28 July, 2025
Review of The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History by JCD Clark (Oxford University Press, 2024)
The now seventy-four-year-old enfant terrible of the historians’ guild leaves a trail of destruction in his wake. Never has Jonathan Clark seen a liberal piety he didn’t want to deflate or a “civil religion” he didn’t want to blaspheme. The self-satisfied mythology of “democratization”, “secularization”, and “modernization” were all peeled back: and Clark now arrives at their hollow core. Those myths, he once declared, constitute a “circular argument”: and now he lunges for their most enduring premise. And so it is, as his Kansas University faculty webpage announced to the world, that he has produced the “first ever book on the Enlightenment”.
The first ever book on the Enlightenment? Those who might have suspected a typo will find this swiftly disabused in the book’s acknowledgements, which credit none other than Sir Isaiah Berlin for “persuad[ing] me that a history of the Enlightenment had yet to be written”. Clark sustains his extraordinary claim by arguing that if “the Enlightenment” refers a discernible phenomenon of eighteenth-century thought and culture – many books have indeed purportedly been about that – then there was no such thing; what there can be a real history of is only the idea of the Enlightenment, a loose explanatory device of later vintage and often a defective and polemical one at that. Clark refines his position at the end of the book: it is not that “the Enlightenment never happened”, but that it happened when it “was widely adopted in the twentieth century in some countries and … persisted for several decades”. But here he is being glib. He believes there was such a thing as “the Enlightenment” only in the same way we believe there is such a thing as “unicorns”: as a concept, not a thing. In case there is any doubt on the matter, the reader need only judge the book by its cover, which shows a lightbulb being smashed to pieces.
“The Enlightenment” was already a historiographical battlefield before Clark came along. The liberal mainstream within twentieth-century historiography, to which Peter Gay gave the classic expression, tended to regard it with affection. “The Enlightenment”, goes the familiar story, was the great moment of transition from a benighted old world to a shining modern one: it betokened the defeat of ignorance and superstition by the forces of toleration and reason. Others – one thinks here of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, or, from a very different perspective, John Gray and the late Alasdair MacIntyre – more or less swallowed this story whole, but flipped its moral stakes: now the Enlightenment is made to bear responsibility for the various ills afflicting modern life (fascism and liberalism, respectively). Isaiah Berlin, following some hints laid down by Friedrich Meinecke, saw the modern world emerging from a ferocious contest between “Enlightenment” and “counter-Enlightenment”, with liberalism the child of the former and fascism the latter. Whereas Berlin’s critics have quite comprehensively dismantled the historical existence of the “counter-Enlightenment”, “the Enlightenment” proper stands strong.
Perhaps, it was then suggested, the dizzying range of eighteenth-century thought and letters calls not for one Enlightenment but many. Jonathan Israel thought that there were two Enlightenments: Moderate and Radical. JGA Pocock outdid him, conjuring up at least six or seven, sometimes rubbing up against one another within a single mind (the first volume of Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion is called “the Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon”). Well, said Robert Darnton, once among Peter Gay’s biggest critics, all this was rather silly: if “the Enlightenment” has any use at all, it ought to refer to a coherent, unitary historical phenomenon. He judged that it did, as did John Robertson in 2005 with his Case for the Enlightenment. Clark now accepts the ultimatum, but decides it the other way: since, according to him, “the Enlightenment” does not refer to a coherent, unitary phenomenon, it has no use for those who wish to describe the intellectual history of the eighteenth century. Here is a fine piece of iconoclasm by a historian who’s known for it.
Clark’s first major work, The Dynamics of Change (1982), focused on the high-political drama of the 1750s, in the vein of a historiographical tradition associated with Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he cut his teeth. Then English Society (1985) burst onto the scene, a “revisionist tract” intending a “breach of the historiographical peace”. The breach was widened the following year, when Clark published Revolution and Rebellion: there he excoriated those historians (Cambridge colleagues among them) who clung, sometimes unconsciously, to one of the lynchpins of Whig historiography, namely the notion that the eighteenth century was characterised by “scepticism and rationalism”. The Enlightenment, then – this great reification of that Whig supposition – is a fitting object of Clark’s ire.
