The Enlightenment. A Genealogy (review)

"Scholars, philosophers, churchmen, journalists, officials, teachers, and scores of others have been discussing the Enlightenment for nearly three hundred years, yet there is remarkably little agreement on what, precisely, the Enlightnenment was" (7).

Yet the narrative that Dan Edelstein weaves out of those centuries of disagreement turns out to be what it takes to nail down "the beast" (his word). Not the several tomes of Peter Gay's or Jonathan Israel's monumental endeavors: just one hundred and twenty lively, irreverent, erudite, delightfully enjoyable pages in which Edelstein confronts the Beast head-on. Not with a treatise, but with a slingshot of a book.

We should not be fooled by its swiftness and unassuming ways: this is a courageous and ambitious book that has the rare virtue of being both broad in scope and extremely precise and detailed in its arguments and supporting evidence. Without an ounce of fat or obfuscating jargon. The approach is both historical and philological, and Edelstein merges two distinct but correlated strands. The first is the analysis of the ways in which the concept of "Enlightenment" emerged and spread across Europe roughly between 1680 and 1740 "as a self-reflexive understanding of the historical importance and specificity of eighteenth-century Europe." The second is a critical assessment of the historiographical framing of the Enlightenment. The book thus offers a sharp, critical assessment of the relevance and the viability of the various methods and analysis: it discusses their merits as well as their aporias and pitfalls, always grounding the critique in concrete, pointed examples. Because it presents an overview of recent and influential developments in historiography and history of ideas, the book may also become a precious tool for those wishing to use it as a case study testing the wealth of approaches and methods out there.

There are sixteen short chapters complemented by detailed notes and bibliographical references (the notes take almost as much space as the text) which mark out the stages of a sustained argument that yields an original interpretation of the Enlightenment (in fact, the book is a kind of whodunit, leading the reader on a quest for clarity through a dense methodological thicket), while also reviewing "rival" or alternative interpretations. The Enlightenment emerges on the one hand as a "narrative," a "myth;" on the other, as "a loose collection of individuals, reforms, institutions, debates, texts" (3). Edelstein argues that the Enlightenment was less an epistemological phenomenon than a narratological one: it was a "master narrative" of modernity that did not necessarily produce original thought (its purpose was primarily to destroy Scholastic prejudice, not to create new systems) and was not especially radical (though it had significant incremental, political impact in France through the diffusion of philosophical ideas among the elites). This character of publicity explains why the narrative of Enlightenment must be associated with France. Here Edelstein goes against the grain of recent scholarship that has argued for the dissemination of national or regional Enlightenments, variously located in the Low Countries, in England, in Scotland or in Naples. Yet France enjoyed something of a hegemonic cultural and linguistic status in the eighteenth century, and much evidence points to the fact that networks of dissemination and publicity radiated from France throughout Europe. The very looseness of the narrative makes for its success: "The French narrative of the Enlightenment [. . .] was sufficiently open-ended that it could be appropriated by almost anyone for almost any political or intellectual purpose. It is precisely that open-endedness that makes the French narrative the most likely candidate for providing a template for other national, confessional, or regional Enlightenments" (105).

The other major axis of Edelstein's analysis is genealogical: he locates the origin of the Enlightenment in the late seventeenth-century Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Though the Quarrel began as an argument about the literary value of pagan epic poems, it quickly became a debate about the meaning of science, history, religion, politics and cultural...