The Enlightenment: A Genealogy

great book

This book on the enlightenment has many questions. There is the question of if everyone had an enlightenment. Certainly Newton was not the founder. There is the theory of a “radical enlightenment.” There is discussed a consciousness raising of Hannah Arendt’s history. There is the reason as superior. There is the theory of multiple and distinct enlightenments without linear progression. There is the playwright philosophers like Diderot and Voltaire.

Rather than interpreting the Enlightenment through the anachronistic perspective of the French Revolution, or the Romantic counter enlightenment of the 19th C or even its 20th C detractors from the intellectual left and right, the author invites us to look at its origins during the French 18th C . The Enlightenment was a concerted serious endeavour to reform the intellectual, institutional and social domains; it was a quest for happiness on earth, inspired by the previous century’s scientific enterprise of Galileo and Newton and the anti scholastic principles of Bacon and Descartes in order to abolish the relevance of the supernatural and reduce fear. The text aims to reconstruct the ways French thinkers of the 18th C, envisioned their own era in terms of objectives and accomplishments, through a dialogue with the overawed pagan models of Antiquity, in turn venerating them or dismissing them. It describes how they shaped their own historical narrative through years of dispute between the supporters of the Ancients versus the Moderns. This literary quarrel helped to define and eventually disseminate the concept of Enlightenment and the so called “ l’esprit philosophique” among the literate sections of the public as well as some of the political rulers, who embraced the principles of rational institutional reform, of polite debate, of toleration. Everything was open to civilised discussion. But the “ philosophes” aimed at gently influencing, even cajoling the political elite to accept their reforming views, and were far from being the subversive radicals they were depicted later, bent on destroying the status quo. Many were close to the Authorities and most would have been horrified at the French Revolutionary upheavals.Hundreds of books have been written and will continue to be written about the Enlightenment. The closer we get to the mindset of the 18th C protagonists, situating them in their own period, and allowing them to speak in their own voices, the better we will understand their aims and endeavours, their disputes and differences, framed within their own intellectual and social universe. This book, a model of intellectual history, helps us to get a step closer to the complexity and diversity of this movement, by clearing away layers of interpretative accretions and removing the enduring myths surrounding it.