The Enlightenment Revisited

The traditional view of the Enlightenment forged in the aftermath of Kant's famous essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, tended to focus upon the French philosophes and their supposed valorization of reason as a tool to challenge the church and extol the virtues of liberty, humanity and toleration. While this interpretation was never truly reflective of the European thought during the long eighteenth century, it provided a simplified version of events that could be used to either laud the advance of freedom and equality, or more darkly could be cited as the root cause of the modern horrors of Nazi totalitarianism, Western imperialism and Soviet communism. Some historians of philosophy followed Ernst Cassirer's influential interpretation and extended the reach of the Enlightenment as far as Konigsberg, on the grounds that it reached its apogee with Kant, but this reading still viewed it as a movement founded in an appreciation for the role of rationality in contributing to an ideal of progress. During the 1960s, these assessments formed the backdrop to Peter Gay's influential argument that there was ‘only one Enlightenment’, characterized by ‘secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom’. While ‘the variety of political experience produced an Enlightenment with distinct branches’, these differences were relatively minor and thus Enlightenment thinkers as a whole could be seen as composing a single ‘family’.