the enlightenment 12 · ian); aufkla¨rung (german); upplysningen (swedish; lyse means light)....

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THE ENLIGHTENMENT

12Brian Dolan

To refer to The Enlightenment, complained the em-inent historian of the eighteenth century, J. G. A. Po-cock, was to presume inaccurately that one could referto ‘‘a single unitary process, displaying a uniform setof characteristics.’’ Many scholars of the post-PeterGay world of Enlightenment studies share this griev-ance, and, at variance to Gay who considered ‘‘theEnlightenment’’ as a fundamentally unified move-ment involved in the ‘‘business of criticism,’’ have pre-ferred to see ‘‘Enlightenment’’ as a dynamic and dif-ferentiated ‘‘long-eighteenth century’’ mainly (but notexclusively) European movement. Depending on thehistorian’s preference, ‘‘Enlightenment’’ becomes aperiod, a process, and/or a product. This article brieflyconsiders how ‘‘Enlightenment’’ has been recently andpredominantly defined in each of these frameworks.

Previous conceptions of the Enlightenment haveundergone major transformations as a result of thenew angles from which historians view the past. Atissue is not only the scope of where Enlightenmentwas considered to have taken place, but accounts ofhow and through whose contributions as well. Ratherthan seeing the pursuits of select individuals, for ex-ample the editors of the Encyclopédie—Denis Diderotor Jean Le Rond d’Alembert—as emblematic of thequest for Enlightenment in a society that worshipedthe sovereignty of reason over biblical revelation, re-cent scholarship has gone much further in altering thecanon of central contributors to Enlightenment pur-suits. Eighteenth-century gender studies, for example,has refashioned the image of Claudine-AlexandrineGuérin de Tencin as a matron of the Enlightenment,not because she was d’Alembert’s mother, but ratherbecause she was bearer of a civilized state, running ahighly respected salon on rue Saint-Honoré in Parisand acting as mentor to future salonnières, such asMarie-Thérèse Geoffrin. Madame de Tencin’s aban-donment of her child, the rejection of the duties ofmaternity for which she has been so well known, raisesuncomfortable questions regarding the Enlighten-ment’s attempt to reconcile the language of individualrights and autonomy with consistent attempts to con-

fine women in domestic settings and reinforce theirrole as mothers—as, for example, prescribed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile. As an intellectually inde-pendent writer and salonnière, Tencin represented achallenge to social values that subsequent thinkerswould use as a model to help forge a feminist philos-ophy. Here late-twentieth-century scholarship has notonly illuminated the often contradictory Enlighten-ment debates about gender, but also the ways that newareas of knowledge were developed that expanded theopportunities for a wider band of people to participatein the pursuits.

But ‘‘Enlightenment,’’ as a process with which—many believe—we are still engaged in the twenty-firstcentury, is also a pursuit filled with irony and paradox.The psychology of the pursuit—the analysis of whatmany previous historians preferred to call the ‘‘Mindof the Enlightenment’’—is complex. This is becauseEnlightenment thinkers—both men and women—seized upon and then struggled to come to grips witha deep transformation in what were taken as funda-mental beliefs and true knowledge about their world.One goal of any history of the Enlightenment—whether the historiography of the 1930s or 1940s,which played on the Enlightenment’s intellectual val-ues, or later scholarship which stressed the mecha-nisms of enlightened practices—has been the attemptto capture some of the wonder and the reflexive pridethat enlightened individuals felt when assessing thephilosophical and material changes visibly occurringthroughout Europe.

Everything was changing, and it seemed—many believed—to be changing for the better. In1759 a forty-one-year-old d’Alembert leaned backand thought about his times. Putting pen to paper,he wrote his reflections at the beginning of his Ele-ments of Philosophy:

If one examines carefully the mid-point of the centuryin which we live, the events which excite us or at anyrate occupy our minds, our customs, our achievements,and even our diversions, it is difficult not to see thatin some respects a very remarkable change in our ideas

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is taking place, a change whose rapidity seems to prom-ise an even greater transformation to come.

He thought the changes amounted to nothing shortthan a revolution: ‘‘all fields of knowledge have as-sumed new forms.’’ What was the root of suchchanges? New developments in natural science whichushered in ‘‘a new method of philosophizing,’’ prompt-ing ‘‘the kind of enthusiasm which accompanies dis-coveries, a certain exaltation of ideas which the spec-tacle of the universe produces in us.’’ What were theconsequences? D’Alembert could only wonder, but itwas clear that ‘‘this general effervescence of minds’’would ‘‘cast new light on some matters and new shad-ows on others.’’ Knowledge was shining bright inwhat his contemporaries were styling the first centuryof Enlightenment.

What were all these revolutionary changes inknowledge and methods of philosophizing that so im-pressed d’Alembert? The answer harks back to the ac-tivities of some of d’Alembert’s intellectual ancestors,whose work in natural philosophy and experimentalscience culminated in the scientific revolution and

helped establish new conceptions of cosmologicalstructure, to readjust (or revolutionize) the founda-tions of knowledge, and to set the pace for how En-lightened pursuits (with emphasis on empiricism, ex-perimentation, and secular rationalization) began toreshape modern beliefs about the natural world, hu-man nature, and social organization.

