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  • The Legacy of Enlightenment
  • Jeremy L. Caradonna
Daniel Brewer . The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2008). Pp. viii + 260. $95

The use of “the Enlightenment” as a signifier of reason and tolerance is still in vogue in public discourse. In November of 2008, for instance, I attended a lively talk by Salman Rushdie in which, after viciously attacking religious intolerance and superstition in such divergent places as Pakistan and Kansas (here representing the American Bible Belt), the once-persecuted author made an impassioned plea to revive the “values of the Enlightenment.” He never explained what he meant, but his learned audience presumably grasped the idea. In the same way, Rushdie’s fellow agent provocateur, Christopher Hitchens, recently called for a “new Enlightenment” in the closing paragraphs of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, an acerbic book on the evils of religious belief. (Hitchens also invokes lowercase “enlightenment” in the introduction to The Portable Atheist, a book that he edited.) In both instances, the Enlightenment as a complex object of historical inquiry is slyly replaced with a reified and symbolic Enlightenment that is marshaled for particular political ends—in this case, to destroy religious superstition and promote the advent of more tolerant and secular geopolitical order.

These anecdotes merely confirm Daniel Brewer’s observation in The Enlightenment Past that “the Enlightenment” has come to “signify a particular [End Page 17] set of ideas, values, and cultural practices that grew out of an existing intellectual and socio-political order” (1). Indeed, much of Brewer’s astutely argued book is an attempt to historicize and deconstruct the simplistic Enlightenment invoked by historians, literary critics, and political commentators for much of the twentieth century and beyond. How did the Enlightenment, we might ask, develop into such an easily graspable signifier?

To answer this question, Brewer traces the “construction” of the Enlightenment over the past two centuries, creating, in his words, a “critical genealogy” (3) of the old narrative of the “heroic, emancipatory, and ultimately modernizing Enlightenment” (5). Brewer’s parcours takes him from the eighteenth century, when Kant and other philosophes began to identify and valorize their own movement, through the culture wars of the nineteenth century, when Sainte-Beuve and Villemain shaped the Enlightenment canon, and finally into the twentieth century, when the Enlightenment finally achieved its apotheosis in the hands of Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay, before hostile postmodernists reduced the word to hypocrisy and hyperrationalism.

In making his case, Brewer is careful to avoid many of the binaries that have shaped the study of the Enlightenment. He neither defends the “ values” of the period, as in the case of Daniel Gordon’s ultra-defensive Postmodernism and the Enlightenment, nor attacks the Enlightenment, as in the case of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, whose Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) linked some very different Enlightenment values to the Third Reich. Indeed, Brewer is even more detached in his analysis than the relatively evenhanded essays in Peter Reill and Keith M. Baker’s edited volume, What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question. Brewer is also careful to avoid the impulse to divide eighteenth-century intellectual life into two simple categories: Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment. The notion that there were “winners and losers” in the period—whether the winners were Voltaire and Rousseau or Fréron and the abbé Barruel—is mostly a byproduct of the left/right cultural divisions in nineteenth-century France, in which historical figures became little more than symbolic representatives of a given political system. As it so often happens in France, one’s perspective on the past correlated to one’s political views in the present.

In effect, Brewer borrows a page from both François Furet and Roger Chartier. He borrows from Furet to the extent that he consciously rejects the politicization and binaries in which the Enlightenment has been mired for so long. Brewer brings to the Enlightenment the same much-needed disinterestedness that Furet brought to the Revolution in Interpreting the French Revolution. Second, and more importantly, Brewer expands Roger Chartier’s contention in The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution that the Enlightenment was only created after the fact...

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