Enlightenment

In 1973, then, we see the Enlightenment divided in two parts: a western European rationalist Enlightenment and a negatively defined central European antirational Counter-Enlightenment. In fact defining the Enlightenment, even in 1973, was not as easy as creating a binary opposition. Beginning in the 1960s Franco Venturi also divided Continental Europe into two distinct political traditions, with multiethnic empires in central and eastern Europe and "great states" in western Europe. He emphasized concurrent developments in republican Mediterranean Europe (Italy, Iberia, France) and monarchical eastern Europe, but he excluded England from the equation, saying that "in England the rhythm was different." Venturi defined the Enlightenment by the presence or absence of philosophes, self-appointed secular intellectuals who critiqued society and presented themselves as its guides toward modernity and reform. Although they were present in Scotland in the mid-eighteenth century, intellectuals of the stature of Voltaire, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Denis Diderot, and so on did not emerge in England until the 1780s and 1790s with Thomas Paine, Richard Price, William Godwin, and Jeremy Bentham. Venturi acknowledged a problem in his definition given the Englishness of Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), whom he considered "a giant of the Enlightenment": either Gibbon was no philosophe or he was a lonely figure in England in the 1760s and 1770s.

In fact the French philosophes were great admirers of the English in the 1760s, wrote Roy Porter in The Enlightenment in National Context (1981): "Certainly England produced no Critique of Pure Reason. But why should systematic theorizing be the touchstone of Enlightenment?" Voltaire noted that the English were "the only people upon the earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of Kings by resisting them." That resistance was galvanized in institutions of sociability—gentlemen's clubs, Masonic lodges, colleges, coffee houses—where private individuals might gather in public discourse to discuss and debate matters of law, politics, religion, and culture. Gibbon might have been a lonely giant among enlightened Lilliputians, but E. P. Thompson pointed to scores of minor "intellectual enclaves" throughout the United Kingdom where individuals exercised their rational and critical faculties.

The very title of Porter and Teich's volume, The Enlightenment in National Context, indicates the direction of Enlightenment historiography in the late 1970s and 1980s. That volume still took the Enlightenment to be monolithic ("a cultural movement," p. xi) and headed in a specific direction, although the constituent parts of that movement expressed enlightened values in terms of their indigenous and traditional concerns. Thirteen separate national expressions of the Enlightenment were identified by the contributors, and the editors acknowledged that even that number was not adequate.

Should the Swiss Enlightenment have been considered a unit, or were there distinct traditions in the French and German cantons? Contemporaries of the eighteenth century expressly believed the latter. Germany was divided into two Enlightenments, Catholic and Protestant, but among the Protestant at least three distinct movements can be identified based on divisions within German Lutheranism: an Orthodox Lutheran Enlightenment centered at Leipzig and Dresden in Saxony; a Pietist Enlightenment centered at Berlin and Halle, where a university was founded in 1690 specifically as a platform for an intellectual movement that saw itself as separate from the Orthodox; and a post-Pietist Enlightenment centered at Göttingen, which defined itself in opposition to both Saxony and the Brandenburg of Frederick the Great. Were the Württemberg Protestants allied with the Hanoverians? Can the Danish and Swedish Lutherans be taken as a unit, and how should their relationships with the Germans be defined? The possibilities for a rigorous classification of cultural movements in the eighteenth century boggle the mind.

The attempt to rescue the Gulliverian Gibbon continues into the twenty-first century. In the first installment of a study of Gibbon that is well on its way toward rivaling the length of Gibbon's own Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, J. G. A. Pocock invented an Enlightenment in which Gibbon did participate. Pocock started by pluralizing Enlightenments, declaring it "a premise of this book that we can no longer write satisfactorily of 'The Enlightenment' as a unified and universal intellectual movement" (The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1999, p. 12; notice the plural in the title). Pocock accepted Venturi's thesis that there was no Enlightenment in England, and he showed that Gibbon did not participate in a separate French Enlightenment either. Instead he placed Gibbon in an "Arminian Enlightenment," referring to the heretical movement within Calvinism and defining an area that extended from Lake Geneva down the Rhine to the Netherlands and across the Channel to Oxford. Pocock presented the Arminian Enlightenment as a unit that unified intellectuals from a variety of backgrounds, and by his participation in the movement, Gibbon could move easily across national, linguistic, and regional boundaries and still find intellectual continuity.

For Pocock this solution had the advantage of retaining "the philosophes and their enterprises, Venturi's settecento riformatore and perhaps even 'the Enlightenment Project,' as cosmopolitan and Europe-wide phenomena, while denying them the privilege of defining 'Enlightenment,' or 'Europe,' by formulae from which either Gibbon or England must be excluded" (p. 295). On the other hand, one wonders whether a series of regional Enlightenments that do not even conform to national or linguistic boundaries, each presented as more or less autonomous from the others, dooms the Enlightenment to an increasingly fractured existence and perhaps renders the rubric altogether useless.