Logo DBNL
De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 43 (2011)

De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 43

(2011)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Do we need more than one Enlightenment?
John Robertson

The significance of the Enlightenment is once again highly contested, within both public and scholarly discourse. Faced with such criticism, the scholarly tendency to deny that there ever was one Enlightenment has intensified; many prefer to think in terms of plural ‘Enlightenments’. This paper asks whether such disaggregation of Enlightenment is necessary or desirable. It points to two recent developments in scholarship which are re-assembling the Enlightenment: the study of ‘transnational’ Enlightenment, and the revival of interest in irreligious Enlightenment, spear-headed by Jonathan Israel. Neither is without problems; ironically, the renewed interest in irreligion has offered encouragement to the parallel idea of a ‘religious Enlightenment’. This paper argues, however, that what characterised - and unified - the Enlightenment was not so much a direct engagement with religion, as a refocusing of intellectual attention on the improvement of the human condition is this world. As an instance of this development, the paper outlines the way in which the study of the earliest development of society became the subject of ‘philosophical’ rather than sacred history.

My starting point is the current, problematic relationship between the historical Enlightenment, the Enlightenment as scholars understand it, and the Enlightenment as it continues to figure in contemporary, present public discourse. There is of course no single, undisputed image of Enlightenment current in public discourse. From some vantage points, the Enlightenment is depicted in markedly negative terms. It can be represented as the inspiration of a technocratic attitude to economic development, indifferent to the costs of such development either to the environment or in human suffering. (In formerly Communist Eastern Europe, the Enlightenment is still held responsible on the Right for the ills of Communism.) Likewise negative is the association of Enlightenment with Eurocentrism - with the assumption that Western values are good for the rest of the world. More often, however, the image of the Enlightenment in European public discourse has been positive. The Enlightenment is seen as defining and representing important aspects and values of modernity. Chief among these at present are tolerance - of variety in religious observance and more generally in ways of living - along with a commitment to rational, open public discussion, in which freedom of speech is accompanied by a willingness to work towards a reasoned decision. Other aspects of modernity associated with the Enlightenment in the later twentieth

century included economic development and social welfare. Sometimes the Enlightenment is also credited with developing the more strictly political prerequisites of modern public life - the rule of law, democracy, representative government; but these had various historical origins, and their exclusive identification with Enlightenment is difficult to sustain. But if the content of the positive public image of the Enlightenment can vary, it has continued to provide an apparently reliable reference point for politicians and commentators on many aspects of public life.

In the last decade, however, this benign, liberal image of the Enlightenment has been seriously tested within Western Europe itself. Both in government and in opposition, politicians have invoked Enlightenment values to justify external aggression and domestic intolerance. The war in Iraq offers examples of the former in Great Britain; the emergence of a violent antipathy to Islam, its adherents and its liberal defenders, not least in the Netherlands, an instance of the latter.1 The Enlightenment is very much at the centre of public discussion; but no longer are its merits disputed between Right and Left, its liberal credentials are themselves in question.

It is not clear how well placed scholars of the Enlightenment now are to respond to these developments. For the Enlightenment as it is understood by scholars seems to grow ever more complicated, ever harder to think of as a coherent, unitary historical phenomenon. For some decades now, there has been a positive tendency to pluralise Enlightenment: to conclude that a phenomenon so complicated cannot be understood as a unity, and defies the reduction implicit in prefixing it with the definite article, as ‘the’ Enlightenment. When this tendency towards pluralisation, to speaking of Enlightenments, first became explicit, in the 1990s, it was an effective response to the renewed philosophical critique of the ‘Enlightenment Project’. The idea that there had been a concerted ‘project’ among eighteenth-century thinkers to establish a single, universal rational standard of morality was effectively refuted by pointing to the undeniable variety of Enlightenment thinking, even within the field of moral philosophy. But what was an effective response in the context of an argument among scholarly disciplines had confusing consequences for the wider reputation of the Enlightenment. The problem did not go unnoticed at the time: a thoughtful series of responses was collected by Keith Baker and Peter Reill in 2001 under the title What's Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern

Question.2 Another political philosopher who has continued to engage intelligently with the issues is James Schmidt: there has never been, he points out, a stable scholarly definition of Enlightenment.3 But these reflections have left little mark on the main body of Enlightenment scholarship, which tends to proceed as if the public understanding of Enlightenment is none of its concern.

