Enlightenment and Modernity, Historians and Philosophers

Abstract

Since the 1990s, historians of the Enlightenment have been notably keen to emphasise their subject’s contribution to modernity. In doing so, they have not shied away from ground usually occupied by philosophers, identifying Enlightenment’s modernity with a system of values and even with specific philosophical positions. This article asks how this has come about, and what have been its consequences. It does so by offering an account of Enlightenment historians’ relations with philosophy since the 1960s, when Franco Venturi repudiated Ernst Cassirer’s philosophical understanding of Enlightenment and urged historians to adopt a different approach. Before 1989, it will be argued, historical study of Enlightenment expanded rapidly but with little reference to philosophers, or interest in demonstrating the modernity of Enlightenment. It was the challenge of Postmodernism (however intellectually chaotic it seemed) in the 1980s, and still more Jürgen Habermas’s vigorous espousal of modernity, which gave historians their cue. Three dimensions of the ensuing association of Enlightenment with modernity are identified: Enlightenment and the public sphere; Radical Enlightenment and one-substance metaphysics; and Enlightenment as cosmopolitan and global. In conclusion, it is argued that while this enthusiasm for modernity appears to be on the wane, the episode has underlined the impossibility of separating historical and philosophical study of Enlightenment.