AHR Forum

The Return of the Enlightenment

KAREN OBRIEN

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THE SECOND DECADE of the twenty-first century finds the Enlightenment in robust
health. As a designation of period, as an intellectual clustering, as a method of experimental inquiry, and as an ideal, even, of rationality and toleration to be pitted
against the worlds zones of intolerance, it is back in circulation and generating new
historical work. The Enlightenment has always mobilized and divided opinion. Historians are never as decisively for or against intellectual movements such as Scholasticism, the Renaissance, or Romanticism as they are for or against the Enlightenment. Yet it has proved to be historiographically tenacious, despite a phase of
devastating postwar and postmodern critique, and many late-twentieth-century years
of reticence on the part of historians as to whether the Enlightenment had any originary role in the French Revolution, the American Revolution, democracy, international law, or cultural pluralism. This may be in part because Enlightenment is not
an entirely retrospective category, and this is one area of inquiry in which our own
historical terminologies of Enlightenment, the public sphere, and public opinion
intersect productively with eighteenth-century vocabularies of light, lumie`res, and
Aufkla
rung. And if the Enlightenment is resurgent now, it is also because we possess
an extraordinarily rich picture of the social world of the Enlightenment, mapped out
during the decades of reticence when historians were more inclined to adopt Ju
rgen
Habermass vocabulary of the bourgeois public sphere, and to explore new modes
of social interaction such as politeness, mixed-gender sociability, cultures of reading, and clandestine and radical associations. The recent, renewed emphasis upon
the primacy of ideas in the study of the Enlightenment owes a great deal to this
sophisticated history of its social embodiments and circulations, and there can be no
returning to the pure philosophical air exhaled by earlier-twentieth-century historians of ideas.
For all the apparent tension between sociological and intellectual-historical versions of Enlightenment, we have never been better placed to understand the embodied life and impact of its ideas. The first two volumes of Jonathan Israels history
of the Enlightenmentthe most ambitious since Peter Gays The Enlightenment: An
Interpretation (19661969)have forged a massively scholarly intellectual yet socially particularized history of the Enlightenment as a radical, secular movement that
holds the key to the prehistory of democratic liberalism, demanding a major reorientation of the periodization, canonical texts, and political import of Enlightenment

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1 Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 16501750 (Oxford, 2001); Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man, 1670
1752 (Oxford, 2006).
2 For example, Anthony J. LaVopa, A New Intellectual History? Jonathan Israels Enlightenment,
Historical Journal 52, no. 3 (2009): 717738.
3 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments
(2004; repr., with an introduction by Gordon Brown, London, 2008); Tzvetan Todorov, In Defence of
the Enlightenment (London, 2009); Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York, 2004); Robert B. Louden, The World We Want: How and Why
the Ideals of the Enlightenment Still Elude Us (Oxford, 2007).
4 The best summary of these debates is Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., Whats
Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford, Calif., 2001). For an interesting coda to this
debate, see Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Ju
rgen Habermans and
Jacques Derrida (Chicago, 2003), 14 22.

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studies.1 Israels account is unabashedly polemical in its rehabilitation of a radical,