CELEBRATING THE‘‘NEW SCIENCE’’

The theories, mathematical proofs, and writings ofpeople such as the Polish astronomer (and church ad-ministrator) Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), theDanish nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe(1546–1601), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), andIsaac Newton (1642–1727), to name only a selectfew, were crucial in constructing a new method ofestablishing facts about nature. Advocates of the ‘‘newscience’’ (from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge)emphasized that no traditional knowledge was to be

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taken for granted. In fact, it was argued that one oughtto be downright skeptical of all authority. Rather thanrely on what was written in ancient books or whatothers said about the natural world, the best sourceof knowledge was to ask nature directly. Personal ex-perience was to be the new arbiter of truth. Why notexplore for oneself? Why not rely on one’s own ex-periences, use one’s own reason? Natural philosophers(as they were then called; the term ‘‘scientist’’ was notcoined until the 1830s) were encouraging others totake seriously the plea by the English statesman andphilosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) to ‘‘unrollthe volume of the creation’’ and learn from the Bookof Nature by observing and collecting facts fromwhich one could induce greater knowledge and gen-eral truths. As a result, all areas of nature were begin-ning to be scrutinized through critical eyes, andeighteenth-century philosophers portrayed themselvesas the inheritors of the radical changes in what wereperceived to be the legitimate means of producing‘‘natural’’ knowledge.

The seventeenth century ended with a crisis ofunbelief. Previously, the Bible was read as the ultimateauthority on all matters, metaphysical or moral. Butit would be misleading to assume that the new sci-ences simply subverted the authority of the Bible, orthat science was suddenly at war with religion. It wasnot science versus religion, but rather that natural phi-losophers defended the Book of Nature as an equallylegitimate source of knowledge as the Bible. Why notexplore all angles? If your beliefs are worth having,aren’t they worth interrogating?

In the ancien régime, social and political orga-nization was modeled on a divine order that enforceda social hierarchy (originally referring to an order ofpriests; the Greek hieros means sacred and is the rootof hiereus, priest), and authorities attempted to quietthe voices of the new philosophers because of the chal-lenge they presented to the literal truth of the scrip-tures. But the debates over who had the legitimateauthority to speak on matters of divine order and‘‘truth’’ (were philosophers seeking a status equal tothat of priests?) took place among an educated elite.So what effect did the new philosophy have on thebroader public? How did the average individual lookupon the new science? Who had the knowledge tounderstand the debates? After all, the preface to Co-pernicus’s De revolutionibus declared that mathematicswas written for mathematicians, and historians figurethat fewer than a hundred contemporaries attemptedthe whole of Newton’s Principia mathematica, andonly a handful could comprehend the mathematicsthat he used to prove that the earth’s motion couldbe explained with reference to the same ‘‘universal

force’’—gravity—that moved all other celestial (andterrestrial) bodies.

Here the role of Enlightenment thinkers wasparticularly effective. The philosophes saw the impli-cations of the new science—its promotion of a newbasis of knowledge and its elimination of the tradi-tional hierarchical view of nature—as a platform forrevolutionizing the political structures of the ancienrégime. The towering genius of Newton was a post-humous construction. He and others such as Coper-nicus were celebrated not because of what they did,but because of what others thought they did. Howeverfew could understand the calculus, hordes could seethe implications of having destroyed the distinctionsbetween the terrestrial and heavenly realms.

After his death Newton’s achievements werecelebrated as a triumph for enlightened inquiry, andlater philosophes made him into one of the first heroesof Enlightenment. The famous philosophe François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1778), who visitedEngland from 1726 until 1729 (where he befriendedNewton’s niece and even attended his funeral), wasone of his most effulgent admirers. He wrote thatNewton had taught philosophers to ‘‘examine, weigh,calculate and measure, but never to conjecture.’’Grounded were the lofty metaphysical theories of theseventeenth century; gone were the dubious tales ofsaints and miracle workers.

Experiment, observation, and secular reason dis-tinguished an enlightened individual. Newton ‘‘saw,and made people see,’’ continued Voltaire. His pene-trating insight rendered visible the previously hiddenmysteries of nature. His experiment of directing abeam of sunlight through a prism to show that it wasactually comprised of a rainbow of colors has oftenbeen used to symbolize the pursuit of enlightenment.The message was articulated in the word chosen forthis age: siècle des lumières (French); illuminismo (Ital-ian); Aufklärung (German); Upplysningen (Swedish;lyse means light). Enlightenment signifies the processof coming out from the dark—as in ‘‘those times ofdarkness and ignorance, which we distinguish by thename of the Middle Ages,’’ according to Voltaire. ‘‘Weare all [Newton’s] disciples now,’’ he announced in1776.

To boldly go . . . Throughout the eighteenth cen-tury a growing ensemble of admirers seized uponscience as the route to progress and, perhaps, evenperfectibility. Unlike Blaise Pascal who became fright-ened when he contemplated the possibility of an in-finite universe, the preeminent German philosopherImmanuel Kant (1724–1804) thought the concept‘‘filled the understanding with wonder.’’


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Kant was not afraid of the challenges presentedby the new philosophy. In fact, he was one of the firstto sloganize the achievements of the early natural phi-losophers by popularizing the phrase ‘‘CopernicanRevolution,’’ albeit to imply that his particular phi-losophy of knowledge was as radically different fromothers as the heliocentric from the geocentric modelof the universe! But his work is also said to havecrowned the philosophy of Enlightenment in Ger-many. He lived his whole life in Königsberg, wherehe became professor of logic and metaphysics at itsuniversity. His chief works questioned the limits ofreason in the advancement of human knowledge—the Critiques of pure reason, practical reason, andjudgment (published in 1781, 1788, and 1790 re-spectively). However, it is significant that this leaderof the German Enlightenment earlier wrote a workon natural philosophy and the history of the heavens:General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens(1755).

