Banishing the Centaur

This book is an English translation of lectures given in 2005 at the Collège de France by the eminent historian of the Enlightenment, Vincenzo Ferrone. It brings an important body of scholarship to the attention of anglophone readers and displays its author’s unusual ability to interpret both the Enlightenment and subsequent philosophical and historical writing about it.

Ferrone’s objective is to overturn a conception of the Enlightenment as a predominantly philosophical event. He describes this as ‘the paradigm of the centaur’, a phrase which is intended to capture how philosophical ideas about the Enlightenment have been combined with the historical reality to create something fabulous and impossible. In combating the paradigm of the centaur and describing the Enlightenment instead in cultural terms, Ferrone sees himself as building on the work of Franco Venturi, whose Trevelyan lectures of 1969 admonished accounts of the Enlightenment, such as Ernst Cassirer’s Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (1932), which emphasised its philosophical dimension.

Ferrone has three ways of achieving his objective. The first is by providing a genealogy of the paradigm of the centaur. This comprises the first seven chapters of the book and traces the development of the paradigm through the work of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, and Joseph Ratzinger. The second is by showing how twentieth-century writing about the Enlightenment was constrained by the terms of earlier writing on the topic and by setting out the moves which historians need to make in order to break free from these constraints. Historiographical essays on these topics make up the middle four chapters of the book. And the third is by directing attention towards the late Enlightenment, a period which Ferrone dates from the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 until the end of the eighteenth century and which he identifies as the period in which a distinctively enlightened culture came into being, ‘a culture that consisted in the production and consumption of new representations, institutions, values, practices, languages, and styles of thought’ rather than just new ideas. Three studies of the late Enlightenment make up the final chapters of the book.

In the genealogy, Ferrone identifies Hegel as the originator of the paradigm of the centaur, the first writer to conceive of the Enlightenment as a historical event and as a stage in the development of spirit. At the same time, Ferrone believes, Hegel was a major figure in the creation of a vein of anti-Enlightenment thinking, according to which the elevation of independent judgement by Kant and his contemporaries led to the rejection of all authorities, a development which could be discerned in the transformation of the emancipatory spirit of the French Revolution into the barbarity of the Reign of Terror.

The idea that the Enlightenment contained the seeds of events which contradicted its basic principles was taken up by Marx in Die Heilige Familie (1844–5), where he argued that bourgeois society was the Enlightenment’s most distinctive product. In Marx’s account, the overthrow of the ancien régime, though justified in terms of equality, rights, and the expansion of the franchise, handed power to the controllers of production and contributed to a nineteenth-century ideology which identified individualism as the distinctive character of the Enlightenment.

For Marx, the Enlightenment was not the unequivocally positive event that many of its supporters had envisioned, but it was nevertheless a necessary step on the road towards a communist society. Horkheimer and Adorno, writing in 1944, took the critical elements of this and other nineteenth-century views and sheered away the qualifications, fixing on the Enlightenment as the cause of totalitarianism in Europe, of mass consumerism in America, and of the wider dehumanisation of society by science and technology. In their eyes, the independent reason which had been lauded by Enlightenment philosophers had engendered a mania for the manipulation and administration of society. They were not perhaps, to the extent that Ferrone imagines, interested in...