The Enlightenment That Wasn't

NDLR: I wasn’t originally intending to review J.C.D. Clark’s book The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History (Oxford University Press, 2024). But I read it at the end of last week, started writing down notes to myself, and those notes morphed into a review. So here it is.

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Forty years ago, J.C.D. Clark burst upon the scene as the enfant terrible of early modern English history. It was the heyday of Thatcherism, and just as the Tory Prime Minister was taking aim at well-established British political and social structures, so Clark and a few like-minded conservative colleagues did the same with historiographical ones. At the time, the field was dominated by formidable left-wing scholars—above all, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Christoher Hill—who interpreted early modern English history as a story of social conflict. In their view, this conflict had led to revolution in the seventeenth century and come close to doing the same in the early nineteenth, although in both cases the old order had (unfortunately, in their view) reestablished itself. Clark, in his provocative studies Revolution and Rebellion and English Society, 1688-1832, would have none of it—and was equally critical of the older “Whig” history that cast the period as one of steady progress towards democracy. He insisted that the principal framework of English history, right up to the first Reform Act, was religion, and religious conflict. He failed to win many converts but started a series of interesting controversies.

Since the 1980’s, Clark has remained as provocative as ever, and admirably prolific. He has extended his arguments to the American Revolution and to the rest of the British Isles (The Language of Liberty and from Restoration to Reform), published hefty studies of Samuel Johnson and Thomas Paine, and issued a splenetic attack on “presentism” in history (Our Shadowed Present), while also making an unlikely move from Oxbridge to the University of Kansas.

His newest book seems to move in a different direction: to the Enlightenment—but not exactly. Was the Enlightenment a single movement, or many different ones, Clark asks, recalling one of the major debates on the subject in the past few decades. His answer? “Neither.” “The Enlightenment,” he claims, never actually existed, at least in the eighteenth century. The phrase, he argues, properly denotes only an ideological concept retrospectively applied to a wide variety of intellectual works to give them a spurious unity, and which served as a rallying cry for various twentieth-century reform movements. The book is enormously erudite, forcefully argued throughout, ambitious, engaging, but also uneven—and not, in the end, convincing, at least to me. It is also driven by a deeply conservative ideological agenda.

It is well-known that the concept of “the Enlightenment,” with the definite article, postdates the thing it purportedly describes. It was not until the 1820’s that Hegel applied the label “die Aufklärung” to a historical period, and several decades more until German historians of philosophy began to use the phrase commonly in their work. In French and English, “les Lumières” and “the Enlightenment,” with the definite article, did not enter common currency until the twentieth century. And it is only since World War II that Enlightenment studies became a recognized academic cottage industry, and that cultural critics started identifying “the Enlightenment” as the principal source of “modernity”—whether for good or ill (more often for ill).

Several notable historians have investigated the process by which observers came to believe that a coherent intellectual movement aimed at reforming or even overthrowing the existing social order came into being in the eighteenth century. In 1989, for example, in his Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, Roger Chartier showed how the French Revolutionaries retrospectively devised a canon of intellectual progenitors for themselves, thereby cleverly flipping a historical commonplace on its head: the French Revolution brought about the Enlightenment. Twelve years later, Darrin M. McMahon argued, in Enemies of the Enlightenment, that it was conservative Catholic defenders of the French Old Regime who first perceived a coherent intellectual movement in what we now call the Enlightenment (full disclosure: I directed the dissertation on which the book was based). Clark praises Chartier, but only mentions McMahon in passing.

Clark shows in more detail than any previous scholar that while metaphors of “light” and “enlightenment” (small e, no capital letter), were pervasive in the eighteenth century, the concept of “the Enlightenment” was absent. But does the absence of a concept denote the absence of a thing? Historians routinely devise concepts to classify and explain past phenomena. If we limited ourselves exclusively to the concepts used by our subjects, our profession would be entirely unable to function.

The more important question, as Clark himself recognizes, is whether sufficient evidence exists for grouping together a set of historical phenomena under a single label such as “the Enlightenment.” Did there exist sufficient commonalities between particular persons, ideas, or practices to justify linking them in ways not recognized, or only partially recognized, at the time?

It is in examining this question that the book turns uneven. Although one might expect a scholar weighing evidence for the existence of “the Enlightenment” to range across Europe and its overseas possessions, and to devote considerable attention to France, Clark again and again falls back on the subject he knows best: eighteenth-century Britain. By far the longest chapter in the book (98 pages!) has the title “Did Anglophone Philosophers Design ‘the Enlightenment?” and focuses on John Locke, David Hume and Mary Wollstonecraft. Clark answers his question, of course, in the negative, again and again rejecting the association of these figures with supposed innovations of “the Enlightenment”: “in Locke’s lifetime there were no universal human rights, and Locke did not invent them”; “in Hume’s lifetime there was no science of man, and Hume did not invent one”; etc. A subsequent chapter on “leading reformers in the Age of Revolution” again focuses almost entirely on Britain. Clark includes very little on eighteenth-century Germany, and less on Italy. And while he has many pages on David Hume, other figures commonly associated with a Scottish Enlightenment, such as Adam Smith, receive very short shrift.