religiously freethinking strain of the Enlightenment at the expense of the moderate
mainstream of Voltaire, Hume, Locke, Wolff, and others. As such, Israels study
has attracted controversy (reaching the pages of The Nation and beyond), not least
among those who see its assertion of the inherent power of certain privileged ideas
as in some ways replicating the self-authorizing rationalism of the Enlightenments
more extremist intellectual figures.2 This atmosphere of controversy is surely something to be welcomedevidence at least that as a nexus of concepts, the Enlightenment continues to provide clarifying focus for the critical self-awareness of Western modernity as something larger and older than liberalism. Historians of the
Enlightenment complain about, but also reap the benefits of, the broader interest,
among political scientists and political commentators, in the nature and legacy of its
rationalism, its universalism, and its coherence and legacy as a project. What is
new, latterly, is the tone of optimismtaking Israels defense to extremes of overcelebrationthat has crept into recent books for non-specialist audiences. Among
the bestsellers in this vein, Gertrude Himmelfarbs The Roads to Modernity (2004)
its British edition featuring an enthusiastic preface by Gordon Brownextols the
British Enlightenment as the source of voluntarist and tolerant values for a market
economy, while Tzvetan Todorovs In Defence of the Enlightenment (2009) offers a
Pollyanna-ish reading of the Enlightenment as a repository of good political intentions.3 Gone is the sense of a need to readdress the Marxist postwar critique of
Enlightenment as the precursor of the murderously technocratic state mounted by
Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), or to resist the
philosophical assault on its foundational universalism and rationalism by poststructuralists.4 The Enlightenment, successfully historicized back into existence by scholars, has recovered its nerve, and if anything, it now suffers from an embarrassment
of admiration.
As the dark postwar Enlightenment slips behind us, the shadows of the early
twenty-first century undoubtedly hover over current preoccupations, in scholarship
and more generally, with the ways in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
writers balanced universality of values with pluralities of cultures, with the Enlightenments self-ratifying and Eurocentric view of the development of civilization, the
question of Enlightenment and the truth claims of religious belief, and the Enlightenment faith in the market economy. The articles in this forum give a sense of this
general field of inquiry as one that discretely enlists contemporary questions, without

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Karen OBrien

5 See Charles W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically in the Age of Reason
(Chicago 2007); Miles Ogborn and Charles W. J. Withers, eds., Geographies of the Book (Aldershot,
2010); and Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in
Britain, Ireland and America (Chicago, 2006).
6 John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 16801760 (Cambridge,
2005); John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and
Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and Early Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2006);
Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, N.J., 2005);
David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna
(Princeton, N.J., 2008).

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loss of historical particularity, and for which the Enlightenment provides a rich intellectual resource. Sophus Reinerts and Fredrik Albritton Jonssons articles speak
indirectly to the current crisis of neoliberal economics: the latter by drawing attention to the ecological dimensions of Adam Smiths defense of free markets as rooted
in a symbiotic relationship between man and natural resources, and the former by
showing that not all Enlightenment thinkers assumed that market economies foster
peaceful internationalization or promote greater social equality. William Max Nelson cautions against too blithe a recuperation of the Enlightenment spirit for present
purposes. He explores the Enlightenment roots of Eurocentric racism: How responsible is the Enlightenment for exclusionary Western theories of civilization, and
do these still lurk behind political rationalizations of military intervention in our own
time? Indeed, to what extent does the very notion of the West subsume a heterogeneous set of European national experiences within the expansionist historical
trajectories of Britain, France, and the United States?
As well as exuding some of the renewed confidence in their field, the articles in
the forum exemplify the recent expansion of the canons and locations of Enlightenment. They take us into the intellectual worlds of government officials, insignificant university professors, and colonial engineers, as well as into a variety of provincial and colonial places beyond the metropolitan centers of Enlightenment
production. In negotiating spatial scales of analysis, from the local, to the state, to
the international, they also illustrate the infusion of new geographical perspectives
into this field, including ever more sophisticated geographies of the book that pay
attention to the role of locality in the making and mediation of print culture.5 The
authors augment the recent emphasis upon the political and economical aspects of
Enlightenment in the influential works of Israel, John Robertson, John Marshall, and
others, and they also sidestep the other issue that has preoccupied so many scholars,
namely the extent to which the Enlightenment was a force for secularization or,
alternatively, a reforming movement within traditions of religious thought.6 Instead,
the articles promote a realignment between the intellectual history of the Enlightenment and the history of science, and emphasize natural history, in particular, as
a central practice of Enlightenment, itself undergoing disciplinary transformation
during this period. For, as two of the articles imply, current histories of science and
of political and economic thought have not been moving in tandem. Where historians
of science have integrated the scientific revolution into much longer histories of
natural philosophy, and have paid close attention to the social processes and geographical sites of scientific knowledge-making, other intellectual historians have only
recently been rethinking the natural-philosophical foundations of Enlightenment

