The Virtual Stoa

Leon Blum, French socialist and prime minister during the period of the Popular Front, and immediately after the war; born 9 April 1872, died 30 March 1950.

Here’s Enkidu, engaged in mortal combat with a stripy green catnip mouse:

Here’s Enkidu, again:

And here’s Andromache:

People are suddenly arguing about the Enlightenment. It’s terribly exciting: Madeleine Bunting posted here, leading to responses here, here, here and here, with, no doubt, more to come. But how many people have a good idea as to what they are talking about?

In the posts that follow (read down: I’ve posted them in reverse order), I ask a few standard questions about the Enlightenment. I think it’s worth having answers to questions like these — otherwise you just end up in a position where you can cheerlead for “the Enlightenment” (the rule of law! democracy! science!) or just slag it off for the bad things you vaguely associate with it somewhere along the way (racism! sexism! Revolutionary Terror!) without letting anything as complicated as history or evidence get in the way of your arguments. And that’d be a shame.

So, here we go…

When do you think the Enlightenment happened?

Even those contemporary historians who are happy to talk of a single “Enlightenment” disagree about what the key period we’re talking about actually is. For Jonathan Israel (Radical Enlightenment), it’s the late C17th and early C18th. As he writes, “even before Voltaire came to be widely known, in the 1740s, the real business was already over” [p.7]. Is he right, or not?

Someone who disagrees is John Robertson who has recently published his book on The Case for the Enlightenment” Scotland and Naples, 1680-1760, which restates the case for a “traditional” dating of Enlightenment from the 1740s to the 1780s, replying to Israel with a claim that all that was over by the 1740s “was the radical assault on the foundations of the Christian religion” and “it was over because the authorities, Protestant as well as Catholic, had effectively suppressed it”.

Where do you think it happened?

For a long time, when people wrote of the Enlightenment, they were thinking about France in general, Paris in particular, and - even more particularly - the small group of people clustered around the Encyclop�die of Diderot and d’Alembert. Lots of people want to make “Enlightenment” a broader category than that, but how broad should it go, in geographical terms? Does it include Eastern Europe (apart, perhaps, from K�nigsberg)? Does it make much sense to talk of England as being an “Enlightened” country in the eighteenth century, and, if so, in what respects? And there’s a social geography as well as a spatial one: to what extent was “Enlightenment” an elite intellectual movement, and to what extent was it something ordinary men and women could participate in?

Putting the two previous questions together: was there one Enlightenment, or several?

As we make “Enlightenment” include more than just Paris, we can still ask whether Paris remains a privileged centre or not? Are you “Enlightened” insofar as you are reading the same books as the people in Paris and arguing about them in a language they would understand, or are there alternative ways of being “Enlightened” in the eighteenth century that bypass Paris altogether?

If you talk about the “Scottish Enlightenment”, for example, as people in the last fifty years have quite often done, is this in order to distinguish it from the “French Enlightenment” or the “German Enlightenment” or the “Neapolitan Enlightenment”, or is it to indicate that Scotland was participating in a much broader set of international developments?

I don’t know the history of the historiography of the Enlightenment especially well, but my sense is that the idea that there was a unitary pan-European Enlightenment only goes back to the time of the Second World War — by way of criticism in Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and by way of celebration in post-war scholarship (a tradition that culminates in Peter Gay’s two volumes on The Enlightenment in 1966).

And if you do think there was only one, or if you think there was more than one Enlightenment, ask yourself whether you think the answer to the question matters much. Is it important to you that the Enlightenment is a unitary phenomenon, or not, and, if so, why?

Whatever we think about “the Enlightenment”, does it matter what people at the time thought about whatever it was they were doing, or not? To what extent should we be investigating the eighteenth-century language of Enlightenment (les lumières, Aufklärung, etc.), in order to find out what it was, or otherwise trying to find out what Smith or Diderot or Voltaire or Kant thought they were doing when they were writing the books they were writing? To what extent should we be nervous about projecting onto these people stories about an Enlightenment that they might not themselves have recognised?

(This is especially important for anyone who thinks that the Enlightenment has something to do with democracy, as many of the people who figure at the centre of many of the narratives about Enlightenment were strongly anti-democratic.)

Do you think the idea of the “Counter-Enlightenment” is a useful category or not, either intellectually or historiographically?

Isaiah Berlin and some others have tried to draw a distinction between the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, etc.) and the Counter-Enlightenment (definitely Herder, sometimes Rousseau, sometimes Vico, sometimes Burke, and so on). Does this distinction illuminate more than it misleads?

In particular, how should we understand Rousseau in relation to the Enlightenment? Is he a figure embedded right at its heart, or is he its sharpest critic? How do our understandings of “the Enlightenment” change according to the choices we make in answering this question?