When he turns, quite concisely, to France, Clark quotes a number of famous statements by thinkers who perceived their age as qualitatively different from anything that had preceded it, thanks to the advance of “philosophy.” D’Alembert, for instance: “The middle of the century, in which we live, appears destined to form an era, not only in the history of the human mind, by the revolution which seems to be preparing itself in our opinions, but also in the history of states and empires.” Or Diderot: “As philosophy today advances with giant strides; as it brings order to all the subjects it embraces; as it sets the predominant fashion under which the yoke of authority and precedent comes to be shaken and to yield to the laws of reason, scarcely one work of dogma survives for which wholehearted approval is felt.” Clark also cites many eighteenth-century figures generalizing about the French philosophes as a group, although generally in a disparaging way—for instance, Edward Gibbon commenting on “the intolerant zeal of the philosophers and Encyclopaedists.” He does not cite Voltaire’s famous letter to d’Alembert from 1761: “O my philosophes! You need to march in close order like a Macedonian phalanx. The true philosophers need to form a confraternity like the Freemasons—to come together, to support each other, to pledge fidelity to the confraternity itself.”

In a 2010 book that Clark cites but quickly dismisses, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy, Dan Edelstein argued for the importance of the new sense of historical time that took hold among European intellectual figures in the eighteenth century—in particular their view that their own age marked a break with and advance beyond what had preceded it. This new “narrative,” Edelstein proposed, “gave members of the educated elite a new kind of self-awareness,” and served as a uniting thread for “the loose collection of enlightened texts, institutions, debates, individuals, and reforms that appeared in eighteenth-century Europe.” Meanwhile, in two recent articles, (see here and here) I myself summarized work on a wide range of new cultural practices that emerged in the eighteenth century, and that drastically altered the way in which ideas were disseminated and debated. The historian Margaret Jacob provided a panoramic view of them in her 2019 book The Secular Enlightenment. Are these changes evidence of a coherent, united ideological movement, or of an “Enlightenment Project” (a phrase coined by Alasdair MacIntyre in 1981)? Very few historians of the eighteenth century would say so. But are they sufficiently connected to justify the invocation of a loose but useful umbrella concept? Here, most historians would say yes.

Clark does not, but it is hard to imagine that any contemporary historiographical concepts would survive the sort of sharp prodding he here applies to “the Enlightenment.” Nearly all historiographical concepts are, by their nature, nebulous and messy. There are always exceptions. There are always contradictions. The crooked timber of humanity rarely if ever fits into neat geometrical boxes. In a book I am currently working on, I hope to make the case that there did, indeed, exist a phenomenon sufficiently coherent to deserve the overall name of “the Enlightenment,” and to set it within the context of eighteenth-century social and economic change.

Clark’s attempt to explode the concept remains very useful—a reminder to historians of the subject to avoid facile, weakly-supported generalizations. But it is also worth keeping in mind that his conclusions follow rather too neatly from his strong ideological agenda. That agenda is to sever any sort of substantial connection between a series of twentieth-century reform movements and an Enlightenment claimed for them as an origin point. By extension, he also wants to sever connections between these movements and the revolutions supposedly born out of this Enlightenment, and the modern regimes that emerged from the revolutions. Put plainly, do contemporary movements for “religious equality,” “racial equality,” and “sexual equality” (his wording) follow naturally from the eighteenth-century milieus out of which modern democratic regimes were born? Can they claim this sort of legitimacy? Clark would say no, and it is his ambition to prove this point that drives his work of deconstruction. And the point has direct political relevance—for instance to the continuing debates in the United States about whether we are a “Christian nation,” or a nation founded by deists and agnostics who desired a sharp separation of church and state.

There is one further thing about Clark’s book worth noting. In putting his political cards on the table in his chapter on the three campaigns for equality, Clark calls attention—quite correctly—to a fact often danced around by scholarship on the concept of “the Enlightenment”: a high proportion of the most prominent contemporary scholars associated in one way or another with the concept have been Jewish. Ernst Cassirer, Peter Gay, Robert Wokler, Theodore Besterman, Isaiah Berlin, George Mosse, Jacob Talmon: in each case Clark takes care to identify them as Jewish, and to note their continental European birthplaces (e.g. “Robert Wokler [1942–2006] became one of Britain’s most active campaigners for the idea of a unified Enlightenment. He was born to refugee Polish and Hungarian Jewish parents surnamed Wochiler in France in 1942”). Clark might have also included Hannah Arendt, Judith Skhlar, and Jonathan Israel in his pantheon of noted Jewish scholars interested in the Enlightenment. There is no particular mystery here. These scholars mostly associated eighteenth-century calls for religious toleration, quite rightly, with the reforms that freed European Jews from ghettoes and persecution and gave them citizenship, equal rights, and full membership in their societies. These scholars also tended to identify the Nazism from which so many of them had fled, and which slaughtered so many of their relatives, as the absolute negation of the principles on which modern democracies were founded, and which they associated with the Enlightenment.

I wish Clark had devoted more substantial attention to this “Jewish question.” If he had done so, he might have seen that there is another way to interpret what he clearly views as these scholars’ perhaps understandable but still misguided desire to help invent an eighteenth-century phenomenon that did not, in his view, ever exist. He might have seen that their experience of very different regimes and societies, and of extreme persecution, and their status as immigrant strangers in the strange lands of mid-twentieth century Britain and America, might have given them insight into these countries’ histories that natives had mostly missed. But this is not a perspective which J.C.D. Clark, a firm High Tory Brexiteer, was likely to adopt.