1. Enlightenment and modernity
Dr. Stuart Middleton
October 2018

2. How the enlightenment ‘made the modern world’
The ‘counter-enlightenment’ and the making of the modern world
Questionable legacies of the enlightenment
The idea of ‘enlightenment’ in history

3. Enlightenment and democracy
Democracy obviously not an enlightenment invention; and enlightenment thinkers not all proponents of democracy
But enlightenment thinkers made major contributions to modern theories of democracy:
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748): wary of pure democracy, but advocated a form of representative democracy
Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762): the ‘general will’ as basis of sovereignty
Competing claims for ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ enlightenment as progenitor of democracy – but the fact that claims can be made for such disparate tendencies within the enlightenment perhaps underlines its importance to development of democratic ideas

4. Liberalism Development of central enlightenment ideas:
‘man’ at the centre of moral & intellectual universe
liberty & religious toleration
human nature: egotism leavened by sociability, epitomised in commerce
Adoption of utility as moral principle – thus Bentham: the ‘scales had fallen from my eyes’ (upon reading Hume on utility)
John Locke ( )

5. Socialism
Early socialism extends enlightenment beliefs in beneficent natural order, essential goodness of human nature, and rational forms of social organisation
Henri Comte de Saint-Simon ( ) – ‘science of politics’ to replace government with rational administration
Charles Fourier ( ) - the ‘Phalanstère’, an organised society in which reason and the passions would be held in equilibrium
Marx as antagonist of enlightenment? – but many Marxists claimed enlightenment lineage during C20
Fourier’s Phalanstère (1834)

6. Secularisation
A ‘meta-narrative’ of modernity: inexorable displacement of religion and the sacred by a world-view centring on humanity, and defined by science and rational inquiry
Enlightenment as hand-maiden of secularisation: self-conscious, decisive break with scholasticism, and in some of its aspects presenting radical challenges to religion
Challenges to secularisation ‘narrative’ in recent years: and historians now recognise a more complex relationship between enlightenment and religion (not just outright hostility)
But major enlightenment legacies remain: e.g. de-sacralisation of political authority; secular conceptions of natural law and human nature

7. Industrialisation
Industrialism: harnessing of new productive technologies and relations enabling a radical expansion of economic productivity from late C18
Influence of enlightenment ideas and practices: the ‘industrial enlightenment’ (Joel Mokyr) –
Dissemination of knowledge & practices of enlightened science among networks of industrialists, e.g. Birmingham Lunar Society (the ‘Midlands Enlightenment’)
Josiah Wedgwood: ‘everything yields to experiment’; Matthew Boulton ‘very ingenious, philosophical, and agreeable’

8. The ‘industrial Enlightenment’ in the Midlands
Joseph Wright of Derby,
A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in Place of the Sun (1762)

9. Challenges to the ‘industrial enlightenment’
Innovations in production didn’t simply emerge from a world of ‘useful knowledge’; productive innovations, and mercantilism, arguably more important ‘Industrial enlightenment’ doesn’t account for the role of conquest and appropriation as key factors underpinning industrialisation Some clear instances of transfer of enlightened ideas to industrial invention/ innovation; but many other cases in which they played no discernible role

10. How the enlightenment ‘made the modern world’
The ‘counter-enlightenment’ and the making of the modern world
Questionable legacies of the enlightenment
The idea of ‘enlightenment’ in history

11. Distinctive enlightenment ideas
Priestley riots, 1791
Enlightenment contested & opposed during C18, at elite and popular levels; continuing adherence to ‘throne and altar’ (or ‘church and king’)

12. Priestley & Tom Paine supping with the devil (1792)

13. The ‘counter-enlightenment’
Isaiah Berlin 1973:
concerted opposition to (what he identified as) ‘the central dogma of the enlightenment’, i.e. existence of universal laws of social & civilisational development, susceptible of rational knowledge
instead, insistence on the particularity of truth & values; rejection of ‘progress’
strong focus on German thinkers, late C18 – early C19
Historians now less sure that there was a single ‘enlightenment’ to which one could be ‘counter’; but idea still used in more geographically expansive & intellectually diffuse sense
Darrin McMahon, Enemies of Enlightenment (2001): not a fully worked-out, coherent ideology, but a pattern of assumptions & values centring on key ideas such as ‘throne and altar’

