Brilliant. Thank you. In a fun debate we once had for the benefit of our second year students, my brilliant colleague Thomas Munck once told our students that 'the Enlightenment was already postmodern', meaning that there were multiple 'Enlightenments' with their different and sometimes conflicting approaches to truth, the use of reason, religion, the role of government and so on....but this did not negate the existence of the Enlightenment. It was its very essence.
Great review -- on the last part it's also worth noting that Gustave Lanson, who helped usher in the study of the Enlightenment as such in France (and who trained Daniel Mornet and Paul Hazard), did so in direct response to witnessing the Dreyfus Affair, and was seeking out a usable French past to combat antisemitism.
A very polite review but you nail it with: ". . . it is hard to imagine that any contemporary historiographical concepts would survive the sort of sharp prodding he here applies to “the Enlightenment.”" The book's argument doesn't arouse the slightest interest in me for this reason. All labels such as "Middle Ages" are constructions, often plainly post-hoc (as with "Middle Ages"). Some labels are more grounded in the period than others, but none are automatically invalid because they didn't circulate inside the period being described.
It's much more interesting to compare conceptions of the Enlightenment (e.g., Ernst Cassirer and Isaiah Berlin had entirely different conceptions) than to argue about whether there was such a thing as the Enlightenment.
It reminds me of the age-old debate about whether or not we can use the concept of genocide to describe events in the past, pre-20th century. Of course! Now the trick is to contextualise and to see what it did to the actors.
About this, I remember an interview of Raphael Lemkin himself who applied the concept to many events in the far-flung past.
In French historiography, we had this famous controversy/ debate between Porchnev and Mousnier, it all goes down to the EMIC vs. ETIC approaches.
'All labels such as "Middle Ages" are constructions, often plainly post-hoc (as with "Middle Ages"). Some labels are more grounded in the period than others, but none are automatically invalid because they didn't circulate inside the period being described.' Absolutely! The Renaissance, too...
My attention was recently drawn to Professor Bell’s review of my recent book. We share an interest in this unavoidably important subject, and I appreciate his detailed attention to my text. I hope we have an opportunity to explore these questions at appropriate length elsewhere. Meanwhile, may I respond to a few of the points he raises?
1. He begins with Thatcherism; but how is this relevant? He contends that the book is ‘driven by a deeply conservative ideological agenda’; but what agenda? Thatcherism may be briefly described as Hayekian radical individualism, yet in the first edition of my English Society I explored wholly different eighteenth-century debates on monarchy, aristocracy and church both with respect to social history and to the history of political thought. Coincidence in time, the 1980s, is not the same as causation. Certainly, my work was resisted in that decade; but I suggest the chief reason was that I was developing a critique of what is now (but seldom then) termed modernism. That historical scenario had been framed not least on the territory of an older historiography of eighteenth-century England; it was championed by some noted senior figures in Cambridge, where I then was; and those figures were resentful, even angry, when they found a junior historian challenging the premises of their historiographical orthodoxy. Since then, my interests have grown to address perhaps the last, certainly now the most powerful, of the surviving categories of modernism, ‘the Enlightenment’.
2. Professor Bell contends that ‘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.’ Certainly, some historians sometimes do this, but many other scholars in the history of ideas, to whom I record my indebtedness, reject this practice on methodological grounds that are now well known. If historians are on the contrary to be free to put words into the mouths of the dead, it is hard to see exactly what the claims of historiography to be an academic discipline are.
3. He charges me with uneven coverage. He is an historian primarily of France, and I believe most of his published work addresses that country. I, as an historian primarily of England, give space to English history. But I also have much to say on Scotland, France, Germany and the present-day United States. Which of us has covered the wider territory?
4. Professor Bell reminds us that he has published two articles on ‘a wide range of cultural practices that emerged in the eighteenth century’. I addressed many such practices in the first chapter of the book. Far from denying them I prominently accepted them, but developed reinterpretations.
5. He rightly records that I attach importance to the work of a host of Jewish émigré scholars, fleeing Nazi persecution (and also to others, like Isaiah Berlin and Theodore Besterman, who, while not themselves émigrés, were inevitably touched by the Holocaust). I must make clear that I am an English philosemite; that I admire these remarkable individuals; and that I write in plain English about Nazi persecution. I suggest that it was understandable that such individuals should devise a term that acted as shorthand for all good things antithetical to Nazism. I do however question whether that experience of persecution gave this new coinage any special historiographical authority.
