ENLIGHTENMENT BOOK EXHIBIT
Clark, J. C. D., The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History, Oxford University Press 2024
The Twilight of the Categories
Concepts can be located chronologically. The analysis of concepts explored in this book shows that ‘the Enlightenment’ (in English) was a recent term of historiographical art (French, German, and other locutions are examined in due course). As such it was only one of several historiographical concepts that were developed in response to a shared problem. English-speaking historians by 1800 inherited a limited range of explanatory tools: the Reformation and the Renaissance were concepts familiar to them, but they largely lacked many that are now taken for granted, including social class, evolution, hegemony, process, industrialization, and race. Nevertheless from the mid nineteenth century academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences became ever more professionalized. More and more monographs were published; academic journals were founded; record societies began to print far more historical materials than had ever been available before; the governments of new states often sought to dignify their sanguinary origins by editions of the papers of their supposed Founding Fathers. An increasingly unmanageable flood of material began to flow across the desks of historians.
They often reacted to the as yet disorganized state of that evidence by formulating or emphasizing a series of simplifying generalizations in the form of explanatory concepts. Students of European history from the tenth century to the fifteenth now re-expressed the older idea of ‘feudalism’. It stood next to another, already in use but now more heavily stressed: ‘the Renaissance’. This possessed a relationship (helpfully ambiguous) with ‘the Reformation’, an older polemical term (though not used in the sixteenth century) now extended in meaning.
Using these concepts, historians posited a great transition from ‘pre-modernity’ to ‘modernity’, a shift that involved ‘the birth of the modern’. Historians researching the seventeenth century depicted the events of the 1640s and 50s as ‘the English Revolution’, naturally followed by ‘the Scientific Revolution’. Colleagues working on the eighteenth organized their materials by invoking ‘the Industrial Revolution’ and ‘the making of the English working class’. Students of the nineteenth reached for ‘capitalism’ and ‘imperialism’.
Aided by such organizing devices, research flourished: the concepts acted as frameworks, as signposts validating academic journeys pursued along teleologically predetermined paths. Students of some narrow or confusing episode could now know that they were on the right road if they could see signposts pointing back, explaining where they had come from, and forward, explaining where they were destined (with a growing and self-confirming crowd) to arrive.
Yet in recent decades uncoordinated research in many fields has uncovered diversities that are difficult to accommodate within these grand concepts. …
… ‘If there is one characterization of the Enlightenment that appears as a truism, it is the assertion that the Enlightenment adopted, extended, and completed the intellectual and social project usually characterized as the “Scientific Revolution” .’1
This had been presented as a concept around which the discipline of the history of science gradually developed from the eighteenth century (notably in French discourse) into the mid twentieth; but in 1996 Steven Shapin, in a book attracting worldwide attention2, located it as a concept ‘probably coined by Alexander Koyré in 1939…it first became a book title in A. Rupert Hall’s The Scientific Revolution of 1954’. The concept’s purpose was to denote ‘a coherent, cataclysmic, and climactic event that fundamentally and irrevocably changed what people knew about the natural world and how they secured proper knowledge of that world’. By contrast, ‘the people who are said to have made the revolution used no such term to refer to what they were doing’.
Shapin recorded that historians had ‘become increasingly uneasy’ with each of the three conjoined words: ‘the’, ‘Scientific’, and ‘Revolution’. More generally, ‘historians have in recent years become dissatisfied with the traditional manner of treating ideas as if they floated freely in conceptual space … An account of the Scientific Revolution as a history of free-floating concepts is a very different animal from a history of concept-making practices.’
Far from disparaging the achievements of early-modern science, Shapin contended that a single narrative of a single movement could not do justice to those achievements’ complexity and importance. Indeed he found a much-quoted formula signifying his acknowledgement of the phenomena but his rejection of their distortion by an organizing concept: ‘There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it … There should be no doubt whatever that one could write a convincing history of seventeenth-century thought about nature without even mentioning the Scientific Revolution as traditionally construed.’ Such arguments are applicable to the historiographies of other concepts, notably the concept examined in the present book.
