The Unbearable Heaviness of Being in Eighteenth-Century Studies

As a cross-section of recent scholarship, these four books make it possible to appraise not only the individual authors' arguments but also the state of academic discourse. Things do not look bright. To make clear the principles of judgment in this review, let me first explain the three qualities I am looking for in a humanistic book.

1) Style. One can dispute what constitutes an optimal style. But certain things always make a text unwieldy. Obscurity—when words are wrenched from their conventional meanings, and the reader has to guess which possible sense the author intended. Prolixity—when extremely long sentences force one, like a Latin student, to scan far ahead in order to figure out where the sentence is going. These and other writing flaws will make a text unbearable to read.

2) Coherence. The overall plan of a book must be evident to the reader. An introduction should define issues comprehensively, at a high level of abstraction that subsumes all the specifics revealed in subsequent chapters. Historians who have spent years in the archives must resist the temptation to reproduce evidence for its own sake. Literary scholars must resist the inclination to announce every clever paradox that comes to mind. Each bit of evidence, each theoretical formulation, must fit into a whole.

3) Significance. A work must not only cohere internally, it must reverberate outwardly. We live in a democratic society, and so we have a vigorous public sphere filled with intense debates about major ethical issues. Today, every thinking person is engaged by problems such as the following. Is it legitimate to use torture to draw information from suspected terrorists? Do gays have a right to marry? What is the proper relationship between Church and State? It's not self-evident that any of these questions hinge on our understanding of the eighteenth century. Specialists of the eighteenth century, then, have to work particularly hard to convince thoughtful citizens that their writing is worth the detour away from the vital problems of the present.

One could argue that, aside from contemporary political issues, there are perennial scholarly ones. But all the longstanding issues in scholarship, such as "How to explain the origins of the French Revolution," once had a vital connection to contemporary problems. When an issue becomes canonized, it can quickly lose its existential point because the outside world is in flux. Scholars riveted by an old academic debate often fail to realize that the universe is no longer made up of the entities about which they are talking. Each generation of scholars working upon a classic problem must define the problem anew, must revitalize it in relationship to the present.

About five years ago, I changed my primary field of study. Instead of the French Enlightenment, I now concentrate on American and European constitutional law since World War II. I remain convinced that a knowledge of earlier centuries is indispensable for understanding the present era. But I do not keep abreast of all the developments in eighteenth-century studies. Since I no longer research the eighteenth century for its own sake, I am perhaps no longer the proper person to review these books. However, it is rare to have an insider who is also an outsider—someone who has both an appreciation for eighteenth-century studies and detachment enough to recognize when the enterprise has become dubious. I hope I have not erred too far on the critical side in the following discussion, and that some readers will be tempted to cut themselves loose from...