But in terms of defining moments in the historyof Enlightenment, it is also significant that in 1784Kant wrote an essay in answer to the question ‘‘Whatis enlightenment?’’ that was published in a Berlinmonthly, Berlinische Monatsschrift. His answer wasthat enlightenment was the attainment of the abilityto think rationally for oneself: ‘‘Enlightenment isman’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelageis man’s inability to make use of his understandingwithout direction from another.’’ Have no fear, hewent on, borrowing a phrase from the Latin poet,Horace: ‘‘ ‘Sapere aude! ’ Dare to Know! ‘Have cour-age to use your own reason!’—that is the motto ofenlightenment.’’

However challenging the new philosophy, self-confidence and self-determination would help over-come vanity and foolishness. Kant believed that pur-suing Enlightenment was worth the effort since thebenefits it brought easily outstripped the perceiveddangers. Yes, people would fall a few times beforelearning to walk alone, but better to do that than tolabor in a life of perpetual tutelage. He, like manyothers, believed that those who learn to think forthemselves ‘‘will disseminate the spirit of the rationalappreciation of both their own worth and every man’svocation.’’ But others remained cautious, fearing thepower of authorities who ordered, ‘‘Do not argue!’’Some of Kant’s colleagues lamented the resistance—or the inertia—of the masses to pursue the quest. TheGöttingen professor of physics (and seventeenth childof a Protestant pastor) Georg Christoph Lichtenberg(1742–1799) erupted in frustration over humanity’sinability to seize its opportunities. ‘‘People talk a greatdeal about Enlightenment and ask for more light. My

God! What good is all this light if people either haveno eyes or if those who do have eyes resolutely keepthem shut!’’

Yet it seemed to others that the greatest ironyof enlightenment was that the light it provided il-luminated more harsh realities of humanity’s condi-tion than havens of happiness. ‘‘Has it not alwaysbeen obvious that the time of highest refinement isprecisely the time of the most extreme moral rotten-ness?’’ asked the German poet and sardonic criticChristoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813). Was it notobvious ‘‘that the epoch of brightest enlightenmentis always the very epoch in which all sorts of specu-lations, madness, and enthusiasm, flourish most?’’Was one really to believe that man’s perfectibility wasan attainable goal—the payoff of Enlightenmentpursuits? Could one really overthrow one’s inner, sav-age, corrupting passions? It seemed to Wieland thatfor every individual who strove to attain enlightenedliberty there were many others who were eager tosuppress their attempts. ‘‘Just think,’’ he wrote,‘‘against one man who actively advances true enlight-enment, there are a hundred who work against itwith all their might, and ten thousand who neitherdesire nor miss his services.’’

Indeed one great paradox of the Enlightenmentmight be that for all the new meanings of liberty andfreedom offered, the same period witnessed the rise ofnew disciplinary controls over the population and newmechanisms of surveillance. Talk about freedom, butplay by the rules. Kant saw this irony when he re-peated the words of a prince: ‘‘Argue as much as youwill, and about what you will, but obey!’’ ‘‘Everywherethere is restriction on freedom,’’ he concluded. Andwhile repression was not as draconian as in the six-teenth or seventeenth centuries, a number of philo-sophes who voiced their visions of a society liberatedfrom a repressive political regime found themselvesmeditating over their next messages in prison.

Nevertheless, one of the major achievements ofeighteenth-century enlightenment was to spread theword, to popularize the new philosophy throughprint, in new journals, or the celebrated Encyclopédie(published from 1751) and the British answer to it inthe form of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (which beganpublication in 1771), through new public librariesand salons, and so forth. They were adept at playingup propaganda. Because of this, philosophes have of-ten been regarded as mere spokespeople for theachievements of the seventeenth century, not sophis-ticates in their own right, and as a result critics re-garded them as shallow. To various degrees either im-age—the hack writer or the high culture savant—canbe defended.


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RULING AND ORDERINGNATURE AND SOCIETY

The few regularly cited philosophes, who are oftencriticized as being mere propagandists, represent a mi-nority of those who contributed to Enlightenment pur-suits. The term ‘‘philosophes’’ gained currency becauseit referred to a specifically French membership (a sortof brotherhood, as Voltaire suggested to d’Alembert),and because, unlike references to university or profes-sionally oriented philosophers, philosophes were am-ateurs, whose society was formed in salons and whowrote for a nonprofessional public. But in commonhistorical usage the term has come to represent farmore than a restricted group of French intellectuals(as the term is often translated). Philosophes are nolonger only French. Rousseau proudly declared thathe was a citizen of Geneva (this before its uprightmagistrates condemned his philosophy and burnedhis books). David Hume and Adam Ferguson wereScottish, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklinwere American, Immanuel Kant and Christian Wolffwere German, and the Scandinavians Emanuel Swe-denborg and Linnaeus’s pupil Daniel Solander (amongmany others) helped spread the Enlightenment in theBaltic. Among those in Italy (where, besides goutytourists, Enlightenment principles were among therare imports from the north) were Cesare Beccaria,Pietro Verri (editor of Il caffè, organ of the LombardEnlightenment), and the Neapolitan experimenterMaria Angela Ardinghelli.