Should scholars be concerned by the public image of the subject? Perhaps not. After all, the public's understanding of the subject does seem to respond, eventually, to developments in scholarship. Toleration and the growth of the ‘public sphere’ have both been topics of scholarly enquiry for some time, and are now prominent among the benefits routinely attributed to the Enlightenment in public discourse. To a considerable extent, it could be said that the public image of Enlightenment is but a simplified version of the prevailing scholarly treatment of the subject, while the latter is a natural reflection of scholars' preference for complexity. But this is not a wholly satisfactory answer. Enlightenment scholars cannot go about their research indifferent to its relation to the current public image of their subject. The dangers have been brought home by the most forceful of all recent contributions to Enlightenment scholarship, Jonathan Israel's claim that the real Enlightenment, the ‘radical Enlightenment’ was profoundly irreligious, committed to a materialist philosophy of nature and human society. For all the rhetoric of his prefaces, which celebrate reason, universal secular values, personal liberty and republican democracy, Israel almost certainly did not mean his arguments to add fuel to popular hostility to Islam.4 But this is just how they have been used.5

It is against this background that I would like to return to scholars' conceptions of Enlightenment, and reopen the question: do we need more than one Enlightenment? In doing so, I shall also be returning to some of the issues discussed in my book, The Case for the Enlightenment.6 But while I continue to think that we can and should discuss Enlightenment as a coherent, connected historical phenomenon, in the singular, I do not want simply to restate the case as I made it six years ago. First, I would like to re-frame the problem, covering some of the ground of the Introduction to my book, but with slightly altered emphases. If anything, I would give even more weight to the

gains of studying Enlightenment in its different, varied contexts. I shall then turn to two more recent developments in Enlightenment scholarship, which have come to the fore in the past years, and which have tended towards a reintegration of Enlightenment intellectual and practical activities across Europe and the European world. One of these, the ‘transnational’ Enlightenment, may be welcomed as reconnecting the different ‘national’ Enlightenments, although I shall enter a caution against the simple transfer to Enlightenment scholarship of a term which has a distinct origin and meaning in another branch of historical enquiry. The other recent development is that associated with the work of Israel, the renewed focus on irreligion as the source of the Enlightenment's radicalism - and, in response, the new interest in the scope for a moderate, ‘religious’ Enlightenment alongside its radical counterpart. Perhaps because the case for a ‘religious’ Enlightenment has helped to offset the impact of Israel's irreligious Enlightenment, both currently enjoy a fair wind. But the implications of what is almost an unholy alliance between the proponents of irreligious and religious Enlightenments need urgently to be teased out and put to the test. I want therefore to make some preliminary observations on this development, before reaffirming my own conviction that what distinguished - and unified - the Enlightenment was the determination of its thinkers to set aside strictly religious questions, and concentrate on the study and betterment of men and women in this world.

First, let me try briefly to re-frame the problem: how has it come about that scholars are unable to think of the Enlightenment as a coherent, unitary phenomenon? An initial point remains essential. No stable definition of ‘Enlightenment’ can be derived from the eighteenth century itself. The term lumières was current in the eighteenth century, and was invoked by the philosophes themselves to characterise their intellectual and practical ambitions. But the term was not theirs to use exclusively; it carried a range of connotations, the oldest and strongest of which were still religious. Likewise the German Aufklärung: its meaning was explicitly debated in Berlin, and the question ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ was answered by Kant in terms which are now broadly accepted. But the question was answered rather differently by others who took up the challenge at the time: there was no consensus, even in the restricted intellectual world of Prussia in the 1780s. If anything, the clearest contemporary definition of Enlightenment was given by its self-styled critics, the ‘anti-philosophes’, from the 1780s onwards. Their depiction of the parti des philosophes was a crude caricature, all the more so when the accusation that

the philosophes were responsible for undermining the Monarchy was extended to include culpability for the Terror. But the caricature was devastatingly effective. Not only did it shape the political reputation of the Enlightenment well into the nineteenth century - and beyond. It threw those who admired the writings of the philosophes, or who simply wanted to understand them better, onto the defensive, and dictated the direction of the earliest scholarly enquiries into Enlightenment.

One line of enquiry was pursued by philosophers, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even then, the perspective was one of looking back on Enlightenment philosophy from the vantage point of a superior successor, whether Hegel or Kant. For Hegelians, Enlightenment philosophy had failed to break through to historicism; for Kantians, its inadequacies had been dissected by their master. Nevertheless, it was a Hegelian, J.G. Hibben, then a Kantian, the better-known Ernst Cassirer, who wrote the first systematic accounts of ‘the philosophy of the Enlightenment’.7 At about the same time, literary scholarship in France took up the cause, through Gustav Lanson and his pupil, Daniel Mornet. Still under the shadow of the anti-philosophe Barruel, Mornet felt bound to address the problem of the Revolution rather than Enlightenment as such: his great work was a study of Les origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française (1933).8 But the work was one of scholarship, as was that of the politically reticent Cassirer.

It was after World War II, however, that the construction of the scholarly Enlightenment began in earnest. Historians now joined the literary scholars and philosophers in the enquiry. There was an obvious political motivation for their efforts - recovery of a better European intellectual past than that which had spawned the nationalist and racialist ideologies of German Nazism and Italian Fascism. But this was no longer connected directly to the question of philosophe responsibility for the French Revolution, and the political agenda of Enlightenment scholarship could, for the most part, become a second-order, rather than a primary concern. By the early 1960s, as Franco Venturi began to go beyond his early biographical studies of individual Italian illuministi, and to sketch accounts of the location and rhythm of Enlightenment activity across Europe, scholars were confident that they had a subject, the Enlightenment.9 The earliest Enlightenment congresses may have been the initiative of an

individual enthusiast, Théodore Besterman; in fact, that canny Voltairean entrepreneur took advantage of a new consensus.