Once we are clear on these points, I trust that Professor Bell and I can move on in our explorations of eighteenth-century intellectual and social history. I look forward to our first meeting, and meanwhile hold out to him the hand of friendship.
Dear Professor Clark. Thank you very much indeed for your courteous and thoughtful reply to my review of your book. There is much to discuss here, and I hope to be able to do so in person one day, or more formally in print if the occasion arises. I will certainly take your points under consideration. I only have one small correction to make to your comment. While it is true that my earlier work focused entirely on France, my third book covered much of Europe with particular attention to Spain, and my fourth book had chapters on the United States, Haiti and Venezuela, so we are both ambitious to cover wide territories. Sincerely, David Bell.
Dear Professor Bell, I apologise for not having your third and fourth books to hand; I stand corrected, and applaud your geographical range. The societies you mention however raise in my mind the question of reception: was the influence of the German concept of 'the Enlightenment' in inverse proportion to distance from Germany? I answer: not always (the USA is the leading exception), so that there is no iron law at work. But the examples of Africa, the Middle East (Israel being the outstanding exception), India, China and Japan all suggest that 'the Enlightenment' is often more culturally specific than its advocates might wish, French universalism notwithstanding. Sincerely, Jonathan Clark
Brilliant. Thank you. In a fun debate we once had for the benefit of our second year students, my brilliant colleague Thomas Munck once told our students that 'the Enlightenment was already postmodern', meaning that there were multiple 'Enlightenments' with their different and sometimes conflicting approaches to truth, the use of reason, religion, the role of government and so on....but this did not negate the existence of the Enlightenment. It was its very essence.
Thanks so much!
Great review -- on the last part it's also worth noting that Gustave Lanson, who helped usher in the study of the Enlightenment as such in France (and who trained Daniel Mornet and Paul Hazard), did so in direct response to witnessing the Dreyfus Affair, and was seeking out a usable French past to combat antisemitism.
thanks! Excellent point.
A very polite review but you nail it with: ". . . it is hard to imagine that any contemporary historiographical concepts would survive the sort of sharp prodding he here applies to “the Enlightenment.”" The book's argument doesn't arouse the slightest interest in me for this reason. All labels such as "Middle Ages" are constructions, often plainly post-hoc (as with "Middle Ages"). Some labels are more grounded in the period than others, but none are automatically invalid because they didn't circulate inside the period being described.
It's much more interesting to compare conceptions of the Enlightenment (e.g., Ernst Cassirer and Isaiah Berlin had entirely different conceptions) than to argue about whether there was such a thing as the Enlightenment.
It reminds me of the age-old debate about whether or not we can use the concept of genocide to describe events in the past, pre-20th century. Of course! Now the trick is to contextualise and to see what it did to the actors.
About this, I remember an interview of Raphael Lemkin himself who applied the concept to many events in the far-flung past.
In French historiography, we had this famous controversy/ debate between Porchnev and Mousnier, it all goes down to the EMIC vs. ETIC approaches.
Thanks!!
'All labels such as "Middle Ages" are constructions, often plainly post-hoc (as with "Middle Ages"). Some labels are more grounded in the period than others, but none are automatically invalid because they didn't circulate inside the period being described.' Absolutely! The Renaissance, too...
My attention was recently drawn to Professor Bell’s review of my recent book. We share an interest in this unavoidably important subject, and I appreciate his detailed attention to my text. I hope we have an opportunity to explore these questions at appropriate length elsewhere. Meanwhile, may I respond to a few of the points he raises?
1. He begins with Thatcherism; but how is this relevant? He contends that the book is ‘driven by a deeply conservative ideological agenda’; but what agenda? Thatcherism may be briefly described as Hayekian radical individualism, yet in the first edition of my English Society I explored wholly different eighteenth-century debates on monarchy, aristocracy and church both with respect to social history and to the history of political thought. Coincidence in time, the 1980s, is not the same as causation. Certainly, my work was resisted in that decade; but I suggest the chief reason was that I was developing a critique of what is now (but seldom then) termed modernism. That historical scenario had been framed not least on the territory of an older historiography of eighteenth-century England; it was championed by some noted senior figures in Cambridge, where I then was; and those figures were resentful, even angry, when they found a junior historian challenging the premises of their historiographical orthodoxy. Since then, my interests have grown to address perhaps the last, certainly now the most powerful, of the surviving categories of modernism, ‘the Enlightenment’.
