What is the
Enlightenment?
Prof Mark
Knights
Two lectures
1: What was the Enlightenment? What did it think it
was challenging? What was its scope? What
aspects of life did it want to shape or influence?
So, how the Enlightenment saw itself.
2: Why is it important for modernists to understand
the Enlightenment? What was its legacy and why
is that legacy a controversial one? Is the
Enlightenment a useful term, does it have a
coherence, a common set of values? So, how the
Enlightenment has been seen by others.
The terms of Enlightenment
• Enlightenment: it was contemporary; 1784
Prussian essay competition ‘was ist
Aufklärung?’
• More common was use of the verb
enlightening: shedding light on.
• Description of a ‘process’ rather than an
‘event’ or period (the term ‘Age of Reason’,
which is also used, does suggest a period).
• The image of light.
• But mainly C19th term used to describe an
intellectual and cultural movement in the ‘long
eighteenth century’ (c.1650 or 1680 to
1815).‘Early Enlightenment’ (late C17th-early
C18th, esp in Holland and England) and ‘late’ or
‘high’ Enlightenment (late C18th, which pushed
ideas outlined earlier further and with a new
confidence)
• The Enlightenment had ‘philosophes’ –
philosophers, public intellectuals
• Where? That’s a point of debate to which we
must return. Traditionally Europe, especially
north-western Europe, though increasingly also
seen as a phenomenon affecting the Atlantic
world and governing Europe’s interaction with
global expansion
The Enlightenment as an attack on the
‘ancien régime’
• ‘ancien régime’: a term invented at the French
Revolution of 1789 to describe the ‘old rule’,
‘old order’, or ‘former regime’ that the
revolutionaries were trying to sweep away
• The Revolutionaries of 1789 saw themselves
as carrying out many of the ideas formulated
by the philosophes and idolised some of them
1794 Allegory
of the
Revolution by
Nicolas Henry
Jeaurat de
Bertry,
showing JeanJacques
Rousseau
Interring Voltaire (d. 1778) in the
Panthéon 1791
The Enlightenment caricature of the
‘ancien régime’
• Governed by outdated notions
of authority and order, based
on Scripture and custom
• Two key institutions:
monarchy/state and church,
buttressed by hierarchical view
of society and inequalities of
wealth and gender.
• Monarchy: divine right,
absolute, sacred and paternal
power, excluding people from
power, no right to resist.
Bishop Bossuet, Politics Drawn
from Holy Scripture (1707)
Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha
(1680)
The ancien régime church
• Bible as source of wisdom for human affairs
• Powerful local and national institution governing
people’s lives and beliefs
• Man as essentially corrupt and evil
• Concerned with life after death rather than life on
earth
• Intolerant of other beliefs
• Opposed to progress (eg Galileo)
• The Protestant reformation had ‘lifted the veil’
(Voltaire) but not removed it
• The church harboured ‘priestcraft’, ‘superstition’ and
‘ignorance’
Social orders
• Great chain of being
• Society hierarchically
arranged and fixed,
reflecting the divine order
• Equality was an impossibility
since it contravened that
notion of hierarchy
• Liberty contravened notion
of order
• Subjects not citizens
• Rural rather than urban
society
What positive ideals did the
Enlightenment seek instead?
Two over-arching objectives:
1) Reason and experiment
Immanuel Kant, 1784 ‘dare to
know’, free oneself from being
slaves to others, think for
yourself, use reason.
Deification of reason
Experimental philosophy – don’t
go on assumptions but start
from direct observation, and
that will clear you from the
ignorance of the past
William Blake’s depiction of Isaac Newton
as the personification of reason , 1805
2) progress towards the good life
• Optimistic belief in what man could achieve through learning and
observation of himself and nature.
• Belief in progress. Marquis de Condorcet, ‘Sketch for a Historical
Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind’ (c.1794): advances in
reason, knowledge and harnessing science lead to progress;
through medical science ‘the perfectibility of man is unlimited’.
Vision of universal education; greater leisure; better provision to
feed the population and produce enjoyable goods; reason itself will
progress and advance; the sexes will become equal; prejudices will
be eradicated. ‘Men will know then that if they have obligations to
beings who do not yet exist, these obligations do not consist in
giving life, but in giving happiness. Their object is the general
welfare of the human species’.
• Man as good and as a social animal
• Human happiness and the good life as the purpose of society.
• There were of course occasions when these convictions were
shaken eg 1755 Lisbon earthquake; French Revolution’s excesses.
But can we identify areas where the
Enlightenment appears distinctive?
1) Religion. Questioned the relationship between
man and God; between Church and State; the
nature of revealed religion; the superiority of
Christianity; and the nature of any Church.
Hostility to superstition and to intolerance
(écraser l’infâme). Some adopted a more
rational form of religion, deism (Voltaire,
Thomas Paine) and even atheism (Baron
d’Holbach). But ironically many clerics were part
of the Enlightenment e.g. Abbé Sièyes on the
‘third estate’.
2) Political Authority
• New ways of thinking
about the powers of the
people and their rulers.
• Ideas of contract and
natural rights (John Locke;
Rousseau).
• Justification of revolution
(Britain 1689, America
1776, France 1789)
• Desacralisation of
monarchy; admiration of
republics (strong
influence of antiquity)
3) The public
• The public as a force
• Proliferation of print and
case for press freedom
• New institutions where
the public met and
debated: coffee houses,
cafés, salons.
4) Knowledge
• The organisation and
collection of knowledge
and artefacts (Carl
Linnaeus 1707-1778; the
Encyclopédie 1751-1772)
– D’Alembert and Diderot
• New energy to
understand the natural
world, the body, and
scientific processes
(inoculation, analysis of
air, the microscope,
dissection and medicine)
5) Wealth and luxury
• Changing notions about
the creation of wealth –
a move away from
consumption as sinful
and from protectionist
economics – Adam
Smith’s Wealth of
Nations (1776)
• Debate about luxury
6) Exploration of the world
• Scientific and
economic drivers
• Encounters with nonwestern civilisations
– relativism and
questioning how far
Europe was superior
(Diderot, Tahiti)
• Fascination with the
exotic
Variety within the Enlightenment
• How these ideals were
thought about varied. Pro
and antiChurch/Christianity; pro and
anti monarchy; different
ways of thinking about
sociability or what was the
good life.
• And less novel than it liked
to claim? There had been
earlier thinkers and
movements on which the
Enlightenment built
The good life? A satire, by Gillray, of the
prince of Wales (future George IV), 1792