German Historical Institute London Bulletin

German Historical Institute London Bulletin Bd. 24 2002 Nr. 1 Copyright Das Digitalisat wird Ihnen von perspectivia.net, der Online-Publikationsplattform der Max Weber Stiftung – Stiftung Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland, zur Verfügung gestellt. Bitte beachten Sie, dass das Digitalisat urheberrechtlich geschützt ist. Erlaubt ist aber das Lesen, das Ausdrucken des Textes, das Herunterladen, das Speichern der Daten auf einem eigenen Datenträger soweit die vorgenannten Handlungen ausschließlich zu privaten und nicht- kommerziellen Zwecken erfolgen. Eine darüber hinausgehende unerlaubte Verwendung, Reproduktion oder Weitergabe einzelner Inhalte oder Bilder können sowohl zivil- als auch strafrechtlich verfolgt werden. REVIEW ARTICLE A WAR O WORDS? OLD AND NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT by Michael Schaich MARGARET C. JACOB, The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents, The Bedford Series in History and Culture (Boston: Bed- ford/St Martins, 2001), 237 pp. ISBN 0 312 17997 9. £8.99 (paperback) JONATHAN I. ISRAEL, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 810 pp. ISBN 0 19 820608 9. £30.00 PETER CLARK, British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World, Oxford Studies in Social History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), xii + 516 pp. ISBN 0 19 820376 4. £60.00 PAMELA E. SELWYN, Everyday Life in the German Book Trade: 0ried- rich Nicolai as Bookseller and Publisher in the Age of Enlightenment, 1750- 1810 (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 2000), 419 pp. ISBN 0 271 02011 3. £56.50 ECKHART HELLMUTH, IMMO MEENKEN, and MICHAEL TRAUTH (eds), Zeitenwende? Preußen um 1800: 0estgabe für Günter Birtsch zum 70. Geburtstag (Stuttgart: frommann-holzboog, 1999), 327 pp. ISBN 3 7728 2014 X. DM 158.00 MAIKEN UMBACH, 0ederalism and the Enlightenment in Germany, 1740-1806 (Hambeldon: The Hambledon Press, 2000), 232 pp. ISBN 1 85285 177 5. £38.00 Over the last two decades or so, the Enlightenment has had a bad press in intellectual circles on both sides of the Atlantic. With the advent of postmodernism the legacy of the Age of Reason was held responsible for such diverse phenomena as the authoritarian nature of the modern state, the suppression of emotions in bourgeois society, and the destruction of the natural environment. Such criticism was not without precursors. In 1947 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer had already pointed out the inherently retrogressive 29 Review Article and destructive as well as the progressive elements of Enlightened thinking in their influential treatise Dialectic of Enlightenment. Paradoxically, however, academic research on the historical period of the Enlightenment has not been hampered by the poor reputation of its subject in general discourse. Rather, modern criticism sometimes seems to have sparked off the study of the intellectual revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1 Adornos and Hork- heimers book, for example, revived interest in the Age of Reason after the Second World War. Following a short flourish of studies in the inter-war period, most prominently Ernst Cassirers The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), interest had declined sharply. The most important impetus for the investigation of the Enlighten- ment, however, was the student revolution of 1968. In its aftermath scholars all over the Western world started to trace the roots of the liberal political agenda set out by the students and their intellectual leaders in the writings of Enlightened thinkers. In consequence, from the 1970s, eighteenth-century studies became one of the growth industries within the humanities. Journals devoted to the analysis of all aspects of eighteenth-century life sprang up, national societies of dix-huitiémistes were founded and soon came together to form the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and numerous conferences are held, culminating every five years in a world con- gress on the Enlightenment with hundreds of sessions and thousands of participants from all areas of cultural studies. The explosion of research activities over the last twenty to thirty years, defying any fashionable criticism, has also resulted, almost inevitably, in a re-evaluation of the traditional monolithic image of the Age of Reason. Thus the idea of a universal model of the En- lightenment was increasingly challenged by historians who put more emphasis on the national contexts in which the new movement grad- ually took shape.2 Even more interestingly, the character of the Enlightenment as a primarily intellectual current has been ques- 1 For a general account of Enlightenment research in Germany in the twenti- eth century see Winfried Müller, Die Aufklärung, pt. 2, Enzyklopädie deut- scher Geschichte, 61 (forthcoming, Munich, 2002). 