This, of course, names only a few, and propor-tionately fewer still were amateur polemicists—wefind academicians, politicians, and other legal ormedical professionals filling in the ranks. Perhapsequally variegated were the philosophes’ commit-ments to pursue different Enlightenment goals. AsSimon Schama has remarked of the reformers in theDutch Enlightenment, they rejected ‘‘a cosmopolitan,Francophone, universally applicable, rationally dis-cerned set of natural laws, in favor of a highly partic-ular, inward-looking, evangelical, proto-romantic cultof the Fatherland.’’ With regard to the crusade forreligious and intellectual toleration, not all EuropeanEnlightenment activists rallied around Voltaire’s no-torious cry to crush the infamous (écrasez l’infâme).Enlightenment philosophies of toleration emphasizedthat rational enquiry necessitated freedom of thoughtand expression, which usually did not mean abolish-ing God but recognizing that heterogeneous beliefsmight legitimately coexist, something that enlight-ened Europe, largely through the work of its travelers,anthropologists, and orientalists, was forced to cometo terms with.

State responses to this varied around Europe. InEngland the Toleration Act (1689) permitted freedomof worship for Nonconformists, if at the cost of con-tinuing certain civil disabilities. Elsewhere some mon-archs such as Frederick II of Prussia (ruled 1740–1786), Catherine II of Russia (ruled 1762–1796),and Joseph II of Austria (ruled 1764–1790) adoptedan enlightened philosophy of conceiving of them-selves as the servants, rather than the absolute masters,of their states, leading to the paradoxical way theserulers were referred to by nineteenth-century histori-ans as ‘‘enlightened despots.’’ How enlightened andtolerant their rule was in practice is much debated.For example, Charles III of Spain has been describedas a minor enlightened despot; nonetheless progressivemembers of the elite in the Iberian peninsula stillfaced a tough fight against the Spanish Inquisition.

But a new ruling philosophy was emerging. So-cial power was increasingly sought by philosopheswho seized upon laws of nature as a guide to legitimategovernance. One radical philosophy developed wasmaterialism, with John Locke’s theory of thinkingmatter—the material, ‘‘corpuscular,’’ sensory originof ideas—proving an influential model for later clan-destine writers who appropriated materialistic argu-ments to support their theories of an immortal andimmaterial soul, of free will, and a naturalistic philos-ophy of life. In his Man a Machine (1747), the Frenchmilitary physician Julien de La Mettrie wrote of howhuman physiology and behavior could be explainedsolely in terms of the organization of matter and withreference to the mechanical concepts offered in nat-ural philosophy. La Mettrie, who after the publicationof Man a Machine settled at the court of Frederickthe Great, described the body as a sort of automatonthat ‘‘winds up its own springs,’’ which physicians,rather than priests, were capable of repairing.

The influence of this philosophy was not, assome critics have emphasized, a matter of an Enlight-enment drive to create a ‘‘modern paganism’’ wherethe so-called Age of Reason was one sustained attackon religious faith. To be sure, deism and natural the-ology emerged as mediators which postulated that themore rational nature was seen to be—that is, the morelaw-bound and organized—the more proof this of-fered of the wisdom and benevolence of God. Moregermane, perhaps, to Enlightenment pursuits were theways in which innovators used the man-machine phi-losophy as a model for their systems of mechanizedlabor and manufacture.

Enlightened entrepreneurs. Enlightened entre-preneurs translated the concept that nature was me-chanical and could be reduced to laws, its powers im-


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itated in machinery and harnessed, into economicadvantage. Nature provided not only material re-sources but sources of power, and the new ‘‘mechan-ics’’ (referring to people rather than machines) ofindustry, who became known by the end of the eigh-teenth century as ‘‘engineers,’’ not only used nature’sforces to operate their improved windmills, water-mills, pumps and other types of machinery, but reliedon conceptual tools that became the catchphrases ofthe Enlightenment: precision measurement, economyof power, environmental management, standardiza-tion, interchangeable parts, and so on. We know theways that this led to the possibilities of mass produc-tion and entrepreneurial distribution of products toan expanding consumer market. But what is fre-quently overlooked is how these products—whetherscientific instruments, books, maps, or Wedgwoodpottery—encapsulated and distributed the values ofthe Enlightenment to the bourgeoisie, thus furtherreleasing the Enlightenment from its predominatelyelite male grip. Consumption by the material cultureof the Enlightenment expanded the range of thosewho were invited to think of themselves as sharing inits accomplishments. But the Enlightenment alsocommodified philosophic ideas and practices.

Part of the mantra of Enlightenment rationalitywas the refrain that, like nature which operated underregulated ‘‘laws,’’ the human economy—from laborprocesses to population health—could be reduced tomechanical operations that were rule-bound and con-trollable. Once this was accomplished, humanity waswell on its way to realizing the Enlightenment goal ofrendering laborers’ techniques visible and allowing en-trepreneurs and projectors to assess and reproduce themanywhere. In this protoindustrial and capitalist enter-prise, a mechanical, visible workforce was the key tosocial progress. To the philosophes, as Simon Schafferhas suggested, workers themselves figured as individualswho performed like the machines they managed.

Also accomplished would be the associated ben-efit of replacing a hereditary social hierarchy with asingle strata of enlightened individuals who shareknowledge of the mechanical principles that governnature and society. One popular Enlightenment goalwas for careers to be open to the talented, with theintent of introducing a professional meritocracy wherestatus was earned rather than inherited, but propo-nents first needed to establish rules by which meritcould be judged. An illuminating example is the wayin which the eighteenth-century French artillery


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corps—traditionally a second-class branch of themilitary—obtained new social status when it was rec-ognized that their abilities as technical experts, orga-nized around rigorous discipline and collaboration,could successfully ‘‘engineer’’ the French Revolution.In the Enlightenment, mechanist theories and rule-governed practices were equally as likely to be appliedin factories as in prisons, hospitals, or on battlefields.