Almost as soon as the scholarly credentials of the Enlightenment had been recognised by the institution of an international congress, however, the process of fragmentation began. Having lectured to the first congress in 1963 on ‘The historical philosophy of the Enlightenment’, Hugh Trevor-Roper addressed the second, three years later, on ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’.10 Gradually, over the 1960s and 1970s, Enlightenment was identified in a number of new settings, including the North American colonies and the United Provinces. As research proceeded on Enlightenment in Italy and Germany, moreover, scholars naturally became ever more aware of the differences between these contexts and that provided by France, still regarded as the home of Enlightenment. At least until 1980, these new settings were not thought to have produced separate Enlightenments: the title of the book which sought to capture and summarise this trend, Porter and Teich's The Enlightenment in National Context (1981), still used the singular, common noun.11 After 1980, however, the differences between national Enlightenments became increasingly hard to contain under a common designation. Although this was by no means the only form of difference to be identified, the proliferation of national Enlightenments was the first and strongest incentive towards pluralising the subject as a whole.

It is worth reiterating that the gains of thinking in terms of national Enlightenments were real and substantial. ‘National’, of course, covered a multitude of cultural and political differences: the sense in which Scotland was a national context was rather different from that applicable to Naples, and both again from Belgium, or the United Provinces. But the focus on national contexts encouraged attention to the specific institutions which supported men of letters in a given country, giving them time and space to write: the universities, the churches, and the publishing industry. It encouraged, too, a sharper, more local appreciation of the problems which Enlightenment thinkers addressed within their own societies - problems of economic development, judicial reform, curtailment of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and property, and the expansion of education. Most important, with the aid of Habermas’ concept of the ‘public sphere’, it encouraged historians to explore the engagement of thinkers with their audience, the increasingly literate, middle class lay ‘publics’ who bought the philosophers’ books, discussed them in voluntary debating societies, and

sought to put their ideas into practice through ‘improvement’ in agriculture and manufactures.

When all these gains had been registered, however, it had also become clear by around 2000 that the national context approach would meet diminishing returns if it continued to be pursued in a pluralist spirit. My own response was a comparative study of two such contexts, which suggested that despite their many and manifest differences, the economic and political predicaments of Scotland and of Naples at the beginning of the eighteenth century were such as to stimulate strikingly similar intellectual responses, whose protagonists saw themselves as participants in a wider European intellectual movement of Enlightenment.12

An alternative approach, one perhaps more practicable as a research strategy, is study of what has been called the ‘transnational’ Enlightenment. Behind this development appears to be a recognition that the ‘national context’ approach is inapplicable to ‘peripheral’ regions whose thinkers relied, at least initially, more on contact with institutions, booksellers and other sources of intellectual inspiration outside their regions than on their own local resources. Examples of such regions include Transylvania, whose German speaking elite looked to the University of Göttingen for its education and intellectual direction, or Mexico, where Spanish-speaking creoles studied and imitated European literary models.13 The ‘transnational’ perspective emphasises that the traffic was by no means one way, from the core to the periphery: the elites within the peripheries would in time develop new public spheres of their own, and generate their own, regional or even national ‘patriotisms’.14 But they could do so only by first recognising and associating with the wider European intellectual movement of Enlightenment. In this way the ‘transnational Enlightenment’ has begun to reverse the hitherto apparently unstoppable process of the Enlightenment's fragmentation, reaffirming what was common in its participants’ aspirations and their methods of achieving them.

While this is a welcome development, a note of caution should be struck. The term ‘transnational’ is being used too easily and uncritically. In particular, it appears to be deployed without any awareness of its specific historiographic origin. ‘Transnational History’ is a coinage of and now flourishes as a subdiscipline within ‘International History’, that is, the history of international

relations. It first began to be used in the 1970s, as a heading under which to capture and discuss the operation of institutions, agencies and individuals which acted in the international sphere, but not in the direct service of a state. Examples might be the League of Nations or indeed the United Nations, aid agencies and other Non-Governmental Organisations, and groups of intellectual experts - economists, agronomists, health-specialists. As the inclusion of such international ‘experts’ under its aegis indicates, ‘Transnational History’ has accommodated intellectual history: its proponents speak of studying ‘epistemic communities’ of experts. At its most flexible, ‘Transnational History’ aims to study and illuminate a wide range of ‘border crossings’, in ways which will do justice to the internal social and political structures of states as well as to those who move between them.15 There are, to be sure, attractive, thought-provoking ideas here. But the terms of Transnational History are discipline-and even time-specific. They relate to interactions between states, and assume capacities for cross-border activity which only existed in the twentieth or at the earliest the nineteenth century. If we are to think in terms of a transnational Enlightenment, we need to determine just what sorts of cross-border structures could exist in the eighteenth century.

