American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason by Caroline Winterer (review)

Caroline Winterer concludes American Enlightenments with a striking image of Charles Willson Peale's mastodon skeleton, mounted with its tusks curving downward like a saber-toothed tiger's incisors. There was a debate in the early nineteenth century, Winterer explains, about mammoths and mastodons. Were these beasts harmless plant eaters, like elephants, or, as Peale thought, vicious carnivores, relics "of past American glory" (253)? Winterer compares this debate to the twentieth-century one over the legacy of the Enlightenment: "Has it been mostly positive or negative?" (253). Do we blame it for "concocting rationalist regimes of classification and control that led straight to some of the greatest collective tragedies of the twentieth century" or laud it as the foundation "of universal human rights and a cosmopolitan frame of mind that ha[s] led to some of the greatest achievements for human justice in the history of the world" (254)? Do the tusks point down or up?

Of course, the question of the Enlightenment's legacy is not at all like the one about the mastodon. It is neither a simple choice (up or down, herbivore or carnivore), nor is it quickly and decisively resolved with more data. "The Enlightenment" is a historiographical construct, a name given to a cloud (rather than a distinctly bordered set) of ideas, attitudes, and practices that historians have found especially prominent in some sectors of European and Euro-American society over the long eighteenth century. In any case, Winterer sidesteps the question of the essence or legacy of the Enlightenment as misguided, arguing that what has gone by the name "Enlightenment" is more a myth or a gross caricature than reliable history. Like others who have written on this topic in the last decade or so, Winterer wants to move us from "the Enlightenment" to the plural and lowercase "enlightenments." For Winterer, this means turning from the historian's construct, the cultural critic's punching bag, and the op-ed writer's shorthand term to the ways that people in the past actually talked about being "enlightened."¹

We love when historians do this, don't we? Rather than continue to argue about an abstraction, a cartoon, they say, we should return to the primary sources, rehistoricize and recontextualize them, and then we will be sure to find our topic different—stranger, more complicated, more interesting—than we were led to expect from all the secondhand commentary. This project, as Winterer puts it, requires "that we scrape away the many barnacles that have glued themselves to the idea of enlightenment in the past two centuries so that we can actually see and hear what eighteenth-century people are telling us" (4). Winterer is right when she notes (as others have before her) that people in the 1700s did not think of themselves as living in the Enlightenment. Some of them did, however, talk about enlightenment as a process rather than an epoch and about themselves as living in an enlightened society and an enlightened age, attaching new meanings and new powers to the term. Yet this move from Enlightenment to enlightenments, from historiographical construct to self-descriptions, is not as easy as it sounds. This reconstructive intellectual history involves more than pluralizing, lowercasing, or stripping off layers of barnacles.

To the fans or critics of the "quasi-mythical" (4) or "hyper-real" (255) Enlightenment, Winterer promises to "neither celebrate nor condemn" (2) her historical subjects but merely to reconstruct their views of the world. This is an admirable stance, though it need not shove aside analyses of the relationship between knowledge and power. She discusses, for example, a 1793 painting by William Winstanley that hung at Mount Vernon (and serves as the book's cover illustration). View of the North [Hudson] River (Morning) is a picturesque scene with a rosy sky reflected in the placid river waters that lead the eye...