14. Conservatism
Not a systematic political ideology; rather a set of shared emphases or values, including:
importance of temporal and spiritual authority
value of custom and tradition
rejection of universalism
negative view of human nature
Some conservative thinkers displayed pre- revolutionary affinities with enlightenment – e.g. Burke & Maistre
Maistre: ‘All power, all subordination, rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association’
Joseph de Maistre ( )

15. Romanticism Wordsworth on the French Revolution:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! […]
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress—to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
—William Wordsworth, ‘The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement’
Difficulty of defining ‘Romanticism’; its origins in enlightenment itself (particularly Rousseau’s lapsarian account of modernity)
Thought as self-expression and revelation – Coleridge: ‘My opinion is […] that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation.’

16. Romanticism
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774): ‘I return into myself and find a world.’
Valuation of feeling and imagination over reason
Against enlightenment view of nature as inert matter, over which reason would attain mastery: instead, a site of spiritual contemplation and renewal
A major caveat to arguments that modernity is a creation of the enlightenment – including the very idea of ‘modernity’ (conceived by Romantics as alienation – not progress)
Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818)

17. How the enlightenment ‘made the modern world’
The ‘counter-enlightenment’ and the making of the modern world
Questionable legacies of the enlightenment
The idea of ‘enlightenment’ in history

18. Imperialism
Locke’s theory of property as underpinning of colonial projects – a justification of European conquest & expropriation of land from non-Europeans Identification of non-European people as ‘primitive’ (in enlightenment schemes of civilisational development)
But historians also recognise countervailing, anti-imperialist enlightenment tendencies:
Diderot’s opposition to attempts to ‘civilise’ non-European people – not inconsistent with his belief in single developmental framework
Kant’s defence of the right to define one’s own manner of living, without external coercion
Other ideological underpinnings of imperialism, besides enlightenment – e.g. Christianity, C19 racism and nationalism

19. Racism
Enlightenment ‘science of man’ as origin of scientific racism: making humanity the object of scientific observation & classification produces schemes of biological racial difference
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach – five varieties of human skull

20. Racism
Overtly racist statements by key enlightenment thinkers - e.g.: David Hume, ‘Of National Characters’ (1748) - I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) – […] but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid. How integral to enlightenment ideas is this form of racial thinking? E.g. are the universal categories of Kant’s mature moral philosophy undermined by implicit limits to his concept of personhood?

21. Dialectic of Enlightenment
Max Horkheimer
Theodor W. Adorno
“In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant.”

22. Dialectic of Enlightenment
‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ –
“Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground: what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office, can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.”
— Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947; trans. 1979), p.137
But NB this is not simply a wholesale rejection of enlightenment: “The point is rather that the Enlightenment must examine itself, if men are not to be wholly betrayed. The task to be accomplished is […] the redemption of the hopes of the past.” (p.xv)

23. How the enlightenment ‘made the modern world’
The ‘counter-enlightenment’ and the making of the modern world
Questionable legacies of the enlightenment
The idea of ‘enlightenment’ in history

24. The idea of ‘enlightenment’ in history
Its ambiguity, and the sheer diversity of ideas and attitudes it has to cover: no easily-identifiable set of ‘core doctrines’ to which all enlightened thinkers, without exception, obviously subscribed
But the term is an artefact of contemporaries’ usage – in which it was also ambiguous or contested (thus Kant’s essay question, ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’)
Is ‘enlightenment’ less problematic than ‘the enlightenment’?
Can we understand the modern world without understanding enlightenment – even if we don’t necessarily espouse it? Terry Eagleton: ‘If we can and must be severe critics of Enlightenment, it is Enlightenment which has empowered us to be so.’
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), p.8