The obvious candidate for consideration in these terms is the Republic of Letters. Apparently existing only in the minds of its adherents, this, we have come to understand, acquired substance in the early modern period as a network connecting men of letters across Europe, capable of transcending both political and religious dividing lines - though it did not always do so. It was governed by a set of rules, amounting at least to an etiquette of conduct, which were nonetheless accepted for being observed, all too often, in the breach; and it operated through a variety of institutions, including learned societies, publishing houses and the postal services of Europe.16 There is no doubt that the Republic of Letters underwent a notable phase of expansion at the end of the seventeenth century. The proliferation of scientific academies, the development of literary ‘salons’, the emergence of the review journals, above all in Rotterdam and Leipzig, and the multiplication of correspondence networks, no longer channelled through a few heroic individuals, all contributed. As a result, many more could participate, and count themselves men - and, in a very few cases, women - of letters. Here, surely, was one condition of the expanded intellectual world of Enlightenment.

But men of letters also needed a ‘public sphere’ to address, in which they might find a receptive audience for their ideas. Unless such a sphere existed or could be created, more or less independent of government direction, there could be no process of Enlightenment. The existence of the cross-border Republic of Letters on its own was not enough. As the exponents of the transnational Enlightenment are showing, such public spheres were created, in Habsburg Prague and Transylvania, as in Naples, in Scotland, and in many parts of Germany. But one could not be created everywhere, as Alexander Radischev learnt to his cost in Catherine's St Petersburg.17 Nor was the public sphere always amenable to direction by men of letters. This was evidently the case in England, where the public sphere was simply too large, the press too free and publishing too commercial, for any group of men of letters, however well-connected and well-organised, to shape it according to their intellectual priorities. The unusual size of the public sphere in England, and especially in London, had obvious benefits: it reinforced political and religious liberty, and it created opportunities for women writers which simply did not exist on the Continent. But it frustrated those men of letters, perhaps most notably David Hume, who thought, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, that they ought to be recognised by the public as arbiters of taste and political and economic judgement on the authority of their books.

In sum, the ‘transnational Enlightenment’ is to be welcomed for the way it is reconnecting once separated Enlightenments across Europe; it parallels, and perhaps reinforces my own comparative approach to Enlightenment in suggesting that scholarship may not, after all, need to think in terms of more than one Enlightenment. But it is important to be clear what is meant by the term ‘transnational’ Enlightenment, and to continue to think in categories, such as the Republic of Letters and the public sphere, which have proved appropriate to the eighteenth century.

If the identification of distinct national contexts offered one incentive to differentiate between Enlightenments, another, likewise apparent from the 1980s, has been recognition of religious, confessional divisions among proponents of Enlightenment. Where the urge to separate national Enlightenments has diminished in recent years, however, arguments in favour of multiplying Enlightenments along the fault-lines of religion and irreligion have been renewed and revitalised. The arguments are complex, and do not

always point in the same direction.

The association of Enlightenment with irreligion, and with the aggressive criticism of organised religion, is of course an old one. It was the principal charge of the anti-philosophes in the later eighteenth century, and was endlessly renewed during the religious revivals of the nineteenth century. Only gradually, as the Left recovered its anti-clerical nerve, did it attract attention as a demonstrable current in eighteenth-century thought. The example of Ira Wade's pioneering research on the clandestine diffusion of works of irreligious philosophy in early eighteenth-century France was followed after the War by a wave of Italian scholarship exploring the heterodoxy of figures such as Alberto Radicati and Pietro Giannone.18 The fullest statement of the irreligious interpretation of Enlightenment in the twentieth century, however, was the first of Peter Gay's two volumes on The Enlightenment, entitled The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966).19 At the centre of Gay's interpretation was Voltaire, coiner of the most aggressive of slogans against the religious as l'infâme, and author of the emblematic statement of the case for toleration, the Traité sur la tolérance (1763).20 Thereafter, interest in this interpretation was sustained by a number of scholars, notably Margaret Jacob and Silvia Berti21 - but not until it was abruptly and powerfully renewed at the outset of the twenty-first century, in Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment (2001) did it again take centre-stage in Enlightenment studies. In this formidable work, Israel identified a clear line of materialist and more specifically monist philosophy, deriving from Spinoza, whose logic drove those who engaged with it more or less wittingly in the direction of unbelief, if not outright atheism. It was this radical, irreligious Enlightenment, he claimed, which had inspired many of the key social and political principles associated with modernity, including a strong concept of toleration as intellectual freedom.

