Enlightenment

Enlightenment

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“It was the common presupposition of all thinkers of the Enlightenment that the being of man is implied in and subordinated to the being of nature and that it must accordingly be explained by the same universal laws” (vol. 5, p. 548). So wrote Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) in the entry on “Enlightenment” in the original Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1931). To the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), Cassirer attributed the idea that the “stirrings and movements of the will on which the world of man is founded are subject to rules just as universal as the movements within the world of physical bodies. There is a mechanics of human inclinations and urges…. This analogy was emphasized so severely by the philosophy of the Enlightenment that it became finally a complete logical identity” (vol. 5, p. 548).

A generation later Hayden White wrote, “It follows that the Enlightenment was altogether misguided in its attempt to construct a science of human nature on the basis of a study of physical nature: understanding cultural phenomena, which are creations of man alone, in terms of incompletely understood natural principles is doomed from the start” (White 1968, vol. 16, p. 314). This passage appeared in the entry on “Giambattista Vico” in the first edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968), published in an age in which the Enlightenment had fallen on such hard times that it did not even rate a separate entry in that Encyclopedia. The inclusion of the present entry in this second edition is indicative of the rising fortune of the Enlightenment not only in its own right but also with respect to the social sciences specifically.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, there were several attempts to place the origins of the social sciences in the eighteenth century. Yet, although the term la science sociale was first used around the time of the French Revolution (1789–1799), a consensus has emerged that, whatever was invented by eighteenth-century social theorists, it was not modern social science. When the editor of History of the Human Sciences devoted an issue (6 [1] 1993) of that journal to the Enlightenment origins of the social sciences, he received a set of articles that called that very premise into question. Christopher Fox wrote that “we cannot visit the eighteenth century with a modern campus map” (Fox et al. 1995, pp. 3–4). Claude Blanckaert asserted that to name the Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) as the founder of modern anthropology is really to say that Buffon is the earliest author read by modern anthropologists. Roger Smith contended that it is no longer tenable to trace modern disciplines like sociology, psychology, anthropology, and economics back to Enlightenment precursors, as was the practice in many histories of the disciplines throughout the twentieth century. With the expansion of the eighteenth-century canon since the 1970s, historians of the social sciences have found that the configurations of eighteenth-century science, politics, and social theory were much more complicated than indicated by the tidy narratives of Enlightenment and revolution that characterized much of twentieth-century scholarship.

It was against those narratives of individual liberty, limited government, and toleration of religious practice that continental historians in the mid-twentieth century set up an alternative narrative of Enlightenment social science: one that emphasized efficiency in government, technical bureaucracy, and the assimilation of populations into a centrally administered territorial nation-state, all of which converged for one purpose—domination.

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) wondered how the liberal project of the Enlightenment could have culminated in the authoritarian regimes, death camps, and armed conflict of the twentieth century. Where Vico saw the project of a mathematical, laws-based social science as doomed from the start, Horkheimer found that, in historical terms, that project was only too successful. As enlightened science played out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all particulars came to be understood as mere representatives of universals. All qualities were reduced to quantities, and all things ultimately became identical, including people. The Enlightenment, wrote Horkheimer, represented the triumph of oppressive equality. Quantitative methods became so pervasive that the human and natural sciences, initially intended to eradicate irrational appeals to myth, magic, and religion, became mythic in their own right.

Under the old regime, domination was clearly visible in political and ecclesiastical hierarchies and in the dogmas by which they were legitimized. The Enlightenment produced new forms of domination that were even more insidious because they were not only vindicated by critical reason but were also applied by reason itself. Michel Foucault (1926–1984) characterized every victory of enlightenment as a step further into the darkness of domination. Biology and medicine exposed to light the hidden recesses of the body in search of life, but found only disease and death. Psychology penetrated the rational mind only to discover irrationality and insanity. Prisoners were freed from dungeons only to be captured all the more securely in the light that flooded Jeremy Bentham’s (1748–1832) Panopticon prison, and, not only for criminals, the entire world became a prison that subjected the individual to every form of manipulation and control. Language itself was appropriated by reason (and later by positivism), so that every attempt to resist enlightenment only served the cause of enlightenment. Theory was rendered irrelevant. Critique, once the hallmark of the Enlightenment, came to be dismissed as mere belief or ideology, or worse, as art. In place of the human spirit and critical inquiry was the commodification of all things— science and language as well as material culture—and Horkheimer proposed a theorem that the pliability of the masses increased as the quantity of commodities offered to them increased. Even the individual’s own self became alienated and objectified through technologies of psychology.

Against the poststructuralist attack on the Enlightenment, several studies have highlighted the intellectual and social network of the international republic of letters that enabled individuals and texts to cross national boundaries and find common ground in ideologies of republicanism, universal human rights, toleration of beliefs and practices, and freedom of thought, all of which went under the heading of “cosmopolitanism.”

