Enlighteners

Two studies offer new insights into the history of the Enlightenment by deploying a comparative national framework. In the first, John Robertson explores The Case for the Enlightenment as it was made, along parallel lines, in early eighteenth-century Naples and Scotland, whilst making and exemplifying his own case for a return to a rigorous and unified intellectual history of the Enlightenment. In the second, Kate Davies furthers the case for an Anglo-American understanding of late eighteenth-century radicalism by showing how a progressive gender politics was forged across transatlantic intellectual networks. Both studies see in this period as a whole a trajectory of intellectual and social modernization that followed different lines in different national and provincial sites, but which cannot be fully understood in a purely national context. Both are concerned with very particular historical contexts as crucibles of new ideas, and with the way that those ideas take off and acquire an analytical purchase beyond the immediate circumstances that they were formulated to address.

For Davies, that analytical vocabulary – of female political entitlement, and of republicanism inflected by notions of gender equality – is ultimately inseparable from the life of writing, and the personal allegiances and connections that structure that life. Her book centres upon the epistolary and personal friendship of two remarkable female historians, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, both of whom supported the American Revolution and opposed the American Federal Constitution from their respective homes in England and Massachusetts. It demonstrates all of the strengths, and some of the limitations, of a broadly cultural-historical approach to late eighteenth-century republicanism by exploring the kinds of female citizenship that could be retrieved from its characteristic forms of sociability. There was room, certainly, in Macaulay and Warren's social worlds for female learning, for active patriotism and for politically contentious publications. But, Davies's interest lies as much in these women's ability to make the best of the peculiar arrangement of those worlds, with their overlapping domestic and public spheres, as in the intellectual content of the women's writings.

For Robertson, by contrast, exchanges of letters, practices of sociability, even the forging of an extra-governmental public sphere of readers and opinion formers, may have facilitated the progressive thinking of the Enlightenment, but they were certainly not the stuff of it. It is with a real sense of excitement that he restates the case, made some years ago by Hugh Trevor-Roper and Franco Venturi, for a genuine intellectual history of the Enlightenment in its Scottish and Neapolitan incarnations. His case for the Enlightenment is that it did have precise and determining national political contexts (around a third of the book is devoted to these), epistolary and social networks, peculiar processes of book circulation, and influential institutional settings, but that none of these would be worth describing so thickly were it not for the quality of the ideas they engendered. Those ideas were thus the product of local circumstance (and Robertson generally prefers the terms 'ideas' or 'intellectual contribution' to more collaborative notions of conversation, debate or argument), but acquired international salience at the hands of key intellectual entrepreneurs who forged an Enlightenment for the second half of the eighteenth century.

Robertson takes an unapologetically restricted view of the Enlightenment as a unitary phenomenon: echoing Peter Gay's dictum that 'there were many philosophes in the eighteenth century, but there was only one Enlightenment', he insists that 'out of two very different national contexts came one Enlightenment'. If the Enlightenment is everything it is nothing. So, for Robertson, it must have precise chronological limits (its preparatory phase roughly 1680–1740, its 'high' phase roughly 1740–90), identifiable philosophical origins (in the Epicureanism of Bayle), and a set of characteristic intellectual preoccupations (a philosophical understanding of...