At first, in Radical Enlightenment, Israel suggested that this vein of thought reached intellectual fulfilment by 1740; after that, the ‘real business’ of Enlightenment was over.22 Barely had he drawn breath, however, than Israel realised that this was an unnecessary exaggeration. The materialist, Spinozist tradition had found fresh adherents in France in the 1740s, most notably Diderot, D'Holbach and Helvétius, thinkers long neglected by historians.

A second volume, Enlightenment Contested (2006) - in many ways a revision of rather than a successor to its predecessor - adjusted the interpretation accordingly. It made even clearer Israel's remarkable claim that a monist, one-substance metaphysics is the philosophical pre-requisite of a series of concepts associated with modernity, including toleration, human rights, racial and sexual equality, and democracy. Though not a philosopher himself, Israel would renew the philosophical tradition in Enlightenment scholarship, combining it with the irreligious perspective of historians. At the same time, Israel brought to the centre of his interpretation a distinction previously acknowledged in passing: that Radical Enlightenment had been offset by a ‘Moderate’ or ‘Conservative’ Enlightenment, whose adherents were rather more numerous, and were by no means so hostile to religious assumptions in their thinking. Israel conceded, in effect, that there was room for a religious Enlightenment, if only as a foil for the radical, irreligious Enlightenment.23

The existence of a distinctively religious and specifically Protestant Enlightenment had already been argued by John Pocock. Pocock traced this Enlightenment from England, through Scotland to Northern Germany, and attributed a key role in its development to a particular current within the Huguenot Réfuge in the Netherlands. It was characterised by its liberal, Arminian opposition to the Calvinist emphasis on the saving decrees of Grace (denominated ‘enthusiasm’), and by its ‘Socinian’ conception of the Church as a forum for discussion of the example and teachings of Christ. From the 1680s, Pocock argued, adherents of this Enlightenment took the lead in seeking to ensure that Protestant monarchs, William III at their head, opposed the designs of the Catholic Louis XIV without resorting to the terrible weapons of religious war.24 Pocock's ‘Protestant Enlightenment’ bore more than a passing resemblance to ‘The religious origins of the Enlightenment’ as Trevor-Roper had depicted them in an essay of 1967.25 But where Trevor-Roper was more concerned to identify forerunners, Pocock insisted that this was a line of religious thinking which would run through to key figures in the later eighteenth century, the historian Edward Gibbon not least.26

More recently, the case for a religious Enlightenment has been taken up and broadened still further by David Sorkin. In his book, which carries

an endorsement from Israel, Sorkin identifies a series of individual Protestant, Catholic and Jewish thinkers whose theology directly engaged with Enlightenment intellectual currents, without succumbing to manifest heterodoxy, let alone irreligion. In the case of the Prussian Jewish community, the movement of engagement was known as the Haskalah, which translates as ‘Enlightenment’; but similar tendencies can be identified in Protestant and Catholic churches across northern Europe. By their similarities, they constitute for Sorkin a single, inclusive movement, ‘the religious Enlightenment’.27

Is it justified to draw such fault-lines through the Enlightenment? There is no denying the presence of both irreligion and religion in Enlightenment thinking. But there are two reasons to believe that they may have been given undue prominence. First, the fault-lines are over-drawn; and second, because this is not, as I understand it, where the originality of Enlightenment thinking is to be found.

Just as the binary opposition of radical and moderate Enlightenments preempts our attaching significance to other differences between the figures so classified, so the polarising of ‘religion’ and ‘irreligion’ does scant justice to individuals at the time. Many of those who have been associated with irreligion were no more than heterodox. By 1700 the scope for heterodoxy was extensive, especially within Protestantism; it was perfectly possible to challenge what the churches defined as orthodoxy in doctrine and belief and remain confident of one's Christianity. For various reasons, however, historians have acquired a kind of vested interest in irreligion, leading them to look for a high road leading from heterodoxy to unbelief.28 This tendency is particularly strong where an interest in materialist philosophies is identified, as if subscribing to materialism were an investment in the secular foundations of modern thought. But not all thinkers who showed an interest in materialist accounts of nature, Epicurean or even monist, also denied the existence of God. Spinoza did not; Bayle did not. However heterodox they were, however vehemently they were accused of atheism by their enemies, in very different ways Spinoza and Bayle continued to affirm a concept of the divine. Many Socinians combined an interest in materialist philosophies of nature with a conviction of the divine character of Christ's message (even if they denied the divinity of his person). Socinianism may be variously defined - John Pocock's definition, summarised above, is very much his own - but this most intellectual

of heterodoxies was decidedly alive, and troubled all the Protestant churches throughout the eighteenth century.29