What do you take the relevant difference between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries to be, such that it makes sense to call one period “Enlightened” and the other not? What is it that makes the eighteenth-century world of Hume, Smith, Kant, Voltaire and Rousseau distinct from the seventeenth-century world of Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Newton, Locke and Bayle? Or do you think the term “Enlightenment” ought to be stretched to cover pretty much all of modern science and philosophy (in which case, the more it’s stretched, the less it refers to anything terribly precisely any more)?

Is it important that we call whatever it is we’re talking about “the Enlightenment”? Why not use the older language — which, unlike “Enlightenment”, really was very widely used at the time — of “the Republic of Letters” instead? Or use some other term altogether?

What do you think happened to the Enlightenment?

Do the French and American Revolutions somehow represent its climax - or its betrayal? In France, was Si�y�s an Enlightened architect of modern politics, or someone who turned genuinely Enlightened political theory on its head? What’s the relationship between the nineteenth-century politics of nation-states and democratisation and what happened in the eighteenth century? Is there much connection between the social philosophies of the eighteenth century and those of the nineteenth (in Hegel, Marx and Weber, say), or not? And what, if anything, has the Enlightenment got to do with the political distinction between Left and Right?

That’s probably enough for now. And finally, out of pure curiosity, can people tell me what their favourite piece of Enlightenment literature is, and, if you feel so inclined, why.

Enkidu has found a way of getting up onto the roofs of the houses in Victor Street. Fortunately for my nerves, he has also found a way of getting back down off them. Here he is, not on a roof:

Harold Laski, author of The Grammar of Politics and other more or less unjustly neglected books; briefly mentioned in the recent film Good Night and Good Luck, somewhat to my surprise; born in Manchester, 30 June 1893, died in London, 24 March 1950.

C. Wright Mills, sociologist, author of The Power Elite and other good books; born Waco, Texas, 26 August 1916, died Nyack, New York, 20 March 1962.

If, like me, you can’t ever visit a friend’s home without finding yourself involuntarily making sideways glances at the contents of the bookshelves, then you’ve probably already got an account over at LibraryThing. I think it’s a tremendous site. (I’ve probably said that before.)

Anyway: the main point of this post is to congratulate the LibraryThing people on the occasion of the cataloguing of the two-millionth book (only 0.1% of which were catalogued by me). Good stuff.

Since people keep asking me about this… The adverts for the Manchester Guardian that appear below are real, and not parodies, and have been transcribed from the back covers of four issues of Encounter from 1954.

In blogposts here and here, right-wing hack Stephen Pollard today criticises the Guardian for not removing comments from its new blogsite that it said it was going to remove.

Before he feels too smug, Pollard might like to look back at those occasions when he has made similar claims that he has removed material from his own site (here and here) and has himself failed to, um, remove the relevant material from the site (which is still here and here).

Oh, and if, as Pollard thinks, it’s OK to mock the rather hapless Neil Clark for failing to follow up on his promises to be critical of Oliver Kamm’s recent writing, then it’s probably also OK to mock the rather hapless Pollard for his failure to follow up on his own stated desire to return to the matter of Channel Four’s donation to Interpal.

There are relevant remarks, incidentally, about both flogging dead horses and about people who lack a certain sense of irony at the bottom of one of the posts linked to above.

Today’s the 30th anniversary of my first recorded political intervention. Harold Wilson resigned as Prime Minister, and went on telly to tell the nation what he’d done. I was watching children’s TV at the time - aged three - and wasn’t happy with this interruption in the usual programming. “What’s Mr Wilkins doing?”, I asked, annoyed, prompting my mother’s first and, I think, only ever telephone call of complaint to the BBC switchboard.

Revisionist historians will probably now say that Mr Wilson didn’t interrupt Playschool, or something, but that’s how the story has been passed down to me. I don’t remember it myself.

It’s a while since we had one of these, so here’s a recent image of Andromache, who continues to inspire and delight:

Karl Marx, born 5 May 1818, died 14 March 1883.

(The link contains the text of Engels’ graveside oration.)

Mischievous Constructions, over here.

My friend Dave Renton has posted the text of a talk he’s given recently on the problems of defining fascism over on his increasingly-sort-of-blog-like website. It’s an interesting piece: Dave published a short book on theories of fascism a few years ago (which I reviewed here), and in this talk he takes a long look back at the argument he made in that book, as well as commenting on two excellent, more recent books on fascism, Michael Mann’s Fascists and Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism.

All of which reminds me that I think I got half-way through both Mann and Paxton, and then stopped, and I must return to both before too long. I was enjoying both of them enormously (insofar as one enjoys books about fascism).

Unfortunately too many people take the irony of this Thurberish phrase too literally. They allow their daily newspaper to think for them. And their minds become limp from lack of exercise. A change to the Manchester Guardian soon cures this mental laziness.

Handicapped - if that is the word! - by having no ’strips’, no gossip writers, no sensations, no scandals or spicy revelations - the Manchester Guardian relies entirely upon vivid writing and honest reporting. The result is a daily newspaper which is curiously stimulating. To read the Manchester Guardian every day is a delight to the healthy mind.