, even “enlightenment.” 

118 

The German Museum Volume II (December 1800): 521. For a similar reflection, from roughly the same 

period, on the fate of philosophie in France, see McMahon, Enemies 151. 

119 

120 

Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J Sibree (Reprint: New York: Dover Publications, 1956) 438. 

See Stirling, Jerrold, Tennyson, and Macaulay with Other Critical Essays (Edinburg: Edmonston and 

Douglas, 1868) 121. 

121 

George S. Morris opted for “Illumination” as a translation for Aufklärung in the summary of the argument 

of the Philosophy of History in Hegel’s Philosophy of the State and of History (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1887) 292. 

The 1896 translation of Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy by E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson for 

the most part left the German Aufklärung untranslated, but rendered its appearance in the title of the last chapter of 

Part III, Section II as “The German Illumination.” 

122 

Caird’s Hegel uses “Enlightenment” as a translation for Aufklärung in the translation of a passage from one 

of Hegel’s Tübingen manuscripts (23). 

123 

Albert Schwegler, A History of Philosophy in Epitome, translated by Julius H. Seelye (New York: 

Appleton and Company, 1856) 205, 227 and Albert Schwegler, Handbook of the History of Philosophy, translated 

and annotated by James Hutchinson Stirling, fourteenth edition (Edinburg: Oliver and Boyd, 1890) [first edition 

1867] 187, 207. George S. Morris also employed “the French ‘illumination’” in his translation of Friedrich 

Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, From Thales to the Present Time (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1874) Vol II 

130, though he did use “enlightenment” to render an appearance of Aufklärung in an earlier passage, dealing with 

the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolf, but in this context the word designates a process not a period: “The Leibnitzo- 

Wolfian philosophy became more and more spread over Germany during the eighteenth century … and subserved 

the ends of popular enlightenment” (93).


124 

Wilhelm Windelband, History of Philosophy, translated James H. Tufts (New York: MacMillan, 1910 

[1893]) 438; J. H. Muirhead, review of Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung in Mind N.S. XLII:166 

(April 1933) 250. 

125 

For a particularly striking example, see p. liv: “The central principle of Kant was Freiheit, Free-will; and 

when this word was articulated by the lips of Kant, the Illumination was virtually at an end. The single sound 

Freiheit was the death-sentence of the Aufklärung. The principle of the Aufklärung, the Right of Private Judgment, 

is a perfectly true one. But it is not true as used by the Aufklärung, or it is used only one-sidedly by the Aufklärung. 

Of the two words, Private Judgment, the Aufklärung accentuates and sees only the former. The Aufklärung, asks 

only that the Private man, the individual, be satisfied. Its principle is Subjectivity, pure and simple.” 

126 

Stirling, “Lord Macaulay,” in Stirling, Jerrold, Tennyson, and Macaulay with Other Critical Essays 

(Edinburg: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868); Stirling inserted a footnote in the 1898 edition of The Secret of Hegel 

that quoted from the article’s discussion of Aufklärung. See lxiii. 

127 

128 

129 

130 

Stirling, “Lord Macaulay” 120-21. 

Stirling, The Secret of Hegel lxii. 

John Grier Hibben, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (New York: Charles Scribner, 1910). 

Cassirer cited Hibben’s study in this 1931 article on “Enlightenment” in the Encyclopedia of the Social 

Sciences.

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