If the scope for heterodoxy complicates the suggestion of a clear-cut ‘irreligious’ Enlightenment, it is no less doubtful whether one can identify a single ‘religious Enlightenment’, manifesting itself in tendencies common to the theologies of all the major confessions, and Judaism. The issues which had preoccupied Reformed and Roman Catholic theologians since the sixteenth century - the exact contributions of free will and grace to salvation, whether it was possible to construct a new equilibrium between the natural and the revealed that would replace the Scholastic synthesis, whether and in what respects churches should accept subordination to temporal powers - all continued to be the subject of very different responses within and across confessions. The Moderate Presbyterians of Scotland avoided problems with the Calvinist Westminster Confession by the simple expedient of refusing to discuss the matter of grace; Jansenists insisted on doing so. The Jesuits enlarged the scope of natural religion the better to suggest that Chinese Confucians were but a step away from Christianity; their Catholic critics accused them of trivialising revelation. Anglican justifications for the status of the Church of England by law established were very different from the ‘Gallican’ arguments of Catholic regalists. Even on the apparently common ground of toleration, it is far from clear that Roman Catholics understood the idea in the same ways as Protestants.

Arguments that the Enlightenment should be divided into irreligious and religious parts are, in short, by no means self-evident. There were many more Christians who were heterodox than there were unbelievers, while abiding theological and ecclesiological differences between the Christian confessions, let alone between Christians and Jews, would seem to throw doubt on the existence of a common ‘religious Enlightenment’ at other than the most abstract of levels.

In any case, to concentrate on these divisions threatens to miss the point. The Enlightenment's claims to lasting significance - and to the continued attention of a wider public - rest ultimately, I continue to believe, on the intellectual achievements of its adherents, and their contribution to human understanding. What characterised these achievements was a turning away from religious questions and perspectives, in order to concentrate on the study of man and nature in this world, and on the prospects for human betterment

within it, regardless of whether there is another world to come. Obviously, such a reorientation of interests was congenial to those who would undermine the credibility of religious belief - to the sceptical David Hume no less than the materialist Baron D'Holbach. But it was perfectly possible to combine these worldly enquiries with continued religious commitment, across the spectrum from heterodoxy to orthodoxy. In The Case for the Enlightenment, political economy was singled out as the enquiry which best expressed the Enlightenment commitment to understanding and improving the human condition. This was an enquiry which engaged both David Hume in Scotland and Antonio Genovesi in Naples, the one an unbeliever, the other a committed Catholic.30 Rather than re-use this example, I would like here to draw attention briefly to another shift of intellectual focus, in the writing of history. In this case, I shall suggest, the re-orientation was more explicit, as the study of sacred history was, for certain important purposes, replaced by ‘philosophical’ history.

Sacred history is the history of the actions, beliefs, laws and institutions of the peoples of God and of his son and his disciples, as recounted on the Old and New Testaments; by extension, it is also the history of the Christian Church. It was not of course the only form of history being written before the Enlightenment. Classical narrative and political history had been revived in the Renaissance, and had exponents across Europe. But the writing of sacred history was every bit as alive and innovative in the early modern period. Study of Old Testament history was stimulated in particular by the new Biblical criticism of Louis Cappel, Isaac Vossius and Richard Simon.31 Criticism opened up the question of the composition of the Biblical text, and cast fresh doubt on the chronologies within it. Cognate lines of enquiry were initiated by Samuel Bochart into Biblical geography, and by John Spencer and others into the religious practices of the contemporaries of the ancient Hebrews, the Egyptians and the Chaldeans.32

But what is as interesting is what all this scholarship made possible: sacred history became a privileged source for investigation of the major problem facing political thought after Hobbes: the problem of sociability. Hobbes had proposed that man is naturally unsociable, and that it is possible to conceive of men living in society only by the contractual institution or acquisition

of sovereign power, which would secure peace. From Pufendorf onwards, political philosophers set themselves to answer Hobbes by turning to history, and re-framing the problem as one of how men and women had overcome their natural diffidence, and gradually formed themselves into societies. An obvious source of evidence was the Bible. In the Old Testament in particular were to be found the institutions of primitive sociability: the family in many and varied forms (by no means all of them monogamous); economies of pasturage and agriculture, and forms of religious worship, many of which were idolatrous and, in the case of the Hebrews, apparently wanting a conception of future reward and punishment. For reasons that call for further investigation, the two greatest works to explore sacred history for this purpose were written in Catholic Naples: Giambattista Vico's Scienza nuova (1725-44),33 and Pietro Giannone's Triregno (composed c. 1731-33).34 But the enquiry was pursued across Europe, even to William Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses (1738-41).35 The exponents of the sacred history of sociability were orthodox and heterodox in varying degrees; but they shared the conviction that sacred history offered an appropriate vantage-point from which to address the Hobbesian problem.