The links forged during the Enlightenment be-tween manufacturers, entrepreneurs, and natural phi-losophers became part of the new area where the‘‘business’’ of Enlightenment expanded, includingfactories and banks. In addition to the usual locales,such as universities or philosophical academies, late-twentieth-century scholarship has also focused atten-tion on anatomy theaters, various intellectual societiesthroughout Europe, salons, and even Masonic lodges,whose habitués were allowed to espouse enlightenedideals. All were locales for an effusive Enlightenmentrhetoric of liberty, equality, and fraternity. However,the Enlightenment also saw the expansion of areascentral to the rapidly expanding and specialized pur-suits in natural history—the collection and classifi-cation of specimens from the animal, vegetable, andmineral kingdoms.

Spaces of natural history. The founding of theBritish Museum in 1753 came hot on the heels of theopening of the Luxembourg palace in 1750, the firstpublic art gallery in France. But even earlier, the En-lightenment encyclopedic approach to the acquisitionand classification of knowledge was manifest in cabi-nets of curiosities (such as Peter the Great’s in St. Pe-tersburg, which proudly possessed the largest andmost famous collection of ‘‘monsters’’), or the ar-chaeological and artistic collections that generated athriving commercial economy in Italian cities, wheredealers, dilettanti, connoisseurs, aesthetes, and anti-quarians busily traded in enlightened taste.

As a descriptive science of forms and categories,natural history complemented mechanical philosophyby merging the living and the nonliving, banishingspirits and metaphysics in favor of empirical methodsof classification, often based on external characteristics(such as Linnaeus’s use of the sexual organs of plantsto classify groups down to the level of species), withthe famous exception of Georges-Louis Leclerc deBuffon (1707–1788), who attempted to classify thewhole of the natural world in his massive Histoire na-turelle (1749–1804) using a uniquely historical ap-proach (evidence from the fossil record, for example)and a theory of reproductive relationships to create abiological classification system. In either case, despitetheir epistemological differences, recognizing patterns

in nature was thought to be the key to understandingnot only its operations but its organization, embracingthe Enlightenment commitment to render the secretsof nature visible and to display its magisterial orderopenly to the public.

One Enlightenment pursuit was to set out tocatalog nature’s diversity, with its contents named andclassified accordingly. When Enlightenment pursuitsturned to collecting exemplary specimens, the naturalhistory community was vigorously mobilized. Andone view of the ‘‘geography’’ of the Enlightenmentappears expansive—Russia recruited naturalists par-ticularly from France, Germany, and the Netherlandsto help explore its vast natural resources; the UppsalaRoyal Society sponsored various expeditions to thepolar regions; and Linnaeus gave his pupils specificinstructions for collecting specimens and recordinginformation during their worldwide travels, a proce-dure later imitated by the president of the Royal So-ciety in London, Sir Joseph Banks, when promotingvoyages of exploration. Even if everything collectedcould not be comfortably classified (in an epoch ofstandardized descriptions, how does one account for‘‘monsters’’?), natural historical knowledge was con-sidered useful because it summed up the Adamic pro-cess of establishing order from the confusion of thenatural world.

Popularizing knowledge. The flip side to collect-ing and displaying nature’s curiosities in particularplaces was the spread and distribution of Enlighten-ment knowledge to more distant parts of Europe.Citizens in the eighteenth-century republic of lettersfollowed new codes of sociability and enjoyed a dis-cursive equality where women who participated inEnlightenment debate were seen as a civilizing force,promoting the philosophy of the Enlightenment inthe public sphere. Correspondence linked enlightenedcommunities—Voltaire’s vast network of correspon-dents, including Catherine the Great (who eventuallybought Diderot’s and Voltaire’s book collections,which she added to the imperial library), made hisestate at Ferney on the Swiss border a crossroadsof enlightened Europe. But for many historians of theEnlightenment, the real achievements in spreadingEnlightenment knowledge were linked to the produc-tion of inexpensive editions of books. As RobertDarnton has shown, ‘‘underground’’ printers, pub-lishers, and booksellers who peddled the philosophes’banned books at great risk were crucial to the popu-larization of Enlightenment ideas.

Above ground, the translation of scientific andmedical tracts played a particularly important role inpromoting Enlightenment ideas of utility to a wide-


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spread public—the immense success of self-helphealth-care books such as William Buchan’s DomesticMedicine, first published in London in 1769 but is-sued in multiple editions and translated into a numberof foreign languages, is testimony to the success of thisenterprise. The intended audience for such ‘‘useful’’works and their wide distribution is a measure of theambitions of the Enlightenment to include previouslymarginalized social groups in its goals to educate andimprove. In Buchan’s case it was the poor, but a simi-lar point has been made about the pedagogic literaturewritten for women, such as the Venetian writer Fran-cesco Algarotti’s Newtonianism for Ladies (1737), orby women, such as the Bolognese filosofesse and criticof Cartesian thought Laura Bassi or the French trans-lator of Newton, Émilie Du Châtelet.