It is a longstanding one, too. The first edition of English Society referred to “the Enlightenment” uncritically, but in the second edition, published in 2000, we find that it carries a health warning. There “the Enlightenment” is rejected as a term which “sought to identify and hold up for imitation the polemical objectives of the eighteenth-century French philosophes”. What appears in the first edition simply as “the Enlightenment” becomes, in the corresponding passage in the second, “what was later conceptualized as the Enlightenment”. The shift in Clark’s thought must have occurred before 1994: that year, in The Language of Liberty, he pointed out that “No-one in the English-speaking world … referred to “the Enlightenment”“ in the eighteenth century. Thirty years later, this incipient thought achieves full form in The Enlightenment: “In the eighteenth century anglophone world enlightenment was everywhere, but “the Enlightenment” was nowhere”.
Over the years “The Enlightenment” has grown into something of an obsession: in 2018, in an otherwise entirely unconnected essay on the early-modern Catholic diaspora, he gives the aside that “‘the Enlightenment’ … serves only as an emphasiser, performing no real work”. “The Age of Enlightenment and Revolution” does appear in the subtitle to his Thomas Paine (2018), to which the work currently under review is the “companion” – but this only as an invitation to “reconsider these concepts”. The arguments of Clark”s Enlightenment have thus been trailed and teased before anglophone audiences for decades. French audiences were treated to a more substantial preview in 2011, when Clark defended his position in the journal Lumières. A severe response by the German scholar Daniel Fulda appeared in the same journal a year later – of which more anon.
The Enlightenment thus fits into an ongoing political and historiographical project. Its target remains a form of the “Whig interpretation of history” that Herbert Butterfield, a former Master of Peterhouse, famously identified and attacked. The Whig historian makes of history a long combat between Whig progress and Tory reaction that the Whigs inevitably win in the end, though they may suffer temporary reverses. The mark of the Tory historian – David Armitage once called Clark “the man who put the Tory back into British history” – lies in the belief that it is very important to realize that this is not the case.
One domain in which Clark is especially averse to Whiggery is religion, in a Whig narrative about which – the “secularization thesis” – the Enlightenment has a starring role. Clark is keen to show that the modern world has not seen the significance of religious belief and conflict fade away, as the secularization thesis would have it. To him, the American Revolution was really a war of religion, and in our own century, so he observes in The Enlightenment, religion has re-emerged “from the private sphere, if it had ever been confined there”. Not to smash the Enlightenment myth would only be to leave a polemical weapon in the hands of Richard Dawkins and his ilk.
Moreover, just as history itself does not consist in progress towards modernity, for Clark, neither is there such teleological progress in the study of history. At the turn of the millennium, historians were much disturbed by the perceived threat of postmodernism (one thinks here, for example, of Richard Evans’s 2001 In Defence of History), causing some to double down on the old modernist nostrums. In his own contribution to the discussion, Our Shadowed Present (2003), Clark contended that modernism never had much to recommend it anyway, and that serious research on “such unifying modernist themes” as the Enlightenment give reason to “doubt the validity of these unifying categories”. Other “unifying categories” like “feudalism” or “the Renaissance” have been quibbled by historians to the brink of extinction. Why shouldn’t “the Enlightenment” accompany them into the abyss?
Clark is naturally wary of “unifying categories”, for he is the kind of historian who prefers disunity to unity (a splitter and not a lumper, as they say). When confronted with the diverse array of so-called “Enlightenment thinkers”, he insists that the disagreements between them cannot be “fused into any single story”, but “are themselves the story”. “I was never a modernist, and so had no need to become a postmodernist”, he quips – but he does share in the postmodernists’ healthy suspicion of “grand narratives”. Insofar as he dislikes the postmodernists, it is because they don’t walk the walk. Foucault and Lyotard tended really to adhere to the myth of “the Enlightenment” as much as the modernists do – with only the addendum, as with Adorno and MacIntyre, that it was not the good thing that the modernists thought it.