2 See, e.g., Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981), and, more recently, Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London, 2000). 30 A War of Words? tioned by social historians, who highlight its more practical ambi- tions and generally utilitarian outlook. Far from being merely a war of words, the Enlightenment aimed at reform in many areas of eighteenth-century politics. Both approaches, intellectual history and social history, nowadays belong to the canon of approved methods and are widely employed in research on the Enlightenment, as the first two parts of this review article will demonstrate. In recent years, however, new studies which attempt to discover the visual language of the Enlightenment have taken up the ideas of cultural history. They reveal a totally new side of the old question of whether the En- lightenment was a war of words, and enable us to decipher hitherto hidden layers of meaning, as the third part of this review article sug- gests. I Traditionally, intellectual history has been the via regia for investigat- ing the Enlightenment. One of the most prominent historians to have adopted this approach in the last few decades is Margaret C. Jacob, now professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles. Twenty-one years ago, almost at the same time as post- modernists mounted their attack on the Enlightenment, she wrote a monograph, The Radical Enlightenment (1981), in which she champi- oned the cause of an intellectually subversive and ultimately also politically revolutionary undercurrent within the Enlightenment movement, which in the long run shaped our modern, secular, and liberal Western society. Convincingly argued and well written, Jacobs book placed the radical Enlightenment firmly on the agenda of eighteenth-century historians. Yet she succeeded not only in broaden- ing the field, but also in modernizing the methodology of intellectual history. Identifying the Masonic lodges with their shield of secrecy as one of the hotbeds of radical thinking, she introduced an element of social analysis into the history of Enlightened ideas and concepts. It is therefore hardly surprising that to the present day Jacobs work in this and subsequent volumes to a large degree defines perceptions of the eighteenth century in American and British universities. This influence is certain to rise with the publication of her latest book, a brief history of the Enlightenment. The slim volume is con- ceived primarily as a textbook for use in the classroom and therefore contains a good collection of key documents of the Age of Reason. 31 Review Article Apart from the anonymously published Treatise of the Three Impostors (1719), the reader will find substantial extracts from the writings of John Locke, Voltaire, Mary Wortley Montagu, Denis Diderot, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Moses Mendelssohn. This list alone makes clear that in her introduction Jacob is mainly con- cerned with ideas and controversies. In her understanding, the Enlightenment grew out of a war of words with the upholders of tra- dition, authority and the status quo (p. vii). According to Jacobs chronologically structured account, the origins of this development are to be found in the 1680s when liberal Protestants in England and the Dutch Republic used tracts and pam- phlets in a struggle against religious intolerance and arbitrary rule as embodied by absolutist Catholic princes such as James II in England and Louis XIV in France. As the clergy were seen as the main but- tresses of the policies of these monarchs, the church, its privileges, and its dogmas soon became a second target of enraged pamphletists who drew upon a whole new set of ideas in these battles. One of the main points of reference, according to Jacob, was the work of John Locke whose treatises undermined belief in the divine right of kings and advocated government by Parliament. Further support came from the unfolding of modern science connected mainly with the name of Isaac Newton. New methods such as experiment, trial and error, and the belief that mathematical regularity and laws ruled the universe (p. 15) cast doubt upon the basic assumptions of revealed religion. Finally, the theories of seventeenth-century thinkers such as Francis Bacon and René Descartes could be interpretedoften against the original intentions of their authorsin a way which ques- tioned ecclesiastical authority and doctrinal belief. Taken together, the battles of international Protestantism against allegedly Catholic despotism and religious orthodoxy in the decades around 1700 forged a core group of Enlightened

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