How Not to Deal with Enlightenments

February 2002 Historically Speaking Roger L. Emerson How Not to Deal with Enlightenments I workon the Enlightenment, particularly on the Scottish Enlightenment. I have written on clubs and societies, universities , patronage, religion, and science. Throughout my career, I have tried to see Scottish history in relation to things going on elsewhere, notjustin England but also on the continent and sometimes in America. The world to which the Scots belonged was not a particularly British world but a much wider one. I have tried to see the period in the round and not become too wedded to one or another set ofproblems or themes. I care about getting the parameters ofthe Scottish Enlightenment set correctly. This, it seems to me, involves, first ofall, the realization that, as with everyperiod, one is dealingwith a term that is imposed upon a range ofyears because these years reveal persisting, if changing, traits which are convenient to label since they co-exist and then cease at some later point to cohere. The labels are ours and will change as the period recedes into the past. All labels are temporary. Still, in the case of the European and American Enlightenments, the traits are generallythose thatmanypeople inthe period ca. 1660-1830 found useful to notice and discuss. Like the advanced thinkers of any age, those of that period thought, although usuallyat differing times in various parts ofEurope, that they were doing things both novel and important, and related to similar things being done by like-minded men and women elsewhere. They were not shy about pointing that out. Further, most ofthem had an interest in tracing the origins and forebears of the beliefs and institutions that they sought to defend, change, or eradicate. They did not see themselves , and we should not see them, as having no antecedents and no sense ofthe way things were related in their intellectual worlds. We should, I believe, look for the continuities with the past that they found it interestingto assert as well as for the changes that they sought to make. In doing so, we need to consider a wide range of problems and ideas which preoccupied the thinkers of what we call the Enlightenment. Contemporary intellectual historians tend, however, to focus on onlya segmentof Enlightenment thought and, consequently, miss much ofwhat was important about that era both in general and in the particular contexts which interest them. John Pocock's recent volumes on Edward Gibbon [Barbarism and Religion: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764, vol. I, and NarrativesofCivil Government, vol. ? (Cambridge University Press, 1999)] offer what will be a widely-read example of this unfortunate trend. Pocock is interested in the traditions and men from whom Gibbon drew, but his work often reads as ifhe were giving a character to the Enlightenment or Enlightenments in which he situates Gibbon. His exciting , valuable, and erudite volumes will be taken bymany to be authoritative statements about the Enlightenments with which he deals as well as about the Enlightenment of Edward Gibbon. As a guide to Gibbon, we mayperhaps trusthim; I thinkwe should not when we think about the Enlightenment and particularly about the Scottish one. Professor Pocock views the European Enlightenmentas "a process atworkin European culture," defined primarily by secularization and a system of balanced powers or states, and supported by commerce, as well as byan evolution ofmanners which commerce and the new political balance required (I:4f). The period's exciting historiography, like its thoughtin general, was, accordingto Pocock, almostexclusivelytaken up with debates about civility and morals, politics, and "the forces making for modernity about 1500—navigation , printing, gunpowder, and the revival of letters—and those operating about 1700: standing army and public credit, commerce, and the newphilosophy" (11:370). InPocock's view, itisnotprincipallyin the realm ofideas but in that of power and the contests for it that one comes to understand the Enlightenment or Enlightenments. What makes Pocock's account even more curious is its location of a specific time and place atwhich the Enlightenmentmaybe said to begin in Europe—at Utrecht in 1713. At the same time, he tells us that Enlightenment "occurred in too manyforms to be comprised within a single definitionandhistory, and that we do...