Shapin’s thesis met resistance as historians mounted lengthy defences of twentieth-century orthodoxies. An audience was warned not ‘to dissolve the Scientific Revolution into what has recently’, in Shapin’s words, ‘been proclaimed to be nothing but “a diverse array of cultural practices”’. One learned study [David Wootton] may stand for others.3 Its author framed a defence of the notion of ‘the Scientific Revolution’ as being ‘a single transformative process’, ‘the main event’, and justifying the ‘obvious’ appropriateness of historians’ ‘passing [moral] judgement’. Its chapter 2, ‘The Idea of the Scientific Revolution’, was an extended resistance to the recent historicization of that but also of other leading concepts (‘the Industrial Revolution’ appeared without acknowledgement of recent reconsiderations of the term; similarly, and attributing agency, ‘it was the Scientific Revolution itself which was chiefly responsible for the Enlightenment’s conviction that progress had become unstoppable’).
The ‘newer school’ of historians of science ‘has wanted to debunk or deconstruct the concepts rather than explain their significance and trace their origin’. The author’s repeated use of ‘we’ and ‘our’ was significant: this usage can seem to elevate present-day terms and values into a ‘common standard’, and so turn different words used in earlier periods into synonyms (‘a reasonable translation’) for later ones.
By contrast, attendance to language as disclosing important differences ‘may be labelled “the Cambridge fallacy”’. Larger consequences were at stake: science was ‘accumulative’ so that ‘the history of science since 1572’ is ‘uniquely a history of progress’; ‘the modern scientific way of thinking has become so much part of our culture that it has now become difficult to think our way back into a world where people did not speak of facts, hypotheses and theories, where knowledge was not grounded in evidence, where nature did not have laws’. Science, leading to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, had become exemplary.
Nevertheless, many scholars in the field pursued widespread reconsiderations. By 2006 two historians of science could write, in an authoritative survey: ‘It is no longer clear that there was any coherent enterprise in the early modern period that can be identified with modern science, or that the transformations in question were as explosive and discontinuous as the analogy with political revolution implies, or that those transformations were unique in intellectual magnitude and cultural significance.’4
By 2009, another historian of science added that ‘No overarching narrative has replaced that of the Scientific Revolution’, and that ‘it is now possible to inventory some of the strands that compose the new narrative’. Since ‘early modern culture did not yet possess a unified sense of the use and significance of natural knowledge’, the ‘old history of the Scientific Revolution that was centered on the Copernican hypothesis’ had been ‘displaced’ by new narratives ‘often involving large numbers of anonymous people’ who were ‘part of a story of the movement of knowledge through European expansion and colonialism and through world trade, in which objects, practices, texts, techniques, and knowledge passed between East and West, with practitioners and techniques often moving ahead of the written word’, so that ‘the history of science must be integrated with social history, economic history, art history, and the history of technology and medicine’. The history of science was moving from principle towards practice.
Unrelated to these reconsiderations of ‘the Scientific Revolution’ another three-word concept, ‘the Industrial Revolution’, has been reluctantly reconsidered. Even recently depicted as a sudden, singular phenomenon deserving leading capitals, the term has been demoted by econometrics to the status of (in three more appropriate words) a commercial evolution. Formerly, economic historians wrote of a unified phenomenon that displayed integrally related aspects or facets (technological innovation, manufacture, capital investment, urbanization, transport, literacy, and others). In recent decades econometric historians have shown some of these undoubted developments to have been closely related together, others weakly related, others unrelated. A similar argument can now be framed for what was, during the high tide of modernism, assumed to have been a similarly unitary phenomenon, the Enlightenment.
The concept of ‘the Industrial Revolution’ enjoyed a long hegemony, with consequences in related areas, but its dissolution had implications for other concepts. As one historian of a linked term argued, ‘In recent years the concept of class has come under increasing scrutiny as a means of explaining both the present and the past…if class fails to interpret the present, perhaps it has not given an adequate account of our past either?’ It could not be without historical consequences that there had been ‘a numerical decline of the manual working class’, but in another discourse, ‘Old sources of identity, among which class has been greatly significant, have given place to radically new ones’. Research in economic history had a congruent result:
What stands revealed is a very diverse and fragmented labour force, and one to which the term ‘proletariat’ does scant justice. Socio-economic ‘class position’ or situation emerges as so diverse and ambiguous from this account of proletarianization that the term ‘working class’ is exceedingly tenuous as an adequate description of the supposedly resulting social formation.
