Econlib

The Library

Other Sites

 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow The Protean Enlightenment - Literature of Liberty, Spring 1982, vol. 5, No. 1

Return to Title Page for Literature of Liberty, Spring 1982, vol. 5, No. 1

Search this Title:

Also in the Library:

Subject Area: Political Theory

The Protean Enlightenment - Leonard P. Liggio, Literature of Liberty, Spring 1982, vol. 5, No. 1 [1982]

Edition used:

Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.

Part of: Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, 20 vols. 19781-982

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


The Protean Enlightenment

Roy Porter

  • Lecturer at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine; Co-editor of The Dictionary of the History of Science

“Reading History: The Enlightenment.” History Today 33 (February 1982): 51–52.

In a brief bibliographical overview of interpretations of the Enlightenment, the author stresses that period's diverse and complex nature: “The Enlightenment now looks more Protean but the result has been all gain. The cartoon-character philosophe pursuing Reason is a travesty now consigned to the rubbish bin: in reality the competing claims of nature and culture, reason and feeling, individual and society, order and change demanded, and got, the engaged dialogue of impassioned minds.”

The nineteenth-century Romantic influence scornfully dismissed the Age of Reason and led to Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932). Twentieth-century scholars took the Enlightenment's convictions more seriously but offered contrasting interpretations. Paul Hazard, in his The European Mind, 1680–1715 and European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, presented that age as one of exciting crisis which unfettered man's mind from narrow religion, criticism, and psychology. Another interpretation, Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, rebuked those who would look on Leibniz, Montesquieu, Condillac and other philosophes as facile. Enlightenment thinkers dealt with fundamental questions of critical philosophy.

Peter Gay's The Enlightenment (2 vols., 1967 and 1969) was equally sympathetic to the philosophes, viewing them as a “party of humanity” who advocated “modern paganism” and a progressive vision of knowledge as power against despotism and for a new liberal society. Gay's passing over of the illiberal authoritarianism of the philosophes' “reason” was exposed by the Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which claimed that Enlightenment rationality alienated people from passion and repressed free diversity. Following up on this indictment of Enlightenment ideas as an ideology of powerful interests is M.C. Jacobs' recent The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (1981). Ideologically, for example, Newton's law-endowed cosmos could support a variety of interests or could just as easily be rejected if inconvenient to such republican radicals as Toland.

Yet the Enlightenment ideologues, contra Lucien Goldmann's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, did not serve as champions of laissez-faire individualism or of “bourgeois ideology in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.” Robert Darnton's studies of Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie, The Business of Enlightenment (1970) and Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968) show that there was “not one but many Enlightenments, high and low, patrician and plebeian, salon and street-corner.” Likewise, the variety of forms the Enlightenment took in various countries is emphasized in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich's The Enlightenment in National Context (1981) and Henry May's The Enlightenment in America. Additional sources of bibliography for the Enlightenment are given in a concluding note.