Enlightenment

One result of Enlightenment historiography in the past thirty years, then, has been to carve the movement into different geographic, confessional, and linguistic groupings. And even within these groupings, further fragmentation has taken place. In the original "Enlightenment" article in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Pappe explicitly declared the Enlightenment to be an elite movement. In a parenthetical digression he acknowledged that:

Side-by-side with these productions, the period witnessed the growth of a new cheap entertainment literature as well as a greater diffusion of writings in the old tradition, which aimed at the new enlarged reading public. Although popular reading habits and crowd behavior have come to fascinate some modern historians, such publications are ignored here, as they hardly contributed to the march of ideas, that is to the incivilimento due to man's creative liberty.

Indeed it is precisely the study of reading habits and crowd behavior that have fueled the redefinition of the Enlightenment in the past thirty years. In the mid-1970s Peter Burke pointed out the rediscovery of "the People," by which he meant a renewed interest in folklore, festivals, and the early Germanic and Celtic oral tradition that swept across Europe beginning in about the 1760s, spurring the Romantic movement. Working initially in the Kulturgeschichte mode of Jacob Grimm, Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, and Johan Huizinga but augmenting that totalizing method with anthropological and literary techniques, scholars such as Natalie Davis, Carlo Ginzburg, and Keith Thomas began to study the social function of myth, ritual, and behavior in early modern Europe itself.

Robert Darnton examined not just the ideas of the Enlightenment but the "business" of it as well in a publishing history of the Encyclopédie in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In The Literary Underground of the Old Regime he looked beyond the successes of Voltaire, d'Alembert, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the failure of a host of would-be philosophes who lacked the patronage, money, and access to presses enjoyed by the Encyclopedists and members of learned academies. This too in effect split the Enlightenment into two parts, high and low—or those who got published by presses on Fleet Street and the Strand versus hacks living on Grub Street who were lucky if they got published at all. Darnton showed how the world of those lesser authors functioned—their pirating of copyrighted texts, sale of pornographic and censored books and serials, and the fortune of their original satires and social critiques that never acquired the reputation of Voltaire's.

Darnton called his method the "social history of ideas" (as Peter Gay had done years before). While it lacked a grand narrative of social and intellectual development, the microhistorical approach of scholars such as Darnton was important because if the Enlightenment and French Revolution were the products of new ideas (or of old ideas newly interpreted), then the logistical process of how those ideas were conveyed to the public sphere was just as important as the content of the ideas in themselves. Which texts were circulated? What were the motives of the authors, publishers, and booksellers? Which texts were intended to be circulated but never reached the market due to silly logistical failures? To what extent were authors, The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility Over Ignorance (c. 1740–1750) by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Oil on canvas. The Age of Enlightenment began in England in the late seventeenth century and reached its pinnacle in the mid-eighteenth century. The period was characterized by a desire for reason, toleration, and social reform. NORTON SIMON COLLECTION, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY, WWW.BRIDGEMAN.CO.UK publishers, and booksellers motivated by their economic and social circumstances? That is, how business was conducted influenced what kinds of ideas were circulated in the public sphere.

Rather than taking "popular culture" to be monolithic, Roger Chartier emphasized the different uses of print by different segments of society. These segments frequently overlapped, and a single member might perform several roles depending on the context in which he or she acted. Chartier worked to abolish some of the presumptive categories such as high and low Enlightenment, philosophe and Grub Street hack, even printed text and oral tradition. Whereas the historiography of popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s used techniques of historical anthropology appropriate to understanding forms of expression and communication in preliterate societies, Chartier's cultural history focused on the production, circulation, and function of printed texts. Early modern society was thoroughly dependent on writing, even those who could not read or who grasped a text only when it was read aloud to them. In reconstructing social practice, Chartier found that advice manuals, mandates, and slogans were appropriated by the audience (or, better, plural "audiences," because he emphasized that different overlapping groups read, understood, and acted upon a given text in their own ways). A text might be creatively interpreted, its message adjusted or diverted to purposes not intended by the author or even resisted. Chartier was interested chiefly in action: the act of reading; followed by behavior inspired by the text. He was less interested in the creation of ideas than the reception of ideas once those ideas left the author's desk, or how ideas walked, as it were, around in society.

The most glaring example of how ideas walked around in eighteenth-century society was the French Revolution. Were ideas responsible for the collapse of the Old Regime? Was there a necessary and causal connection between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution? Were ideas really that effective in producing constitutional change and touching off events like the Terror? Assuming that Daniel Mornet was at least partially correct in Les origines intellectual de la Révolution Française (1933) that ideas bore at least some responsibility for the Revolution, Chartier wanted to know: How, exactly? "Is it certain that the Enlightenment must be characterized exclusively or principally as a corpus of self-contained, transparent ideas or as a set of clear and distinct propositions?" Chartier asked. "Should not the century's novelty be read elsewhere—in the multiple practices guided by an interest in utility and service that aimed at the management of spaces and populations and whose mechanisms (intellectual or institutional) imposed a profound reorganization of the systems of perception and of the order of the social world?"

In the 1990s, then, the connection between ideas and practice moved to center stage in eighteenth-century historiography. The inquiry into practices of "sociability" was assisted by the translation into English of Jürgen Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989, originally 1956). Dena Goodman, Daniel Gordon, and others explored institutions and practices of sociability in prerevolutionary France and the movement of ideas from the closed intellectual circles of salons to the active realm of political reform. Margaret Jacob explored the Enlightenment's direct relationship to "lived political experience," particularly through the window of Freemasonry, emphasizing international trends such as the republicanism described by Franco Venturi. And Daniel Gordon has edited a volume on "Postmodernism and the Enlightenment."

Given the many directions of Enlightenment research, it is no wonder James Schmidt reopened the question of the 1780s: "What is Enlightenment?" Yet even that question was limited to Protestant Germany, taken for granted (or, rather, not formulated at all) in the rest of Europe. If the 1780s had answers, the 1990s had only questions, and it is unlikely that any time soon there will be an answer as definitive as the one offered in the first Dictionary of the History of Ideas.