Chronology matters: ‘understandings of class we have taken to be products of “modern”, industrial society in the nineteenth century may in fact be of relatively recent origin. Understandings that are the product of relatively recent times have mistakenly been imaged back upon the past, so distorting it.’ Yet despite these results of research, ‘the concept of class still continues to do sterling service within historical writing’ in which ‘classes are still historical actors’ and ‘class’ is unthinkingly employed as an adjective; ‘Perhaps it is time to look for new actors and new narratives?’5 Class, then, had been given agency.
Other concepts remain to be historicized, but the list can only grow. …
… Other scholars explored thematic diversifications. In one branch of recent historiography, ‘the Enlightenment’ has become many ‘enlightenments’; this (it is contended here) is a preliminary to further revision. John Pocock drew attention to at least two French Enlightenments, that of the érudits and that of the philosophes, and to two British Enlightenments, ‘a conservative Enlightenment which was often Socinian’ and ‘a radical Enlightenment which was often Spinozist’; such divisions meant that ‘it is a premise of this book that we can no longer write satisfactorily of “The Enlightenment” as a unified and universal intellectual movement’.6 Steadily more Enlightenments were sighted: Catholic, Jewish, and even Japanese; Scots, Irish, and even Welsh; Spanish, American, and even Islamic. …
… The practice of selection was not confined to Enlightenment studies. Admirers of natural science could similarly construct their histories as galleries of experimenters. In later accounts those experimenters could be selected, and arranged, as people who had implicitly defined themselves over against revealed religion, notably Christianity, and most often against the Church of Rome; only later did other historians recover the complex, and often mutually supportive, relations of religion and science.
In a related field, one economic historian [Joel Mokyr] argued to link ‘the Enlightenment’ and ‘the Industrial Revolution’ (both in the singular) by proposing a third Enlightenment ‘project’ (in addition to the political and religious projects), economic growth. He gave it substance by placing within ‘the Enlightenment’ the familiar team of technologists and entrepreneurs long deemed to be pioneers of ‘the Industrial Revolution’.7
Enlightenment historiography, although not alone, was especially open to the practice of selection. One important model, that of Jonathan Israel, posited ‘the two enlightenments’ separated by an ‘intellectual chasm’; they ‘diverged fundamentally over every basic issue’; from the 1770s they were ‘self-consciously and publicly divided in basic premises and general principles into bitterly warring factions, for and against democratizing republicanism linked to rejection, or alternatively acceptance, of ecclesiastical authority’; ‘Between these two opposed conceptions obviously no compromise or half-way position was ever possible, either theoretically or practically.’ …
Peter Hanns Reill, ‘The Legacy of the “Scientific Revolution”: Science and the Enlightenment’, in Roy Porter, ed., The Cambridge History of Science, iv. Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, 2003), 23–43, at 23. Reill argued for a more complex model, including Enlightenment vitalism.
Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL, 1996).
David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (London, 2015). [in the Social Science Files Archive]
51 Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, iii. Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2006), 12–13. For difficulties in applying the concept of ‘scientific revolution’ to change in the humanities, see Floris Solleveld, ‘Conceptual Change in the History of the Humanities’, Studium, 7:4 (2014), 223–39. [in the Social Science Files Archive]
Patrick Joyce, ed., Class (Oxford, 1995), 3–4, 10–11, 16. For a critique of ‘The project of modernity’, 7–8.
J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, Revolution and Counter-Revolution; A Eurosceptical Enquiry’, History of Political Thought, 20:1 (1999), 125–39, at 127; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols (Cambridge, 1999–2015), i. 13. John Robertson identified a difficulty in the argument: ‘if there was “a” process of Enlightenment, what prevents this from being thought of as “the” Enlightenment?’: ‘The Enlightenments of J. G. A. Pocock’, Storia della storiografia, 39 (2001), 140–51, at 149–50. The present book offers a solution to the problem.
Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution 1700–1850 (New Haven, CT, 2009: London, 2011), 30–9. Mokyr found that ‘The wide range of often contradictory attitudes, sensibilities, concerns, and hopes that Enlightenment writers have displayed makes any single statement about the movement close to meaningless’, 32, 34, but then adopted a singular Enlightenment nevertheless. He similarly defended other unifying categories like ‘the Middle Ages’ and ‘the Scientific Revolution’, 80.
[END OF THIS EXHIBIT]
Social Science Files displays multidisciplinary writings on a great variety of topics relating to evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age