In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas

Abstract

The history of the Enlightenment has always been a lofty affair-a tendency that will not be regretted by anyone who has scaled its peaks with Cassirer, sucked in delicious lungfuls of pure reason, and surveyed the topography of eighteenth-century thought laid out neatly at his feet.But the time has come for a more down-to-earth look at the Enlightenment, because while intellectual historians have mapped out the view from the top, social historians have been burrowing deep into the substrata of eighteenth-century societies.And, as the distance between the two disciplines increases, the climates of opinion multiply and thicken and the Enlightenment occasionally disappears in clouds of vaporous generalizations.The need to locate it more precisely in a social context has produced some important new work in a genre that is coming to be called the "social history of ideas."Peter Gay, who has sponsored the term,' has attempted to satisfy the need with the second volume of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York, 1969).A half year after the appearance of Gay's book, another secondvolume work came out in France: Livre et societ (Paris, 1970), the sequel to a pioneering collection of essays on sociointellectual history produced by a group at the VIP Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.These two volume 2's make fascinating reading together, because they show two different historiographical traditions converging on the same problem.Gay descends from Cassirer, the VIP Section group from the "Annales" school and from Daniel Mornet's experiments with quantitative history.Curiously, the two traditions seem to ignore each other.In a bibliography that totals 261 pages in both volumes, and that covers an enormous range of European history, Gay never mentions Livre et societ.He makes only a few, irreverent references to Mornet and does not seem to have assimilated much "Annales" history.The second volume of Livre et societe' (the first appeared a year before Gay's first volume) does not refer either to Gay or Cassirer.In fact, Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment was not translated into French until 1966 and has not made much impression on French study of the Enlightenment since its original publication in German in 1932, a year before the appearance of Mornet's Les origines intellectuelles de la Re'volution fran-(aise and fourteen years before Paul Hazard's La pensee europeenne au 18' siecle.So here is an opportunity to compare the methods and results of two attempts, expressing two separate historiographical currents, to solve one of the knottiest problems in early modern history: the problem of situating the Enlightenment within the actualities of eighteenth-century society.l Peter Gay, The Parlty of Humanity: Essays in the Frenclh Enliglhtetinment (New York, 1964), p. x.1 14 Robert Darnton I Gay came to the social history of ideas through an attempt to redefine the Enlightenment.He wanted his "definition" (as he modestly describes his two large volumes) to incorporate the social dimension of the philosophes' experience into a Cassirer-like interpretation of their ideas.This concern testifies to the ever-expanding influence of social history today, but it does not ultimately determine the character of Gay's book, which can be read as intellectual history of the sort that has flourished in the United States for the last few decades.If read in this way, it offers a delightful tour of the Enlightenment, theme by theme, philosophe by philosophe.Gay cuts his way through cliches and breathes new life into figures that had been embalmed and placed on permanent exhibit in the nineteenth century.His philosophes are not desiccated rationalists, naive prophets of progress, or narrow-minded village atheists.They are complicated individuals with complicated problems, irrational in their calculations of pleasure and pain, and pessimistic in their dedication to the advancement of civilization.Gay does justice to these complexities, especially in the first two chapters of volume 2, by relating the philosophes' ideas to their experience and by eschewing worn-out labels like "The Age of Reason."His own labeling sometimes creates confusion, as when he describes eighteenth-century empiricism as a "revolt against rationalism."(Cassirer, and even d'Alembert, made the point clearer by contrasting the "esprit de systeme" of the seventeenth century with the "esprit systematique" of the eighteenth.)But the book makes the philosophes live.Its strength consists in its stress on the complex, human dimension of their philosophy.Although Gay's Enlightenment will delight and instruct anyone who wants to freshen his sense of the past, it deserves to be read as its author intended: not as just another work on the eighteenth century, but as an attempt to establish a new historical genre.Gay needed to develop a social history of ideas in order to bring together the highly distilled philosophical history of Cassirer and the highly specific findings of social history.2Crossbreeding such different historical species raises enormous problems, because Cassirer dealt with modes of thought, like the rise of "critical" as opposed to "mythopoeic" thinking, while social historians are concerned with a different order of phenomena, like the rise of the bourgeoisie.In order to reconcile such opposed viewpoints, Gay adopts a Hegelian device: he defines the Enlightenment as a "dialectical struggle for autonomy" (The Enlightenment, 1:xi; all references are to this work unless otherwise stated).The history of history is so strewn with dead dialectics that it might seem rash to create a new one as the conceptual framework for a new kind of history.But Gay's social history of ideas will not hold together without his dialectic, so the dialectic deserves to be examined with care.It goes like this: thesis-"The Appeal to Antiquity" (book 1); antithesis-"The Tension with Christianity" (book 2); synthesis-"The Pursuit of Modernity" (book 3).Gay explains that he is dealing with the Enlightenment in its narrow sense, the philosophy of the philosophes, not with the broad climate of opinion 2 Ibid.See also Peter Gay, Tlhe Enlighlteniment: An Interpretation (New York, 1966), 1: 427; and esp.Peter Gay, "The Social History of Ideas: Ernst Cassirer and

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 95 citations exist upstream.