Indeed, in seeking to refute modern applications of “liberal” to the pantheon of early-modern thinkers, Clark presents an instance of what we might call “horseshoe historiography”. Although Clark has inveighed against “woke” in publications like The Critic, the whistle stop tour he offers through the thinkers of the Enlightenment canon, highlighting tendencies at which their modern-day admirers would wrinkle their noses, strikes a familiar chord to those of us who were made to sit through history seminars in the long shadow of 2020. There’s Locke the pro-slavery racist, Voltaire the antisemite, Hume the elitist snob. Clark dwells on Addison’s “ridicule of women” and the fact that “Locke’s account of gender relations was … inconsistent with present-day liberalism” with the same glee as a gender studies academic impugning these characters as “problematic” and wishing their statues pulled down and buildings renamed.
Clark’s aim, however, is not to condemn, nor to excuse, but to rescue his subjects from distortions that proceed from the conception of “the Enlightenment” as the genesis of a progressive march towards human rights and universal toleration. The oft-used remark that any given thinker is “ahead of their time” can quickly become a backhanded compliment, implying that they still lag behind our own enlightened age. In the case of Locke, for example, Clark argues that his exclusion of Catholics from his argument for toleration was more than mere unthinking prejudice, but rather carefully deliberated and foundational to his political philosophy. But “to historicize Locke”, Clark says, “is neither to admire nor to reprove him”.
The avowed determination to “historicize” reflects the fact that Clark’s turn against “the Enlightenment” also proceeds from some deeply held historiographical principles. In The Enlightenment, far more than in his other works, Clark presents himself as the zealous heir to a Cambridge tradition in intellectual history distinguished by an emphasis on understanding past ideas in context and avoiding reading into them present-day or supposedly trans-historical concerns. His introduction begins with three “classic opening statements” from the Cambridge School triumvirate of JGA Pocock, John Dunn, and Quentin Skinner. His central argument against “the Enlightenment” is Cambridge School par excellence: “the Enlightenment” misleads above all because the term itself would be unfamiliar to the mouths and minds of eighteenth-century people.
Clark is allergic to anachronism – perhaps at times too allergic. In his attempt to historicise Mary Wollstonecraft, he argues that “her main object was virtue more than what is today called female agency”. Of course, Wollstonecraft never used the term “agency”, but her support for women’s education in order to develop their character and independence, and her refusal to let women off the hook for their frivolity, is surely what we would describe as a defence of female agency. Indeed, just above this he notes Wollstonecraft’s famous insistence on treating women like adults: “My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone”. “Stand[ing] alone” sounds rather like agency to us – even if the term “agency” is not, in this usage, an eighteenth-century one.
Wollstonecraft no more used the term “human rights” than she did “agency”, and Clark is at pains to dismantle the notion, prevalent in both the public and academic spheres, that what came to be called “the Enlightenment” had anything to do with human rights. Indeed, Clark tells us that the Vindication of the Rights of Woman contains 198 and 37 occurrences respectively of the words “virtue” and “morality”, against zero of the exact phrase “human rights”. How much evidence this tally furnishes for Clark’s effort to dismantle the popular genealogy – which does call for some dismantling – is unclear, not least when Wollstonecraft wrote another book called A Vindication of the Rights of Man.
What about “the Enlightenment” itself? As Clark shows, “enlightenment” and its cognates in eighteenth-century writing tended to mean something akin to “truth”, carried a religious connotation, and was seldom ennobled with the definite article, and the reification arrived late on the English scene. In 1910 the British philosopher James Black Baillie translated Hegel’s “die Aufklärung” in his Phenomenology of Mind as “enlightenment”, not “the Enlightenment”; other English authors, such as G.P. Gooch, preferred simply to loan “die Aufklärung” outright, rather than calquing it.
Clark is probably right, too, to identify this English-language reification as essentially a postwar phenomenon. “A re-education” of the world, and of Germany in particular, in the values of the victors required “summing up with simple labels”; “the Enlightenment” was one of them. It is surely no coincidence that Jewish refugees, for whom the success of this “re-education” was a matter of survival, played a significant role in the construction and popularisation of “the Enlightenment”: Clark mentions Robert Wokler, George Steiner, and above all the aforementioned Peter Gay (né Fröhlich). Its greatest reifier, on Clark’s account, was the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, for whom the Enlightenment became a historical agent unto itself. “As an émigré from Nazi Germany, Cassirer’s linguistic usages were largely immune to challenge” – except, it is admitted, by another immigrant Jew, Isaiah Berlin.