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7 For example, Edward Grant, A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2007).
8 For example, Mary Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the
Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002); Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
9 Notably the work of Margaret C. Jacob and Larry Stewart, including their jointly authored Practical
Matter: Newtons Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 16871851 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); and
Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford,
2008).
10 The political dimensions of this response are discussed by Robert Travers in Ideology and Empire
in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge, 2007).
11 Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago, 2005).

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knowledge and practice.7 Notable studies of Enlightenment science, such as James

Delbourgos A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early
America (2006) and Jan Golinskis British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment
(2007), invite reconsideration of the institutional and national structures within
which specific ways of knowing and talking about nature were sanctioned or discounted during this period. And a number of biographical studies of scientific figures
have further embedded the creation of new scientific epistemologies within accounts
of social networks, forms of mobility, and political cultures.8 Yet, as the articles in
this forum argue, there is more work to do if we are to understand the basis of
Enlightenment projects for political and economic progress in the concepts and practice of the new sciences of the eighteenth century (in modern terminology: chemistry, botany, anthropology, and ecology) as well as we understand the impact of the
mathematical sciences in the earlier period.9
Albritton Jonssons article undertakes a reappraisal of Enlightenment political
economy in terms of its different theoretical and practical models for the management of natural resources and the conversion of nature into capital, classifying them
in terms of their rival ecologies of commerce. To what extent were Enlightenment
economics derived from a very particular and optimistic vision of natural plenitude
that we can no longer share? Albritton Jonsson contrasts Smiths liberal ecological
perspectives with those implicit in the British East India Companys executive response to the Bengal famine of 17691770.10 He ends with some reflections on the
perennial dangers of naturalizing ecological vulnerability rather than framing it as
a problem of social justice. He draws upon a substantial body of scholarship on
natural history as an instrument of power in this period, including the global applications of agricultural technologies and bio-prospecting. He places The Wealth of
Nations within a long tradition of naturalistic economic thought in which nature itself
occupied a position of ontological priority, which it would subsequently lose following what Margaret Schabas has termed the denaturalization of economics in
the nineteenth century.11 Albritton Jonsson describes Smiths environmental thinking as seminal, but also acknowledges that Smiths somewhat static picture of the
natural world, along with his clear demarcation of humans (with their unique propensity to truck, barter, and exchange) from other animal species, was only partially abreast of the most contemporary work in plant and animal biology. During
Smiths lifetime, older, mechanist modes of natural philosophy underwent a major
transformation and were reconfigured within the new disciplinary field of life sciences that is now termed vitalism. Vitalist forms of thought and inquiry were various and internally contested, but converged around a view of the natural world as

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Karen OBrien

12 Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley, Calif., 2005), E. C. Spary,
Utopias Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago, 2000); Phillip R. Sloan,
Natural History, in Knud Haakonssen, ed., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy,
2 vols. (Cambridge, 2006), 2: 903938.
13 William Smellies eight-volume 1781 translation is discussed by Paul B. Wood in Buffons Reception in Scotland: The Aberdeen Connection, Annals of Science 44, no. 2 (1987): 169190.
14 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 4: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge,
2005). The Raynal edition is published by the Centre International detude du XVIIIe sie`cle and was
the subject of a Cambridge (UK) conference in 2010.