2. Professor Bell contends that ‘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.’ Certainly, some historians sometimes do this, but many other scholars in the history of ideas, to whom I record my indebtedness, reject this practice on methodological grounds that are now well known. If historians are on the contrary to be free to put words into the mouths of the dead, it is hard to see exactly what the claims of historiography to be an academic discipline are.
3. He charges me with uneven coverage. He is an historian primarily of France, and I believe most of his published work addresses that country. I, as an historian primarily of England, give space to English history. But I also have much to say on Scotland, France, Germany and the present-day United States. Which of us has covered the wider territory?
4. Professor Bell reminds us that he has published two articles on ‘a wide range of cultural practices that emerged in the eighteenth century’. I addressed many such practices in the first chapter of the book. Far from denying them I prominently accepted them, but developed reinterpretations.
5. He rightly records that I attach importance to the work of a host of Jewish émigré scholars, fleeing Nazi persecution (and also to others, like Isaiah Berlin and Theodore Besterman, who, while not themselves émigrés, were inevitably touched by the Holocaust). I must make clear that I am an English philosemite; that I admire these remarkable individuals; and that I write in plain English about Nazi persecution. I suggest that it was understandable that such individuals should devise a term that acted as shorthand for all good things antithetical to Nazism. I do however question whether that experience of persecution gave this new coinage any special historiographical authority.
Once we are clear on these points, I trust that Professor Bell and I can move on in our explorations of eighteenth-century intellectual and social history. I look forward to our first meeting, and meanwhile hold out to him the hand of friendship.
Jonathan Clark
Dear Professor Clark. Thank you very much indeed for your courteous and thoughtful reply to my review of your book. There is much to discuss here, and I hope to be able to do so in person one day, or more formally in print if the occasion arises. I will certainly take your points under consideration. I only have one small correction to make to your comment. While it is true that my earlier work focused entirely on France, my third book covered much of Europe with particular attention to Spain, and my fourth book had chapters on the United States, Haiti and Venezuela, so we are both ambitious to cover wide territories. Sincerely, David Bell.
Dear Professor Bell, I apologise for not having your third and fourth books to hand; I stand corrected, and applaud your geographical range. The societies you mention however raise in my mind the question of reception: was the influence of the German concept of 'the Enlightenment' in inverse proportion to distance from Germany? I answer: not always (the USA is the leading exception), so that there is no iron law at work. But the examples of Africa, the Middle East (Israel being the outstanding exception), India, China and Japan all suggest that 'the Enlightenment' is often more culturally specific than its advocates might wish, French universalism notwithstanding. Sincerely, Jonathan Clark
George Santayana, "Skepticism and Animal Faith" (1923)
Ch.1 "THERE IS NO FIRST PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM"
A philosopher is compelled to follow the maxim of
epic poets and to plunge in medias res. The origin
of things, if things have an origin, cannot be revealed
to me, if revealed at all, until I have travelled very
far from it, and many revolutions of the sun must
precede my first dawn. The light as it appears hides
the candle. Perhaps there is no source of things at
all, no simpler form from which they are evolved, but
only an endless succession of different complexities.
In that case nothing would be lost by joining the
procession wherever one happens to come upon it,
and following it as long as one's legs hold out. Every
one might still observe a typical bit of it ; he would
not have understood anything better if he had seen
more things ; he would only have had more to explain.
The very notion of understanding or explaining any
thing would then be absurd ; yet this notion is drawn
from a current presumption or experience to the effect
that in some directions at least things do grow out of
simpler things : bread can be baked, and dough and
fire and an oven are conjoined in baking it. Such an
episode is enough to establish the notion of origins and
explanations, without at all implying that the dough
and the hot oven are themselves primary facts. A
philosopher may accordingly perfectly well undertake
to find episodes of evolution in the world : parents
with children, storms with shipwrecks, passions with
tragedies. If he begins in the middle he will still begin
at the beginning of something, and perhaps as much
at the beginning of things as he could possibly begin.
On the other hand, this whole supposition may be
wrong. Things may have had some simpler origin,
or may contain simpler elements. In that case it will
be incumbent on the philosopher to prove this fact ;
that is, to find in the complex present objects
evidence of their composition out of simples. But
in this proof also he would be beginning in the middle ;
and he would reach origins or elements only at the
end of his analysis.