How to escape from a maze

Assume you know nothing about the First World War, but had heard the name and wish to learn about it. Reasonably, you turn to the latest scholarship on the subject, only to find fundamental differences of view among professional historians. Some argue that the war had occurred in the early twentieth century; others, in the mid nineteenth. Some assert that important battles had been fought in northern France; others, in northern Spain. Some contend that Scotland was a participant, but that England had never been one; others, that England had indeed been a participant, indeed the first.

You might reasonably conclude that something was seriously amiss in the world of scholarship. In reality there are no such inconsistencies among military or diplomatic historians; but exactly such disparities of interpretation exist among historians of the Enlightenment. One historian says ‘the Enlightenment was this’; another replies ‘No! the Enlightenment was that’; a third trumps them: ‘No! No! The Enlightenment was the other.’ These incompatible interpretations show no signs of being reconciled in any new synthesis; instead, they proliferate.

Where did ‘the Enlightenment’ originate? Its parentage is still disputed. How did it end? Historians search the American Revolution in attempts to sight this phenomenon. Did it triumph in, or was it terminated by, the French Revolution? There are no intelligible answers, since these and others are questions mal posées.

Readers escape from this maze if they accept that the term ‘the Enlightenment’ lacked an eighteenth-century referent and was a much later coinage, projected backwards for much later polemical purposes. Without such a referent, present-day writers are free to make the term mean what they wish it to mean. On the contrary, the belatedly developing history of the concept is itself the only history of the subject that can be written. Many historians formerly took the category for granted, without defence or even an index entry; this assumption is now untenable.

These previous usages were idealistic attempts to identify with a single term some vision of human happiness and progress. I nowhere argue against peace and bread, or for any Counter-Enlightenment. But I contend that in the eighteenth-century there was not one interesting and important thing happening, but many (the spread of literacy and the print culture; communication; international exploration; scientific discovery; economic growth). Even ‘Europe’ was too loose a term to generate much sense of unity; instead, wars between European powers became ever more destructive.

Those many interesting and important things were not reinforced by being seen as aspects of a common cause, swept on by a vast international movement. Indeed the absence of any such unifying movement was a leading reason why reforming causes were so difficult to frame and to carry forward to success. No concept, no movement.

At the time it was known that the famous figures recently depicted as champions of a unified ‘Enlightenment’ often argued for very different things (for example, Locke and Hume); moreover, when they met they were often at each other’s throats (for example, Voltaire and Rousseau). Their cosmopolitanism or tolerance was usually a vain boast. Their mutual hostility is often traceable to those figures’ intolerant views on religion (specifically, Christianity) rather than to differences over forward-looking programmes of social reform.

The great Cambridge classicist Dr Richard Bentley once encountered England’s then most famous poet, Alexander Pope, who in 1715 had just published an acclaimed English verse translation of the Iliad. Pope fished for compliments. Bentley responded with the memorable put-down: ‘It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer.’ I adapt this as my courteous response to those who repeat the old orthodoxy: ‘It is a pretty story, Mr Historian; but you must not call it the Enlightenment’.

_{Feature image by Joshua Sortino via Unsplash.}