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dynamic, self-activating, and harmonious. The scale and significance of that transformation and its impact on other nascent eighteenth-century disciplines has been
the subject of important reappraisal, by Peter Hanns Reill and others.12 The dominant work here, Buffons Histoire naturelle, generale et particulie`re (17491788), exerted enormous influence among the medics and academics of Smiths Scotland, as
well as in Britain more generally.13 As Albritton Jonssons article implies, there is
a great deal more to be written about the impact of this new natural history on the
disciplines of history and political economy. Smith had no truck with Buffons infamous notion of human degeneration in the New World, but The Wealth of Nations
bears witness to an insufficiently noticed but central Buffonian theme in the Enlightenment account of human society: the role of mass human migration in transforming geographies, precipitating both genocide and new phases of social development, and even altering the biological composition of the species itself. J. G. A.
Pocock, in the fourth volume of his ongoing study of Gibbon, has laid the groundwork for a more encompassing account of the global history of the Enlightenment
and its natural-historical contexts, as has the publication of the first volume of what
is to be a full, critical edition of the multi-authored 1780 version of Raynals hugely
influential Histoire philosophique.14 Buffon awaits a similar edition, and there is a
great deal more to be written about the environmental basis of Enlightenment economics.
Allied to the Enlightenments exploration of the impact of migration was its reinvention of the practice of demography, no longer simply as a means of measuring
military capacity, but as evidence of the underlying ecology of human society. As with
other aspects of nature, Enlightenment accounts of population differed in the degree
to which they treated human fertility as a resilient and constant aspect of nature or
as (more usually) a fragile force in need of careful nurture. Like most recent scholars,
Albritton Jonsson situates Malthuss Essay on the Principle of Population, with its
reminder of human helplessness in the face of natural calamity, in a line of continuity
with Smiths non-interventionist approach to nature. As he says, the non-human part
of nature, for Malthus, was largely an inert repository of exploitable resources, feast
or famine, depending upon how many offspring human beings tried to cram around
natures table. Yet, because Malthus showed the extent to which human history participates directly in the natural processes of growth and oscillation (as he called
it) and how little politics can do to remedy the oscillations of nature, we might also
say that he achieved a far more radical naturalization of political economy than
any of his Enlightenment predecessors. The Enlightenment narrative of the progress
of society is here exposed by Malthus as the self-affirming story of the wealthy elite:
the histories of mankind, which we possess, he writes, are, in general, histories

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15 Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge,
Mass., 1996); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif., 1988).
16 Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009); Mona Ozouf, Les
mots des femmes: Essai sur la singularite francaise (Paris, 2005); Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, eds.,
Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2005); Karen OBrien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2009).
17 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007).

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only of the higher classes. The rest of mankind lives and has always lived in a domain
of natural vicissitude, close to the margins of subsistence.
The biological turn of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had
its origins in Enlightenment natural history, yet, as Malthuss Essay makes evident,
also served to undermine confidence in the efficacy of the very projects for amelioration and reform so characteristic of the Enlightenment turn of mind. Nelsons
article on Enlightenment ideas of racial engineering takes us to the heart of this
paradox by telling the story of a project for racial reform based upon an overzealous application of Buffonian species theory. It was the work of two white officials
in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), who shared the goal of creating a
new type of male mulatto soldier to defend the colony and to reinforce white
domination through the policing of the enslaved majority. Fortunately, the projects
came to nothing, but their interest, Nelson argues, lies in what they tell us first about
the proto-eugenic, Enlightenment origins of racist theories of human difference,
second about the influence of Buffons idea that species are malleable through selective breeding (an idea quite distinct from evolutionary theory), and third about
the ways in which the climate theory of Montesquieu and others played out on the
colonial ground. Nelson situates his article within longstanding debates about the
Enlightenments philosophy and politics of inclusion and exclusion. To what extent
did the Enlightenment category of the abstract, universal human subject serve to
misrepresent, exclude, or render normatively other non-whites, women, the poor,
and the peoples of the European periphery? In relation to women, previous scholarly
accounts argued that universalizing discourses of reason, rights, and citizenship
served to compound political exclusion.15 These have been qualified by recent work
emphasizing gender difference and feminine empathy as positive social values within
the Enlightenment. Dena Goodman, Mona Ozouf, and others have explored the
ways in which the socially and historically particularizing tendencies of the Enlightenment and its emphasis upon the value of mixed social interaction created vocabularies and roles for women, which some women themselves found enabling.16
And Lynn Hunts Inventing Human Rights, while it does not downplay the contradictions and gender exclusions inherent in Enlightenment political discourse, draws
attention to the much broader discursive field within which imagined empathy across
divisions of gender created the possibility, at least, for a more inclusive version of
Enlightenment citizenship.17
A similarly positive case clearly cannot be made for the Enlightenment account
of racial difference, or for the ways it became attached to eighteenth-century narratives of civilization, global commerce, and empire. Nelson lists some of the scholarship, particularly from the 1990s, that addressed the postcolonial critique of Enlightenment as coextensive with Western modernity and complicit in the enforced
modernization of non-Western peoples during and after this period. As he also

