Epicurus in the Enlightenment (review)

This excellent collection of essays revisits Epicureanism in its various associations with Enlightenment thought in Europe and as far as Russia. It presents a series of symptomatic case studies that tell us that our sense of Epicureanism as a label used to ‘smear’ Enlightenment thinkers is largely accurate, and also that knowledge of Epicurus’s actual theories, as relayed by Lucretius, Gassendi, or Bernier, is relatively deep, and that different writers engage with, appropriate, or perhaps deny a wide range of its aspects. The volume confirms rather than contests existing research, and does it authoritatively and carefully, but it also does more than this, explicitly engaging with current debates about Enlightenment historiography. As Neven Leddy puts it in his essay on Adam Smith’s critique of Enlightenment Epicureanism, the collection ‘is predicated on the methodological view that there is a value to examining specific concepts in their historical contexts’ (p. 183). Andrew Kahn’s study of Epicureanism in the Russian Enlightenment is a case in point, arguing that Jonathan Israel was surely wrong to claim that ‘the Enlightenment as a movement [was] clearly established in Russia’, given that his principal example is a Russian abroad, Antiokh Kantemir, ambassador to Paris and London, whose ‘erudition operates as a mark of cultural acceptability and as a bid for prestige’ (p. 133); instead, Kahn looks at the relative isolation of two cases, the scientist Mikhailo Lomonosov and the mathematician, Dmitrii Anichkov. Indeed, part of the pleasure of the volume comes from the way it continually moves between examining local contexts and asking large questions. A typically robust sentence from Leddy claims that ‘if there is a single defining characteristic of Enlightenment it is an opposition to pan-European Augustinianism’ (p. 186). Leddy and Lifschitz’s Introduction neatly frames the volume; Élodie Argaud shows us how Bayle inverts Malebranche’s providentialist arguments by replicating certain moves in Epicurean logic; Hans Blom gives a detailed account of Dutch notions of sociability; Thomas Ahnert discusses how Pufendorf and other German thinkers had recourse to the notion of self-interest and thereby opened themselves to the charge of Epicureanism; Charles Wolfe reframes La Mettrie as a ‘medical Epicurean’; Natania Meeker suggests that, while Diderot viewed material existence as essentially feminine, some of his most haunting reveries involve disembodiment; Pierre Force looks at Helvétius, whose political thought is not normally seen in relation to Epicureanism; Matthew Niblett considers how English positions shifted from Toland to Priestley; James Harris analyses Hume, whose position on self-interest allowed new ways of conceptualizing the pursuit of wealth in the state; and Avi Lifschitz explores how debates on the origin of language replicated polemics resonating elsewhere. If, on occasion, the essays are so tightly argued that reading them is a rather eye-watering experience, the collection as a whole works admirably well. Most of the essays, moreover, cross-refer, and it is clear that the authors have all been listening to one another. We would do well to listen to them.