From the late 1740s, however, historians began to approach the question of sociability rather differently. Voltaire decided to begin his Essai sur les moeurs (1756) with the Chinese, not the Hebrews, and to write the history of the world from East to West.36 Even earlier, the Comte de Buffon had overcome his scruples and set aside the Biblical chronology of the Creation in order to re-write the natural history of the world, setting human history within it. Buffon's Histoire naturelle, whose first three volumes were published in 1749, and the last supplement in 1789, was enormously influential. It was the direct inspiration of Rousseau's ‘Second Discourse’, the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes, in which the origin of inequality was also the origin of society.37 Subsequently, Buffon's history shaped the stadial histories of human evolution constructed by the Scots, William Robertson, Henry Home, Lord Kames, and Adam Smith.38 Later still, it shaped

the century's one attempt to render anew the insights of Vico as philosophical rather than sacred history, the Neapolitan Francesco Mario Pagano's Saggi politici (Political Essays), first published in 1783-85.39

Here was a new way of writing history, whose proponents took it for granted that the history of human society was to be studied on the basis of evidence drawn from across the known world of man and nature. Sacred history continued to be studied, as the concern of theologians, of ecclesiastical historians - and of Edward Gibbon.40 But it too was re-shaped by the new perspective: for J.G. Michaelis, understanding - and a new translation - of the Old Testament were informed by study of the language and customs of the people of modern Yemen.41 In such a shift of perspective, it may be suggested, lay the originality, the distinctiveness, and also the coherence of Enlightenment as an intellectual movement. The Enlightenment was not a straightforwardly secular phenomenon: while some of its adherents sought to undermine religious belief, many more retained their faith. Nor would the new perspective outlined here come down to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries without challenge or interruption. The nineteenth century saw a revival of religious, providential perspectives in historical thinking. But there was coherent intellectual content to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and we do not need to slight this content by insisting on the Enlightenment's divisions, by multiplying Enlightenments.

If this conclusion can be sustained for the historical reconstruction of the eighteenth-century movement of Enlightenment, it follows that there is no need to fragment the Enlightenment which scholars present to the wider public. We do need to insist that the Enlightenment was far from an intellectual still less a political monolith. Its adherents thought and communicated within and between multiple contexts, geographical, political and religious. Many adherents were critical of the churches, Reformed as well as Roman Catholic, but few were irreligious, and not a few were firm believers in some version of Christianity. While certain philosophical, even metaphysical currents were stronger than others, the lines of difference among them were many, and Enlightenment cannot be reduced to opposing camps of ‘radical’ monists and ‘moderate’ dualists. Nevertheless, there were commitments in common, consciously shared by philosophers, scholars, men and women of letters

across Europe. There was certainly a commitment to toleration, powerfully and emblematically voiced by Voltaire, which went beyond the traditional Humanist ideal of the liberty to philosophise. Alongside this, there was a commitment to address a wider ‘public’, to make governments answerable to ‘public opinion’. Above all, there was an intellectual commitment to exploring the conditions of human betterment on earth, through philosophical and historical study of human nature, economic activity, social structure, and manners. There is no need to posit that the resulting enquiries constituted the ‘modern’ understanding of their subjects: a great deal of intellectual as well as every other kind of history has occurred since 1800, and the contemporary world faces issues, of scarce resources, a degraded environment, weaponry of mass destruction and ‘terror’ with a global reach, which were beyond the imagining of eighteenth-century thinkers. But it is still possible to say that the Enlightenment represents a permanent acquisition to the stock of human understanding, and to our conception of how that understanding should be set before a wider public for its scrutiny. We do not need to think of that acquisition as a contribution to the telos of modernity to be able to recognise its existence, study it, and perhaps even celebrate it.

About the author

Since October 2010 John Robertson has been Professor of the History of Political Thought at Cambridge, and a Fellow of Clare College. Previously he was a University Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford, and a Fellow of St Hugh's College. He is the author of The Case for the Enlightenment. Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Cambridge, 2005), and of articles on Enlightenment political, social and historical thought. He is currently engaged on a study of the transformation of the writing of sacred history between 1650 and 1750. E-mail: jcr57@cam.ac.uk.

