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

The Question of Enlightenment 4
“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