Enlightenment advocates stressed that scienceserved moral as well as utilitarian ends, which was amessage most effectively presented to the public in theform of ‘‘popular’’ writing. But the rhetoric of En-lightenment ‘‘public science’’ was also crucial to es-tablishing the natural philosophers’ social legitimacyby demonstrating that the improvements they werearguing for would serve the interests of the public.Therefore, ‘‘science’’ is often seen as the centerpieceto Enlightenment thought because, when placedalongside a number of other important implicationsof Enlightenment thought on society, science wasconsidered the embodiment of reason and rationality,it spearheaded the assault on superstition and priest-craft, and it promised human progress and social im-provement. These latter utopian dreams were a leit-motiv of the Enlightenment. Acquiring knowledgethrough enlightened pursuits, some believed, wouldconquer fear, perfect humanity, and even eliminatedeath. At least that is what Benjamin Franklin imag-ined, while lamenting that he was born a century tooearly to benefit. ‘‘It is impossible to imagine theheights to which may be carried in a hundred years,the power of man over matter,’’ he wrote to the En-glish chemist and Presbyterian minister Joseph Priest-ley. ‘‘All diseases may by sure means be prevented orcured, not excepting even that of old age, and ourlives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antedi-luvian standard.’’

THE HEALTH OF NATIONS

Progress was perhaps the key term of Enlightenmentthought, the most celebrated, if also the most conten-tious, term. It embodies the tensions and paradoxesof Enlightenment thought, and an exploration of howthe idea of progress was promoted and criticized re-

veals no consensus among philosophes. However, itdoes reveal the degree to which Enlightenment phi-losophes were ‘‘conductors’’ (in both senses) of debatebetween science and politics.

One point of disagreement among writers washow progress was related to the morally charged op-timistic or pessimistic visions of future society. Rous-seau wasn’t very optimistic. He argued that the morecivilization progressed, the farther humanity was fromhappiness. The savage, he wrote, ‘‘breathes only peaceand liberty,’’ while ‘‘civilized man, on the other hand,is always moving, sweating, toiling, and racking hisbrains to find still more laborious occupations: he goeson in drudgery to his last moment . . . and, proud ofhis slavery, he speaks with disdain of those, who havenot the honor of sharing it.’’ This is from his Discourseon the Origin of Inequality, which, in various ways, wasan evolutionary tract explaining how the natural andsocial attributes of man affect perfectibilité, or the ca-pacity for self-improvement. As was more forcefullystated in his direct attack on the notion of progress inDiscourse on the Arts and Sciences, this capacity couldbe misdirected, and lead humanity down the road ofself-destruction.

The Enlightenment analysis of ‘‘wealth’’ elabo-rated on its dangers. European economics, it has beenwidely noted, are future-oriented, a perspective rootedin Enlightenment theories of progress. In the eigh-teenth century, European economic thought assertedthat the purpose of an economy was to increase na-tional wealth—to ‘‘grow.’’ For the French physiocrats,this meant that economic and political administrationshould be based on the scientific, secular managementof public welfare. They maintained that the distri-bution of goods and services operated under the sameNewtonian ‘‘natural laws’’ as the rest of the universe.For them, wealth was dependent on free trade in ag-ricultural products. Freedom from government inter-ference (laissez-faire economics) would lead to greaterprofits, which would result in greater agricultural pro-ductivity, upon which ‘‘the success of all parts of theadministration of the kingdom’’ depended, accordingto François Quesnay (a French physician and leaderof the physiocrats). Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, adisciple of Quesnay, used physiocracy to attack mer-cantilism and its economic isolationism, which, hesaid, only ‘‘nourishes among nations a germ of hatredand wars,’’ destroying the wealth and happiness of thewhole population.

But not all agreed with the physiocrats’ view ofeconomic progress. Some eighteenth-century criticsthought that too much wealth was far from ‘‘progres-sive’’ in the sense of improvement, but instead was asymptom of the ‘‘diseases of civilization.’’ Primitivists


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such as Rousseau or physicians such as GeorgeCheyne or Thomas Trotter argued that in the earlystages of human development, ‘‘noble savages’’ hadpursued healthy lifestyles—hunting and gathering,exercising in the open air—which were very differentfrom modern, congested urban squalor. ‘‘The strengthand vigor of body are found under the coarse homelycoverings of the laboring peasant, not under the cour-tier’s embroidery,’’ wrote Rousseau.

Even though many eighteenth-century Enlight-enment thinkers aspired to write ‘‘universal histories’’of civilization that emphasized progressive ‘‘stages’’ of

social refinement, leading eventually to societies whereeven luxurious desires are catered to, others perceivedin the accumulation of wealth (associated with over-indulgence in luxury, idleness, and inequality) a dis-solution of morals. In various ways wealth did not leadto health.

Wealth, according to Adam Smith, was notmerely the same as money. Wealth required new moralresponsibilities. Smith wondered just how far pre-scriptions for individual responsibility to maintainpublic health would be implemented, believing thatcertain refinements of wealthy society made people


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less interested in the welfare of strangers. The Enlight-enment invention of the social sciences proposed newforms of collective organization to guarantee thehealth and wealth of populations. Since medical the-ory saw the health of individuals as bound to envi-ronmental concerns, civic environmentalism proved aprofitable trade, spawning a host of commercial en-terprises addressing problems of drainage, sanitation,and ventilation that were deployed in the eighteenth-century campaign to lessen disease.

