Download - German Historical Institute London

tioned by social historians, who highlight its more practical ambitions
and generally utilitarian outlook. �ar from being merely a war
of words, the Enlightenment aimed at reform in many areas of eighteenth-century
politics. Both approaches, intellectual history and
social history, nowadays belong to the canon of approved methods
and are widely employed in research on the Enlightenment, as the
first two parts of this review article will demonstrate. In recent years,
however, new studies which attempt to discover the visual language
of the Enlightenment have taken up the ideas of cultural history.
They reveal a totally new side of the old question of whether the Enlightenment
was a war of words, and enable us to decipher hitherto
hidden layers of meaning, as the third part of this review article suggests.
I
Traditionally, intellectual history has been the via regia for investigating
the Enlightenment. One of the most prominent historians to have
adopted this approach in the last few decades is Margaret C. Jacob,
now professor of history at the University of California at Los
Angeles. Twenty-one years ago, almost at the same time as postmodernists
mounted their attack on the Enlightenment, she wrote a
monograph, The Radical Enlightenment (1981), in which she championed
the cause of an intellectually subversive and ultimately also
politically revolutionary undercurrent within the Enlightenment
movement, which in the long run shaped our modern, secular, and
liberal Western society. Convincingly argued and well written,
Jacob’s book placed the radical Enlightenment firmly on the agenda of
eighteenth-century historians. Yet she succeeded not only in broadening
the field, but also in modernizing the methodology of intellectual
history. Identifying the Masonic lodges with their shield of secrecy as
one of the hotbeds of radical thinking, she introduced an element of
social analysis into the history of Enlightened ideas and concepts. It
is therefore hardly surprising that to the present day Jacob’s work in
this and subsequent volumes to a large degree defines perceptions of
the eighteenth century in American and British universities.
This influence is certain to rise with the publication of her latest
book, a ‘brief history’ of the Enlightenment. The slim volume is conceived
primarily as a textbook for use in the classroom and therefore
contains a good collection of key documents of the Age of Reason.
31
A War of Words?