Clark is wrong, however, to suggest that “the Enlightenment” is always an anachronism when used to describe a moment in thought and culture. Oxford’s Jacob Chatterjee has crunched the numbers: “allusions to this “enlightened age” start in the 1690s, become substantially more prominent after 1750, and increase exponentially in the 1790s”. There were at least 2835 print references to an “enlightened age” in eighteenth-century Britain. And that’s just Britain: let us remember that Clark is setting himself against a transnational phenomenon. Werner Schneider’s Die wahre Aufklärung (1974)lists seventy works on “Aufklärung” published in German between 1779 and 1802. Nor, we should add, was “enlightenment” solely an empty, self-flattering epithet; already by the close of the eighteenth century there were people in Britain who regarded themselves as its enemies. In 1797 John Robison inveighed against the “principles of the Illuminati” which had wreaked such havoc in France: “have not the enlightened citizens of France applauded the execution of their fathers”, he asked, having been “bewildered by the false and fluttering glare of French Philosophy?”
By far the most famous eighteenth-century witness to what is conventionally translated into English as “the Enlightenment” is Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay “Was ist Aukflärung?”. It may be revealing, as Clark says, that the essay was not titled “Was ist die Aufklärung?”, and that its first translation into English, in 1798, was not “What is Enlightenment?” but rather “What is enlightening?”. But then Clark overplays his hand. The “often-repeated interpretation” of Kant’s most famous line, “sapere aude”, “became current only after it was widely forgotten that Kant was quoting Horace”. (Was this ever forgotten by those who once knew it?) Horace, Clark points out, was calling for “industrious application in private study”, not “participat[ion] in any movement in the public realm”. But there is no evidence that Kant meant his “sapere aude” exclusively as a Classical allusion, nor that he intended to achieve precisely the same effect in his own Berlinische Monatsschrift readers as Horace did in Lollius.
Clark’s peculiar reading of Kant was already criticised prior to the publication of The Enlightenment. We have drawn attention to Daniel Fulda’s critique of an earlier expression of Clark’s arguments. Clark’s 2011 essay had already placed great weight on the “sapere aude” in Kant. Such a reading of Kant, said Fulda, is “implausible unless one believes that the original signification of a word or phrase” is its sole value, and the interpretation is “definitively refuted by the rest of the text”. It is a pity that Fulda’s article is absent from Clark’s bibliography and that Clark has not responded to Fulda’s criticisms. We are left with the situation that Fulda’s overall assessment of Clark’s 2011 essay, especially with respect to the German sources, applies equally to his present book.
Britain is what Clark knows best. He repeatedly berates David Hume for failing to take his History beyond 1688, lamenting that the Jacobite rebellions of 1715–16 and 1745–6 (to which he ascribes immense significance) did not receive the “social-scientific explanations” from Hume that they apparently deserved. He is adamant that reading Hume’s History in their order of publication, rather than the chronology of events described, will reveal his “unwilling appreciation of the slow, belated, and seldom intended emergence” of contemporary values, and demonstrate the “domination of any potential social science by contingency”. These, we may observe, are Clark’s own historiographical precepts. His mission as a historian, in English Society especially, has been to continue the project which the Tory Hume had started. Hume, of course, was the great iconoclast of his own day: having pooh-poohed belief in miracles, having denied the possibility of empirical knowledge of necessary causal connexions, having shattered very induction to pieces, he would return to the tavern to play backgammon and make merry. The historians’ guild is as guilty of groupthink as any other, and has a tendency to use freighted words sloppily. Historians will probably continue to use “the Enlightenment”, and perhaps they ought to, but thanks to Clark they will now have to make a rigorous, positive case for doing so, at least before they go back to their backgammon. “Sapere aude” said Kant, after Horace. Nobody can deny the audacity of Clark’s work. Kant did not need to agree with Hume in every point when he praised him for interrupting his “dogmatic slumber”.
Felice Basbøll is a student in History at Trinity College, Dublin. Samuel Rubinstein is a doctoral student in History at University College, Oxford.