In England the Enlightenment pursuit of en-vironmental health was haphazardly implementedthrough philanthropic programs, while elsewhere inEurope the drive to quantify the size and strength ofthe state in terms of the health of its citizens was givenmore—if at the same time uneven—state support,such as through the efforts of the Physici, the state-salaried physicians in Protestant northern Germany.While statistical enquiries into population trends andpatterns of epidemic disease were undertaken at leastin Italy and Spain since the sixteenth century, the En-lightenment quantifying spirit is best represented inthe state census bureaus set up earliest in Sweden(1749) and followed elsewhere, such as with France’sbureaus of statistical investigation instituted duringthe Napoleonic era. As Dorothy Porter has pointedout, the Enlightenment pursuit of medical statisticsand state accounting used the data it acquired eitherto prescribe preventative health measures to avoid ep-idemic disease or to introduce efficient state regulationof medical practice and the standardization of phar-maceutical preparations and sales, depending on whichstate is being examined.

Attitudes toward progress were often burdenedwith ambivalent feelings, oscillating between opti-mism and pessimism, with underlying uncertaintiesover humanity’s new social and moral responsibilities.For every attempt made in the Enlightenment to re-duce the natural and social world to a formulaic equa-tion or neatly catalog all knowledge, a catastropheseemed to threaten the entire enterprise. This led tofurther anxiety and a paradox of the Enlightenment.If nature was rational and law-bound, then why didearthquakes and floods occur? If government was bestplaced democratically in the hands of its citizens, thenwhy the Reign of Terror?

Every pigeonholed piece of knowledge seemedto add to a mosaic of larger questions. Was naturereally a mechanical entity that could be controlled?Was rationality the best guide to human happiness?Was the emphasis on scientific knowledge and rationalpursuits really the key to unbounded progress? Whatwere the limits to humanity’s intellectual horizon?What were the limits of enlightenment?

LIMITS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

This sketch can only point to a few of the major ‘‘longeighteenth-century’’ trends that characterize Enlight-enment pursuits. There have been many attempts topresent a working definition of the Enlightenment—from its chronology to its geography as well as itsintellectual and material representations. Some believethat the Enlightenment has not ended, that the atti-tudes of enquiry that probe the potential powers ofhuman achievement, social improvement, and politi-cal reform continue to characterize even the earlytwenty-first century—spreading throughout the world.Other scholars have been far less sanguine in the anal-ysis of the legacy of the Enlightenment. For TheodorAdorno and Max Horkheimer, writing their Dialecticof Enlightenment in wartime exile in New York, En-lightenment worship of reason gave man sovereigntynot only over nature but over humanity itself, creatinga new totalitarian regime that ultimately led to fascismand new levels of human barbarism. Still others haveargued that the Enlightenment ended with the with-drawal of confidence in the authoritarian regime ofNapoleon Bonaparte. But late-twentieth-century schol-arship also questioned the geographical limits of theEnlightenment.

The Enlightenment was obsessed with geogra-phy, at once seeking to identify others who werethought to share Enlightenment values, searching forthe boundaries of where rational, enlightened civili-zation ended and the yet unenlightened, savage worldbegan. But precisely because the Enlightenment con-cerned itself with its own propagation under the ban-ner of the ‘‘civilizing process,’’ precise boundaries cannever be located. However, debates over who best em-bodied and applied the principles of the Enlighten-ment to civil duty and social improvement began torefine the general category of ‘‘European’’ to a nar-rower, national level. The Enlightenment vocabularythat gave birth to ‘‘civilization’’ also invented Euro-centrism, which by the end of the eighteenth centuryhad turned into ‘‘enlightened nationalism.’’ This in-creasing fragmentation within Enlightenment geog-raphy has multiplied the number of sites that must beinvestigated in local context rather than by presuminga unified ‘‘European’’ Enlightenment, which is re-flected in late-twentieth-century scholarship’s attemptto analyze the Enlightenment in context and withina comparative framework (as pioneered, for example,by Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich).

Virtually all assessments of the Enlightenmenthave received their fair share of criticism, mainly be-cause any attempt to delimit or define the results orpursuits of the Enlightenment appear to impose sta-


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12PURSUING THE MOOD OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Here are a few sources that can help capture some of thespirit of the Enlightenment.

MusicWolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The Magic Flute.Franz Joseph Haydn. QuartetsChristoph Willibald Gluck. Iphigénie en Tauride

MuseumsA visit to any museum is worthwhile, as Enlightenmentpursuits often ended with the public display of all mannerof ‘‘curiosities.’’ For background, read:Yveline Cantarel-Besson, La naissance du musée du

Louvre, 2 vols (Paris, 1981)Edward Miller. That Noble Cabinet: A History of the Brit-

ish Museum (London, 1973)

Poetry and DramaIsobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain. Women’s Poetry in

the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730–1820 (Basingstoke, U.K., 1999)

Robert Marcellus Browning. German Poetry in the Age ofthe Enlightenment: From Brockes to Klopstock(University Park, Pa., 1978)

Alan Bewell. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature,Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (NewHaven, Conn., 1989)

Denis Diderot. Le fils naturel (1757, various editions andtranslations)

Carlo Goldoni. Pamela nubile (1751, a dramatization ofSamuel Richardson’s famous novel)

FictionJean-Jacques Rousseau. Émile (1762, various transla-

tions)Voltaire. Candide (1759, various translations)

Travel WritingVoltaire. Lettres anglaises et philosophiques (1734, vari-

ous translations)Denis Diderot. Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville

(1772)Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Letters Written during Her

Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1763; reprinted1790 and in various modern editions)

PaintingJohann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen

Künste (1771–1774), for contemporary art theoryand commentary on the German Enlightenment

Charles Coulston Gillispie (ed.). A Diderot Pictorial En-cyclopedia of Trades and Industry: Manufacturingand the Technical Arts. . . . (New York, 1959)

On CD-ROM, History through Art: The Enlightenment(1994)

Contemporary reactionsCyril O’Keefe. Contemporary Reactions to the Enlight-

enment (1728–1762): A Study of Three CriticalJournals, the Jesuit Journal de Trévoux, the Jansen-ist Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, and the Secular Jour-nal des savants (Geneva, Switzerland, 1974)

bility on what was, by most accounts, a dynamicmovement. Hence defining the Enlightenment is yetanother paradox scholars continue to confront.

