Mariia Dotsenko reviews The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History by J.C.D. Clark. (Oxford University Press, 2024)
In today’s world, it is almost impossible to identify any phenomenon which is not historically connected with the ideas of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment and its legacy seem to be embedded in every sphere of our lives and have become firmly entrenched in the public consciousness as a product of Western civilization, successfully spreading its values throughout the world. However, the establishment of the paradigm of global history has challenged this vision of the totality of the Enlightenment. Much Enlightenment scholarship has treated the Enlightenment as a meaningful historical category while debating its plurality, chronology, and geography; however, a significant critical strand – most prominently J. C. D. Clark, – has questioned whether ‘the Enlightenment’ names a coherent historical entity at all, i.e. whether it actually existed.
Jonathan Clark is a distinguished British scholar specializing in the history of the Anglo-Saxon world in the 17th and 18th centuries. Having introduced the concept of the “long 18th century” into the study of English history, he earned a reputation as a ruthless revisionist of modern history as early as in the 1980s. His choice of the Enlightenment as the subject of his current research is no accident—after all, the Enlightenment is traditionally regarded as a product and achievement of modernity. Thus, Clark is effectively continuing the course he set in past decades toward rethinking the phenomenon of modernity, but he is doing so on a new plane, addressing a pan–European phenomenon for the first time.
The very first sentence of Clark’s monograph leaves the reader perplexed: “In the English-speaking world during the long eighteenth century, “enlightenment” was everywhere but “the Enlightenment” was nowhere” (1). As a true representative of the Cambridge historiographical tradition, he attempts to trace the history of the Enlightenment as a movement, focusing primarily on the history of the term’s usage. To do this, the author goes beyond his usual focus on the Anglo-Saxon world and analyzes the connotations of the word “the Enlightenment” in the treatises of leading figures in philosophical thought from England, France, Germany, the United States, and Scotland.
Clark’s key methodological premise is the assertion that the absence of a term to define a phenomenon is tantamount to the absence of the phenomenon itself.
He writes that “the members of…society cannot perform any act without having language that enables them to understand that act, since in the absence of such an understanding they would be doing something else” (479). Clark, drawing on the works of key figures in the Western intellectual scene from the late 17th to the late 18th centuries, seeks to differentiate the concepts of “enlightenment” as a metaphor associated with insight, and “the Enlightenment”, which is understood as a historiographical concept functioning in contemporary historiography. In Part I “Absences” he examines both English and French intellectual discourses, making an attempt to trace the Enlightenment in the history of these countries. Based on the established historiographical notion that this phenomenon originated in England, Clark appeals to the theses of such eminent thinkers asJ. Locke, M. Wollstonecraft, W. Godwin, and D. Hume, but he does not identify any evidence of the existence of this movement in Anglophone discourse. Since the Enlightenment is considered to have flourished in France, he scrutinizes the intellectual legacy of such philosophers as d`Alembert, Diderot, Voltaire, and J.-J. Rousseau, looking for the reflections on the ideas attributed to the Enlightenment, and finds these ideas too vague and incoherent to be identified as an ideological basis of such a movement.
Part II “Absences”is devoted to the examination of the American context of the emergence of the Enlightenment; it analyzes the interconnections between this phenomenon and empiricism, liberalism, and socialism. Based on a detailed textual analysis, provided in the first two parts, the author concludes that the intellectuals of both the 17th and the 18th centuries did not consider their age enlightened, and the concept of “enlightenment” was imbued with a meaning similar to “illumination” or “insight” and was used primarily in a religious context.
So, in Clark’s view, there was no unified ideological, political, philosophical, or cultural movement of the Enlightenment thinkers aimed at improving human life and perfecting society.
Part III “Achievements”the “Enlightenment” appears to readers as a historiographical concept that emerged in 19th-century Germany to denote the specific period in German history. Clark states that this term is claimed to have been established in the historiography of the development of Western European philosophical thought only by the early 20th century. Furthermore, he claims that the further development of the concept of “the Enlightenment” and its identification with the rapidly evolving liberal Western democracy took place in the second half of the 20th century. At that time, the author observes, such terms as “the Enlightenment Project” – a global idea uniting the countries of Western civilization in the defense of their fundamental values – and “the Counter-Enlightenment,” associated simultaneously with Nazi and totalitarian threats to the enlightened democratic world, appeared in historiography.
In Clark`s opinion, this reflects the fact that after World War II, “the Enlightenment” as a historiographical concept definitively supplanted the original interpretation of “enlightenment” as a metaphor. Consequently, “the Enlightenment,” which is traditionally positioned as an indispensable characteristic of the modern era, appears to readers as nothing more than a historiographical myth with geopolitical undertones.
The revolutionary nature of Clark’s views ensures a prominent place of this monograph both among works on the history of the Enlightenment and studies in intellectual history in general. The inclusion of a significant number of citations from classical and, conversely, little-known works by key Western thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries lends Clark’s conception credibility and allows even the uninitiated reader to trace the development of philosophical thought during the “Enlightened Age” and identify the original connotations of the most symbolic concepts of Enlightenment thought. Drawing on case studies from England, France, the United States, Germany, and Scotland, the author demonstrates the results of applying the techniques of content analysis and discourse analysis, allowing his audience to follow the course of his mind and avoiding their loss on the murky path from the Dark Ages to the Light.
As a specialist in British history, Clark pays considerable attention to the intellectual landscape of this country, shifting his research focus away from America and France — countries where revolutionary events are typically considered as a key to the formation of Western democracy, one of the products of the Enlightenment.
Paradoxically, Clark manages to sidestep the question of the essence of the most famous product of the “non-existent Enlightenment” – enlightened absolutism, which undoubtedly requires further rethinking following the attempted deconstruction of its ideological core.
It is impossible not to notice that Clark’s approach to the question of the essence of the Enlightenment can be viewed as an alarming symptom pointing to a looming crisis of the idea of modernity in Western intellectual space. By decisively challenging the Enlightenment studies paradigm entrenched in Western historiography, Clark effectively questions the viability of this current vision of this field in global historical scholarship. The reflections presented in the monograph can be seen as a call for further conceptual rethinking of the processes of liberalization, secularization, and democratization that have largely determined the formation of modern Western society. Who knows, perhaps this very study will spark a new historiographical revolution and radically transform the global historical community’s understanding of humanity’s long journey toward progress and brighter future?
Mariia Dotsenko is an Assistant Editor at the Review of Democracy.