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18 Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, N.J., 2003); Doris L. Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, N.C., 2005).
19 Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France (Princeton,
N.J., 2005).
20 See, for example, Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Imperial Liberalism (Princeton, N.J., 2010).
21 Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, eds., The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford, 2009).
22 Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, 2008),
8.

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notes, there followed important revisionist work, by Sankar Muthu, Doris Garraway,
and others, that reengaged with the elements of cultural pluralism and of anti-European, anticolonial critique in Enlightenment writers, especially Diderot, with consequential implications for the way in which the Enlightenment is periodized.18
Where intellectual historians (of the Sussex school, in particular) emphasize continuities between the (particularly Scottish) Enlightenment version of the progress
of civilization and the varieties of utilitarian and liberal imperial thought in the nineteenth century, others, notably Jennifer Pitts, argue that nineteenth-century theorists
of empires such as the Mills and De Tocqueville coarsened and betrayed their Enlightenment humanitarian heritage.19 The division of mankind into civilized and barbarian races and cultures thus becomes, in this newer account, a post-Enlightenment
phenomenon.20 After these contrasting theses, a degree of synthesis emerged in a
recent collection of essays, The Postcolonial Enlightenment, which maps out the multiplicity of universalisms and cosmopolitanisms, from Hobbes to Kant, within which
selves and others were textually negotiated during this period.21 Larry Wolff and
Marco Cipollonis useful collection The Anthropology of the Enlightenment (2007)
complicates our picture of the period by exploring the multiple perspectival locations
of observers, and the sliding scales of belonging and non-belonging that shaped the
forms of Enlightenment anthropological inquiry.
Nelson is rightly anxious that the current scholarly mood of balance and synthesis
should not distract us from the sinister implications of eugenic projects such as these,
and he gives us insight into how forms of scientific knowledge, in this period, were
embodied in available kinds of social personae (in this case, that of the philosopheofficial), as well as into the role of the colonial space in the remaking of that knowledge. In this respect, Nelsons article has something in common with Neil Safiers
compelling study Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America
(2008). This book tells the story of the French and Spanish scientific expedition to
Quito in the 1730s to study the curvature of the earth at the equator. Safier takes
us beneath the eventual public packaging of these findings to satisfy the presentational protocols of European print culture, and unravels a skein of print and social
mediations that first enlisted and then silenced the contributions both of non-European actors on the colonial ground and of Europeans lower down the social hierarchy.22 He presents a nuanced picture of Enlightenment science as a both a conceptual advance (his explorers were right about the true shape of the earth) and a
collaborative material practice that did not transcend the racial and social inequalities of its processes of knowledge-making.
Both Safier and Nelson give us insights into the complex career trajectories of
Enlightenment practitioners who mobilized generalized vocabularies of scientific

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Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, 5 vols. (Turin, 19691990).

Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981);
and John Robertson, The Enlightenment above National Context: Political Economy in EighteenthCentury Scotland and Naples, Historical Journal 40, no. 3 (1997): 667697.
23
24

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progress in the cause of national and colonial advancement. Some parallels may be
drawn here with the more palatable poet-economist Agostino Paradisi discussed in
Reinerts article. During his short life, Paradisi made a remarkably successful career
for himself, on slim foundations, as an Enlightenment cultural entrepreneur, and this
persona clearly worked well for him as a strategy of upward social mobility. His
career also exemplifies the blend of practically minded local patriotism and cosmopolitan intellectual outlook that Franco Venturi deemed so typical of the Italian
illuministi.23 Tempted though Reinert says he is to see Paradisi as symbolizing a
striking moment in the transition from humanist erudition to institutionalized political economy, he positions him not as a transitional but as a relatively typical
figure within the disciplinary systems obtaining in Italy at his time, systems issuing
from Italians critical awareness of their own peculiar historical experience. For
Reinert that distinctiveness is still underappreciated. He asserts that the fragmentation of the Enlightenment, in the scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s particularly,
into national contexts, or into radical and moderate, high and low, orthodox and
heterodox strands, has yet to be fully carried through to a thoroughgoing appraisal
of the multiplicity of its historical and economic thought.
Reinert is in some respects writing against the current transnational grain of
Enlightenment scholarship. Enlightenment has featured as a unitary phenomenon
in the work of Israel on the basis of its coherent package of concepts and ideological
commitments, and in the work of Robertson and David Sorkin on the basis of crossnational comparativism, emphasizing parallel social conditions alongside the traffic
of ideas.24 From his Italian historical perspective, Reinert prefers the dissolved Enlightenment, with its plurality of regional phenomena, publications, and practices.
Given the similarities between the fragmented political structures of Italy and Germany in this period, a comparative account of Modena and, say, a small German state
might nevertheless prove instructive. For over and above the debate about the Enlightenments definite article, Reinerts essay allows us to see the ways in which particular cultures of reception and local forms of knowledge mediation, such as clubs,
academies, and universities, in themselves served to constitute an effect of Enlightenment cultural centrality in multiple locations. He tells us that Paradisis defense
of Italian arts and sciences was motivated by an article in the Gazette litteraire de
lEurope which claimed that Italy had too many capitals and was too fragmented
for the flourishing of Enlightenment and progress. The ruling Este family nevertheless attempted to reinvent Modena as a functioning intellectual capital, and Paradisis Italian-centered lectures on historical decline undertook a further localization
of Enlightenment historical paradigms. We might see this reconstitution of urban
locality as intellectual center through Enlightenment practice, in other words, as
structurally connected to the grander versions of that process which took place in
Paris, Berlin, Rome, Mexico City, and elsewhere. Moving beyond models of capital/
province, center/periphery, or the Enlightenment in national context, historians
(many influenced by Daniel Roche) have described these processes of multi-cen-

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Karen OBrien

25 Ste
phane Van Damme, Paris, capitale philosophique: De la Fronde a
` la Revolution (Paris, 2005);
Van Damme and Antonella Romano, Science and World Cities: Thinking Urban Knowledge and Science at Large, Itinerario 33, no. 1 (2009): 7995; Daniel Roche, Humeurs vagabondes: De la circulation
des hommes et de lutilite des voyages (Paris, 2003).
26 Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 5.
27 This is not the case in Istvan Honts Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the NationState in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
28 Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 17001850 (New Haven,
Conn., 2009).
29 Notable exceptions include Knud Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent
in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1996).