Bibliography

Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass., and London 1997).
K.M. Baker, and P.H. Reill, What's Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford 2001).
Silvia Berti, ‘The First Edition of the Traité des trois imposteurs, and its Debt to Spinoza's Ethics’, in M. Hunter and D. Wootton (eds), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford 1992) 182-220.
Madeleine Bunting, ‘The Convenient Myth that Changed a Set of Ideas into Western
Values’, The Guardian, 10 April 2006.
Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (London 2006).
Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tübingen 1932), transl. as The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton 1951).
Fiona Clark, ‘The Gazeta de Literatura di México and the edge of reason: when is a periphery not a periphery?’, in R. Butterwick, S. Davies and G.S. Espinosa (eds), Peripheries of the Enlightenment, SVEC, 2008:01 (Oxford 2008) 251-264.
Patricia Clavin, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, Contemporary European History, 14, 4 (2005) 421-439.
Patricia Clavin with Jens-Wilhelm Wessel, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations: Understanding the Work of its Economic and Financial Organisation’, Contemporary European History, 14, 4 (2005) 465-92
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: an Interpretation 1. The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York 1966).
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: an Interpretation 2. The Science of Freedom (New York 1969).
Pietro Giannone, Il Triregno. Ed. Alfredo Parente, 3 vols (Bari 1940).
Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680-1750 (New Haven and London 1995).
Akira Iriye, ‘Transnational History’, review article, Contemporary European History, 13, 2 (2004) 211-22.
Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford 2001).
Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (Oxford 2005).
Jonathan I. Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton and Oxford 2010).
Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790 (Oxford 2011).
Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London 1981).
Eric Jorink, ‘“Horrible and blasphemous”: Isaac La Peyrère, Isaac Vossius, and the Emergence of Radical Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Republic’, in Jitse van der Meer and Scott Mandelbrote (eds), Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: up to 1700, 2 vols (Leiden and Boston 2008) 428-450.
László Kontler, (ed.), Enlightenment and Communication: Regional Experiences and
Global Consequences, Special Number of European Review of History, 13, 3 (2006).
Rita Krueger, Czech, German and Noble: Status and National Identity in Habsburg Bohemia (Oxford 2009).
Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Ezra and the Bible: the history of a subversive idea’, in: Idem, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford 2002) 383-431.
Scott Mandelbrote, ‘Isaac Vossius and the Septuagint’, in: Eric Jorink and Dirk van Miert (eds), The Challenger: Isaac Vossius (1618-1689) and the European World of Learning (Leiden forthcoming).
Sarah Mortimer and John Robertson, ‘Nature, Revelation, History: The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy’, forthcoming in Sarah Mortimer and John Robertson (eds), The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy 1600-1750 (Leiden 2012).
Francesco Mario Pagano, Saggi politici. De' principii, progressi e decadenza delle società (1791-1792), ed. Luigi and Laura Salvetti Firpo (Naples 1993).
John G.A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in R. Ajello et al (eds), L'età dei Lumi. Studi storici sul Settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, 2 vols (Naples 1985) 523-62
John G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: I The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge 1999).
John G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: II Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge 1999).
John G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: V The First Triumph of Religion (Cambridge 2010).
Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge 1981).
Giuseppe Ricuperati, L'esperienza civile e religiosa di Pietro Giannone (Milan and Naples 1970).
John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Cambridge 2005).
Daniel Roche ‘Dell'Illuminismo: per una storia sociale della cultura’, Rivista Storica Italiana, CXIII, (2001) 86-106.
James Schmidt, ‘Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians, and the Oxford English Dictionary’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003) 421-443.
James Schmidt, ‘What the Enlightenment Was, What it Might Still Be, and Why Kant May Have Been Right After All’, American Behavioural Scientist, 49 (2006) 647-663.
James Schmidt, ‘Misunderstanding the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”: Venturi, Habermas and Foucault’, History of European Ideas, 37, 1, (2011) 43-52.
Silvia Sebastiani, I limiti del progresso. Razza e genere nell'Illuminismo scozzese (Bologna 2008).
Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton 2005).
David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton and Oxford 2008).
Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Mass. and London 2010).
Zsuzsanna Török, ‘The Ethnicity of Knowledge: Adaptations, Practitioners, and Social Hierarchies in the 18th-Century German State Sciences’, in: G. Abbertista (ed), Encountering otherness. Diversities and Transcultural Experience in Early modern Europe (Trieste 2011) 147-162.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment’, in: Idem, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London 1967) 193-236.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment (London 2010).
Franco Venturi, Saggi sull'Europa illuminista 1 Alberto Radicati di Passerano (Turin 1954).
Franco Venturi, ‘The European Enlightenment’, in: Idem, Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, ed. S.J. Woolf (London 1972), 1-32.
Franco Venturi, ‘A portrait of Alexander Radishchev’, in: idem, Studies in Free Russia, transl. F.S. Walsby and M. O'Dell (Chicago and London 1982) 26-58.
Giambattista Vico, Giambattista Vico Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, 2 vols (Milan 1990).
Giambattista Vico, Vico: the First New Science, ed. and transl. L. Pompa (Cambridge 2002).
Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, transl. by T.G. Bergin and M.H. Fisch (revised edition, Ithaca 1968).
Voltaire, François Marie Arouet, Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations (1756) Tome 2, Avant-Propos et chapitres 1-37, eds B. Bernard, J. Renwick, O. Ferret, C. Volpilhac-Auger (Oxford 2009).
Voltaire, François Marie Arouet, Traité sur la tolérance (1763) ed. J. Renwick (Oxford 1999).
Wade, Ira O., The Clandestine Organisation and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1670 to 1750 (Princeton 1938).
Warburton, William, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, on the principles of a religious Deist, from the omission of the doctrine of a future state of reward and punishment in the Jewish Dispensation, 2 vols (London 1738-1741).
Wokler, Robert, ‘From “l'Homme physique” to “l'Homme moral” and Back: Towards a History of Enlightenment Anthropology’, History of the Human Sciences, 6, 1 (1993) 121-138

Vorige Volgende

Over dit hoofdstuk/artikel

auteurs