Despite the reservations of Europeans regarding the legacy of their own supposed Enlightenment, the traditional narrative of Enlightenment liberalism has been appropriated by social theorists in regions briefly (although brutally) colonized and dominated by the European states in the nineteenth and twentieth century. “Post-colonial scholarship is committed, almost by definition,” wrote Dipesh Chakrabarty, “to engaging the univer-sals—such as the abstract figure of the human or that of Reason—that were forged in eighteenth-century Europe and that underlie the human sciences” (2000, p. 5). He finds that although it is inadequate, the European narrative of Enlightenment and technological advancement is indispensable to understanding the history and future of “developing” nations. But this was precisely the point made by the poststructuralists: that cosmopolitanism, like all universal systems, was artificially homogenizing. Responding to Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) “history of pure reason” at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) wrote a Metacritique (1798) that argued that there was no such thing as “pure” reason. There was only particular reason. That is, there were no universal ideas or truths, no world soul into which all particular souls were tapped. There were only particular, unique, historical communities, and these were easily extinguished by totalizing systems like universal reason and imperialism of all sorts, whether ancient Roman or modern European. Universal reason was a chimera, perpetual peace a pipe dream.

It was not merely the case that the party of humanity, as Peter Gay called the two dozen or so philosophes who comprised the twentieth-century canon of eighteenth-century thought, was shouted down by counter-enlightened conservatives and reactionaries. The tendency toward mass democracy and domination, both physical and psychological, was never a sinister plot of imposters. It was built into the very Enlightenment itself—built, that is, into cosmopolitanism, universal reason, and the instrumental reason aimed at reforming the inefficiencies and abuses of old regime society.

Writing on the twentieth-century culture industry, Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) augmented Horkheimer’s penetrating critique of the technological society by showing that even the objects of individual choice were instruments of homogenizing conformity. Production technology, hailed in the eighteenth and nineteenth century as the means by which Europe could finally cultivate the land and meet its needs efficiently so that the individual could cultivate himself or herself, was transformed into the economic logic of standardization and mass consumption. One city, with its gleaming skyscrapers, was essentially the same as the next. Older houses outside the city center decayed into slums, while new suburban houses were thrown up quickly and cheaply, as if designed to be discarded in a short while like empty food cans. Suburban housing projects were intended to perpetuate the rational-critical individual as an independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling, but in fact they made the individual all the more subservient to the absolute power of capitalism. Adorno took the development from telephone to radio as indicative. The telephone was liberal: it allowed the person to play the role of subject. The radio was democratic: it turned all participants into listeners, authoritatively subjecting them to broadcast programs that were all exactly the same. Other mass spectacles performed the same function, including popular music, cinema, and sports, to say nothing of television. Focus groups and market research, employing the techniques of propaganda, ensured that something was provided for all so that none might escape. Even improvisational jazz was a perfected technique that homogenized all particulars into a universal jargon of style, a style that, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) terms, was “a system of non-culture, to which one might even concede a certain ‘unity of style’ if it really made any sense to speak of stylized barbarity” (Nietzche 1917, p. 187; Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, p. 128).

Deeply implicated in the movement from liberal Enlightenment to mass deception were the social sciences. Adorno characterized that movement as an inexorable trend built into the Enlightenment itself. But social scientists themselves worried about their own role in social engineering and manipulation.

Both the modernist view of Enlightenment liberalism as an alternative to twentieth-century totalitarianism and the postmodernist view of the Enlightenment as the source of that same totalitarianism depended on selective readings of eighteenth-century social theorists. In fact, few in the eighteenth century were as sanguine about the power of light and reason as they were made out to be in the twentieth century. Edmund Burke (1729–1797) worried about a world in which power became gentle, obedience became liberal, and all shades of life were harmonized, blandly assimilated, and dissolved. Justus Möser (1720–1794) asserted that the civil administrator who hoped to reduce everything to an academic theory or a few rules paved the road to despotism and lost the wealth of variety. Whether in local administration or global ethnology, particularist sentiments like these were echoed across the continent by social theorists such as Louis François Jauffret (1770–1840), Aubin Louis Millin (1759–1818), Joseph-Marie Degérando (1772–1842), Johann Jakob Moser (1701–1785), Ludwig Timotheus Spittler (1752–1810), Christoph Meiners (1747–1810), Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), and of course Herder. Historical scholarship since the mid-1970s has also celebrated the variety of eighteenth-century social thought in counter-Enlightenment, radical Enlightenment, Enlightenment in national context, and so forth. Just as social science cannot be taken as monolithic, neither can the Enlightenment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker, Keith M. 1964. The Early History of the Term “Social Science.” Annals of Science 20 (3): 211–226.

Blanckaert, Claude, ed. 1999. L’histoire des sciences de l’homme. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Burke, Edmund. [1790] 1968. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.

Cassirer, Ernst. 1930–1935. Enlightenment. In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Vol. 5 (1931), 547–552. New York: Macmillan.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Foucault, Michel. [1966] 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage.

Fox, Christopher, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler, eds. 1995. Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gusdorf, Georges. 1966–1988. Les Sciences humaines et la pensée occidentale. 15 vols. Paris: Payot.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. [1944] 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum.

Möser, Justus. 1943–1990. Sämtliche Werke. 14 vols. Oldenburg, Germany: Stalling.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1873] 1917. “Unzeitgemässe Betrachtengun.” In Werke, Vol. 1. Leipzig, Germany: Kröner.

Schmidt, James, ed. 1997. What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Smith, Roger. 1997. Norton History of the Human Sciences. New York: Norton.

White, Hayden. Vico, Giambattista. 1968. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills. New York: Macmillan, Vol. 16, pp. 313–316.

Michael C. Carhart