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

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The Question of Enlightenment 28 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
The Question of Enlightenment 29 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
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