The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History 1721-1794

by Thomas Munck

What did the Enlightenment mean for people who were not intellectuals or members of a wealthy elite? In this incisive new book, Thomas Munck shows the profound impact of Enlightenment ideas on a broad range of social groups. Moving beyond traditional treatments, which tend to focus on leading
individuals and salon culture, Munck demonstrates that the Enlightenment can be fruitfully studied from the vantage point of ordinary people. He focuses on Paris, London, and Hamburg, but draws comparisons across much of Europe. The book begins with Montesquieu's Persian Letters in 1721 and ends
with the changing direction of the French Revolution in 1794, and with a reassessment of enlightened absolutism in the light of changing relationships between state and citizen. It will be an invaluable text for courses on the Enlightenment and provides a valuable new perspective for anyone studying
eighteenth-century Europe or the history of ideas.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 13, 2000

Reviews

[Adam Carnehl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thomas Munck of Glasgow University (my alma mater) wrote this work at a watershed moment for Enlightenment studies - the turn of the twenty-first century. Throughout the fifties and sixties the 'triumphalist' or 'modernist' narrative of Enlightenment had held sway, best represented by scholars such as Cassirer, Hazard, and Becker (since the 1930s) and Gay, Wade, and Venturi. This view of the Enlightenment considered it to be both an historical movement as well as a philosophical position; for them, the Enlightenment was essentially Kantian: a liberation from man's self-incurred tutelage, an emancipation of the individual, a dispelling of the darkness of superstition and ignorance. This view was seriously questioned by post-moderns in the 1970s and 1980s. For them, the Enlightenment, with its elevation of ratiocination above ethnic particularity and individual subjectivity, was the source of the twentieth century's wars and genocides, as well as the philosophies of positivism and nihilism. This postmodern view, heavily modified, was taken up by Christian philosophers such as Dupré, MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the 1990s Radical Orthodoxy group. For them, Enlightenment was not a good or inevitable process; it was a tragic secularization of thought and society that need not have happened. Reacting against the postmodernists and complicating the progressive secularists, a group arose in the 1980s and 1990s which posited a plurality of enlightenments: national, cultural, and religious. The Enlightenment was no longer a monolithic 'thing,' but rather an attitude; it was 'in the air' in Europe at the time. This view, argued most persuasively by J. G. A. Pocock and Roy Porter, was later qualified by others, particularly the globalists, who extended the timeline of Enlightenment(s) a century or more, pointing out that places such as China and Japan were reading Voltaire and Rousseau and shaping policy by eighteenth century principles well after the deaths of the philosophes. Partly stemming from this multiple enlightenments approach, or rather, modifying it, is Munck and his social approach. This sees one spirit of Enlightenment manifested in various, complex ways all across Europe and North America. It offers a very broad definition of Enlightenment, essentially equating it with the eighteenth century, or at least the aspects of the eighteenth century that fit its modernization and secularization assumptions. Then we find those who have sharply modified the twentieth century thesis of people such as Gay; these are the scholars who hold to some kind of "radical Enlightenment," particularly Margaret Jacob and Jonathan Israel. They say that the Lockean and Newtonian position is 'moderate' and was not actually the true force and fire behind the Enlightenment's ideals. These were spread via literary underground movements, especially by deists, atheists, and Freemasons (though Israel doesn't care about them). In this schema, Spinoza and Hobbes feature prominently, as does Toland, Collins, d'Holbach, Helvetius, and Diderot. One wonders in this approach if it isn't colored by the scholars' own progressive views and their desire to retroactively 'discover' them in second- or third-tier thinkers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, there is the position best articulated by J. C. D. Clark - that "the Enlightenment" is primarily a concept, and that historians have, for the last 125 years, seen what they have wanted to see in the period from 1680-1800. "The Enlightenment" is what they have imposed upon 'it' (for there is no 'it'), according to their ideologies. Personally, I hold to Clark's thesis.

But Munck's book is a good starting place for students and scholars approaching the social issues of the time. It answers questions about governmental acts of (in)toleration, newspapers, reading habits, the book trade, slavery, women, and rural issues. Many other Enlightenment historians simply ignore most or all of these questions, so Munck's book may be a breath of fresh air. However, he still (clearly) holds to the old thesis of the last century, that the Enlightenment is a distinct 'thing,' that it is good, that it was primarily secular, and that it led to modern, liberal democracies.