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tralization in comparative terms. In some of the most innovative work in recent years,
they have explored the ways in which the Enlightenment motivated the development
of cultural and institutional infrastructure in large and small urban centers, and have
described the cultures of mobility that shaped them.25 Sorkin has likewise argued for
a multinational and comparative history of the religious Enlightenment that emphasizes similarities while recognizing and explicating differences, and his chapter
headings organize his account of a coherently pan-European phenomenon around
key, spatially located figures.26 Enlightenment ideas, in such accounts, not only are
located and described in transit between locations, but are instrumental in the remaking of the meanings of location and of the forms of urban cosmopolitanism and
intra-urban mobility so central to the self-identification of Enlightenment intellectual culture. And this, perhaps, offers an analytical path beyond the Enlightenment
either in or above national context.
Which brings us back again to the question of Enlightenment economic thought.
Reinert seeks to challenge what he sees as the unreflective association between Enlightenment and the ideal of peaceful free trade.27 He is not concerned here with
the social efficacy of Enlightenment economic thought (Paradisi had very little impact compared to contemporaries such as Antonio Genovese), but rather with the
Anglo-American bias and present-mindedness that cause us to overstate the centrality of economic liberalism to the Enlightenment. Yet, as Joel Mokyrs The Enlightened Economy (2009) has shown, the social efficacy question is very well worth
asking, and has been asked far less often than non-specialists in this field might
imagine. Given the coincidence of Enlightenment and Britains precocious economic
takeoff from the later eighteenth century, what exactly was the influence of Enlightenment political economy upon market reform and industrial revolution?
Mokyr undertakes a synthesis of intellectual and economic history, identifying a competitive marketplace of ideas out of which there emerged an intellectual environment
that fostered innovation, reform, and liberalization.28 He is careful in his handling
of the issue of Enlightenment in or above national context, positioning the British
version of the Industrial Enlightenment, like the British industrial revolution, as
an early, nationally inflected manifestation of a subsequent, European and North
American phenomenon. He is nevertheless overly reliant on a notion of the English
Enlightenment, derived from Roy Porters Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation
of the Modern World (2000), as an inclusive, unconflicted, cheerfully Protestant affair,
which many historians would find questionable. In this respect, Mokyrs book is hamstrung by the continuing reticence of intellectual historians about the existence of
an English Enlightenment, particularly one that includes radicals and dissenters.29

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30 J. G. A. Pocock, Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England, in

Rafaelle Ajello et al., eds., Leta
` dei lumi: Studi storici sul Settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi,
2 vols. (Naples, 1985), 523562.
31 Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano, eds., The Atlantic Enlightenment (Aldershot, 2008).
32 Clifford Siskin and William Warner, eds., This Is Enlightenment (Chicago, 2010), 22.

Karen OBrien is Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick.

She is author of Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire
to Gibbon (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Women and Enlightenment
in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and editor of
the forthcoming 17501820 volume of The Oxford History of the Novel. She is
currently writing a study of Malthus and the reconceptualizing of population,
human migration, and social development in the late Enlightenment.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

DECEMBER 2010

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John Pocock has mapped the contours of the English variant of a European, Protestant, and conservative Enlightenment.30 The other, equally international English
Enlightenment of the more radical and experimental Lunar Society or the Club of
Honest Whigs (Franklin among them) generally goes by different names, and currently fares better in the neighboring domains of Atlanticist history or the history
of science.31 Israels third volume will undoubtedly explore this radical strand of the
English Enlightenment, as he has already done, briefly, in A Revolution of the Mind
(2010), and the fissure between this and the conservative wing. But until we have
more sophisticated and integrated accounts of the English intellectual life, and of
the impact here of developments in Scotland, France, Italy, and Germany in the era
of the industrial revolution, Mokyrs conjectures about the relationship between Enlightenment and technological and economic change will remain uncorroborated.
And this Enlightenment, in turn, is not separable from its iterative, increasingly industrialized technologies of reproduction. Clifford Siskin and William Warner, the
editors of the very recent collection This Is Enlightenment, offer a bold answer to the
question What is Enlightenment? They present not an Enlightenment in or
and, but an intellectual event inseparable from its participation in a particular
phase in the history of mediation via print technologies, associational and communicative practices, institutional structures, travel, and so on: mediation is the condition of possibility for Enlightenment.32 The articles in this forum broaden our
understanding of a conceptual history bound up with its historical conditions of mediation, as well as with the mediating conditions of our own, enduring preoccupation
with the Enlightenment.