THE ENLIGHTENMENTAND SOCIAL HISTORY

While scholars most often approach the Enlighten-ment as a chapter in European intellectual history,there are many important questions to be examinedfrom a social history standpoint. Enlightenment

thinkers came from a variety of social backgrounds.They advanced and promoted technology and science,theorized about education and social change, and ad-vocated ideas with great potential social impact. Towhat extent their ideas actually played a causal role inchanging society remains open to debate. How much,for instance, did Enlightenment thinking contributeto the motivations and tactics of the budding entre-preneurs who would soon trigger an industrial revo-lution? How did Enlightenment thinking affect gen-der, if thinkers tended to downplay women while at


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the same time expounding ideas that could inspirewomen to demand equal rights?

The links between the Enlightenment and theFrench Revolution have prompted particularly heateddebate among historians. There is no question thatEnlightenment ideas challenged the ancien régimeand served to guide the revolutionaries. But histori-ography has shifted repeatedly in evaluating the im-portance of these ideas; while at one point socialtensions—including unrest among peasants and ar-tisans—prevailed over abstract ideas in historical ac-counts of the Revolution, in the 1990s the balanceshifted back toward intellectual developments.

The Enlightenment had an impact on Europeansocieties insofar as its ideas were popularized. It wasthrough the sale of books and pamphlets or throughcoffeehouse and tavern discussions that the thought of

Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Immanuel Kant managed toreach a wider public. For the first time in Europeanhistory, some writers—such as Voltaire—were able tosupport themselves from the sale of their works. Butjust how deeply Enlightenment ideas penetrated societyand how widely they spread has sparked much debateand inspired much imaginative historical research. TheEnlightenment was most effectively popularized in west-ern Europe. Even here, though, its forces faced com-petition, not only from traditional religions, but alsofrom new faiths like Methodism in Britain and frompopular writers who attacked Enlightenment rational-ism, emphasizing a new, Romantic cultural approach.Finally, while the Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century movement, its impact continues well into nine-teenth-century social history, where it may be tracedboth in politics and in popular scientific outlook.

See also other articles in this section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adler, Ken. Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815. Princeton, N.J., 1997.

Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820: Industry, Innovation, and Workin Britain. Oxford and New York, 1994.

Carpanetto, Dino, and Giuseppe Ricuperati. Italy in the Age of Reason, 1685–1789.Translated by Caroline Higgitt. Longman History of Italy, vol. 5. London,1987.

Clark, William, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, eds. The Sciences in EnlightenedEurope. Chicago, 1999.

Crocker, Lester G. An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century FrenchThought. Baltimore, 1959.

Darnton, Robert. The Business of the Enlightenment: A Publishing History of theEncyclopédie, 1775–1800. Cambridge, Mass., 1979.

Darnton, Robert. The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. Cambridge, Mass.,1982.

Dolan, Brian. Exploring European Frontiers: British Travellers in the Age of Enlight-enment. Basingstoke, U.K., and New York, 2000.

Findlen, Paula. ‘‘Translating the New Science: Women and the Circulation ofKnowledge in Enlightenment Italy.’’ Configurations 2 (1995): 167–206.

Frängsmyr, Tore. ‘‘The Enlightenment in Sweden.’’ In The Enlightenment in Na-tional Context. Edited by Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich. Cambridge, U.K.,1981. Pages 164–175.

Gascoigne, John. Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge andPolite Culture. Cambridge, U.K., 1994.

Geras, Norman, and Robert Wokler, eds. The Enlightenment and Modernity. Ba-singstoke, U.K., 2000.


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Golinski, Jan. Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain,1760–1820. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.

Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlight-enment. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994.

Grell, Ole Peter, and Roy Porter, eds. Toleration in Enlightenment Europe. Cam-bridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.

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Century Europe. New York and Oxford, 1991.Jardine, Nicholas, J. A. Secord, and Emma Spary, eds. Cultures of Natural History.

Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.Jordanova, Ludmilla. ‘‘The Authoritarian Response.’’ In The Enlightenment and Its

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Lindemann, Mary. ‘‘The Enlightenment Encountered: The German Physicus andHis World, 1750–1820.’’ In Medicine in the Enlightenment. Edited by RoyPorter. Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga., 1995. Pages 181–197.

Oppenheim, Walter. Europe and the Enlightened Despots. London, 1990.Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800. Trans-

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Porter, Dorothy. ‘‘Enlightenment and Industrial Ideology.’’ In Health Care Provisionand Poor Relief in Enlightenment and Nineteenth Century Northern Europe.Edited by Andrew Cunningham, Ole Peter Grell, and Robert Jütte. London,2000.

Porter, Roy. Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World. Londonand New York, 2000.

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Porter, Roy. ‘‘Science, Provincial Culture, and Public Opinion in EnlightenmentEngland.’’ British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1980): 20–46.

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the enlightenment 12 · ian); aufkla¨rung (german); upplysningen (swedish; lyse means light)....

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