Clark’s Enlightenment

This is a mere note about a fascinating book rather than a review or analysis. The book is  J.C.D. Clark’s The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History, which makes a curious but in the end fairly compelling argument. You can get a sense of what Clark is up to from a passage near the end in which he summarizes a series of potential objections to his argument:

First, that ‘the Enlightenment never happened’. On the contrary, this book has shown how ‘the Enlightenment’ was a concept that was widely adopted in the twentieth century in some countries and that persisted for several decades, influencing large numbers of people in the anglophone world and beyond to the point where the existence of an objective phenomenon to which the term appropriately corresponded seemed beyond question.

Second, that ‘the Enlightenment happened but was unimportant’. On the contrary, this book has contended that, once conceptualized, the notion of ‘the Enlightenment’ was highly influential, and it has indicated how the term could be used (although with varying effectiveness) to promote a variety of causes both thematic and national.

Third, that ‘the Enlightenment happened, was important, but was a bad thing’. On the contrary, this book has asserted the historian’s obligation to refrain from normative comment on the phenomena of the past, and has suggested how refraining in this way can better illuminate the normative forces that others have used to shape the development of knowledge, or supposed knowledge, in this field.

For Clark, “the Enlightenment” definitely happened — but it happened in the 19th and 20th centuries as a scholarly concept, not in the 18th century as an intellectual movement. What happened was the retroactive bestowing by historians of a “badge of normative superiority” on a miscellaneous and heterogenous set of 18th century writers who were in point of fact constantly at odds with each other. (One of Clark’s services to scholarship here is noting points where translators have inserted the word “Enlightenment” into works where it does not in fact appear.) The best way to earn this badge was to be an enemy of religion, and almost any writer or thinker who could be described as such was conscripted into the thought-police force called “Enlightenment.”

Once this badge was pinned onto writerly lapels, there were of course other scholars who, in various polemics against the depredations of “the Enlightenment,” deemed it a badge of shame. But this was to accept the description while inverting its valence.

The most interesting questions Clark poses are these: Can we do without the concept of “Enlightenment”? Certainly not altogether, since it was used by some very famous 18th-century writers. But can it be de-centered? When it is used, can it be used in a way that escapes all these decades of “normative polemics”? Can other concepts with more explanatory power finally emerge? These are powerful questions indeed.