What enlightenment project?

Political Theory

Volumn 28, Issue 6, 2000, Pages 734-757

  Schmidt, James ^a  

^a BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 0034345845     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591700028006002     Document Type: Review

References (81)

1. James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993), 244-45, 250.
2. Knud Haakonssen, "Natural Law and Natural Rights in the Enlightenment, "in Filosofiske Studier Bind 15: Festskrift Tilegnet Professor, Dr. Phil. Karsten Friis Johansen, ed. Finn Collin, Jan Riis Flor, Carl Henrik Koch, and Peter Sandøe (København: Institut for Filosofi, Paedagogik or Retorik, 1995), 126-27, 134. For an elaboration of this account of Enlightenment moral theory, see Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
3. Knud Haakonssen, "Natural Law and Natural Rights in the Enlightenment, "in Filosofiske Studier Bind 15: Festskrift Tilegnet Professor, Dr. Phil. Karsten Friis Johansen, ed. Finn Collin, Jan Riis Flor, Carl Henrik Koch, and Peter Sandøe (København: Institut for Filosofi, Paedagogik or Retorik, 1995), 126-27, 134. For an elaboration of this account of Enlightenment moral theory, see Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
4. Haakonssen, "Natural Law and Natural Rights, "133-34.
5. Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity (New York: Norton, 1971), 263.
6. Karl R. Popper, "Kant's Critique and Cosmology, "in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 176.
7. Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 187.
8. Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 11-42. Hirschman has warned against an overemphasis on the "perversity thesis" to the exclusion of the other forms of reactionary rhetoric he discusses. See "The Rhetoric of Reaction - Two Years Later, "in A Propensity to Self-Subversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 45-68. As will be seen below, while criticisms of the Enlightenment have, at one point or another, exhibited features of the other forms of reactionary rhetoric discussed by Hirschman, the "perversity thesis" has had the greatest appeal for more recent critics.
9. Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 11-42. Hirschman has warned against an overemphasis on the "perversity thesis" to the exclusion of the other forms of reactionary rhetoric he discusses. See "The Rhetoric of Reaction - Two Years Later, "in A Propensity to Self-Subversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 45-68. As will be seen below, while criticisms of the Enlightenment have, at one point or another, exhibited features of the other forms of reactionary rhetoric discussed by Hirschman, the "perversity thesis" has had the greatest appeal for more recent critics.
10. Donna Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 12. See also the discussion in Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990), 1-11.
11. Donna Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 12. See also the discussion in Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990), 1-11.
12. J.G.A. Pocock, "Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment, "in Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850, ed. Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1998), 7. This point is elaborated in Pocock, "The Tell-Tale Article: Reconstructing (…) Enlightenment, "Plenary address to the 29th annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Notre Dame, April 2, 1998, which argues that historians would do well to eschew the definite article and to speak of a variety of "enlightenments" rather than "the Enlightenment." Roy Porter's brief overview, The Enlightenment, while retaining the definite article, begins by emphasizing the diversity of the movement (see especially pp. 10-11).
13. J.G.A. Pocock, "Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment, "in Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850, ed. Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1998), 7. This point is elaborated in Pocock, "The Tell-Tale Article: Reconstructing (…) Enlightenment, "Plenary address to the 29th annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Notre Dame, April 2, 1998, which argues that historians would do well to eschew the definite article and to speak of a variety of "enlightenments" rather than "the Enlightenment." Roy Porter's brief overview, The Enlightenment, while retaining the definite article, begins by emphasizing the diversity of the movement (see especially pp. 10-11).
14. J.G.A. Pocock, "Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment, "in Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850, ed. Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1998), 7. This point is elaborated in Pocock, "The Tell-Tale Article: Reconstructing (…) Enlightenment, "Plenary address to the 29th annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Notre Dame, April 2, 1998, which argues that historians would do well to eschew the definite article and to speak of a variety of "enlightenments" rather than "the Enlightenment." Roy Porter's brief overview, The Enlightenment, while retaining the definite article, begins by emphasizing the diversity of the movement (see especially pp. 10-11).
15. For a discussion of the related tendency to speak of a "project of modernity, "see Bernard Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 112-19.
16. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). There is a note titled "For Voltaire" among the Notes and Drafts at the end of the book, but it has little to say about Voltaire himself. For an attempt to link this discussion to the eighteenth century, see Christoph Dejung, "Für Voltaire: Bemerkungen zum gleichnamigen Fragment im Anhang der Dialektik der Aufklärung von Horkheimer und Adorno, "Studia Philosophica 51 (1992): 183-202.
17. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). There is a note titled "For Voltaire" among the Notes and Drafts at the end of the book, but it has little to say about Voltaire himself. For an attempt to link this discussion to the eighteenth century, see Christoph Dejung, "Für Voltaire: Bemerkungen zum gleichnamigen Fragment im Anhang der Dialektik der Aufklärung von Horkheimer und Adorno, "Studia Philosophica 51 (1992): 183-202.
18. William Ophuls, Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment and the Challenge of the New Millennium (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). Ophuls's account of the now "moribund" paradigm of liberal politics rests on a brief discussion (pp. 29-42) of Hobbes, Locke, Smith, and Marx (who, in Ophuls' account, "heightens the contradictions of liberalism instead of alleviating them" [p. 42]), all of whom are seen as turning nature into an object that has significance only as a means for satisfying the individual's desire for self-gratification. While Ophuls warns at the start that "the reader must avoid judging this work by the standards appropriate to an academic treatise or scholarly monograph" (p. xii), it is hardly reassuring that the annotated "list of sources" (p. 23) contains not a single work by a historian of the Enlightenment.
19. Lawrence Birken, Hitler as Philosophe: Remnants of the Enlightenment in National Socialism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995).
20. John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995). I have devoted a bit more attention to the problems with Gray's account in "Civility, Enlightenment, and Society: Conceptual Confusions and Kantian Remedies, "American Political Science Review 92 (1998): 419-27.
21. John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995). I have devoted a bit more attention to the problems with Gray's account in "Civility, Enlightenment, and Society: Conceptual Confusions and Kantian Remedies, "American Political Science Review 92 (1998): 419-27.
22. Wilson, The Moral Sense, 196.
23. Ibid., 197.
24. Haakonssen, "Natural Law and Natural Rights, "134.
25. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 259.
26. Susan Strickland, "Feminism, Postmodernism and Difference, "in Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, ed. Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford (London: Routledge, 1994), 265-74, and Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 165-206.
27. Susan Strickland, "Feminism, Postmodernism and Difference, "in Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, ed. Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford (London: Routledge, 1994), 265-74, and Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 165-206.
28. For a selection of some of these essays, see my collection What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
29. Lang, Act and Idea, 179.
30. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction, 11-19.
31. Ibid., 43.
32. Ibid., 81-84.
33. Ibid., 139.
34. Pocock, "The Political Economy of Burke's Analysis of the French Revolution, "in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 199.
35. Pocock, "Edmund Burke and the Redefinition of Enthusiasm, "in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Culture, vol. 3, The Transformation of Political Culture 1789-1848, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (New York: Pergamon Press, 1989), 31-32.
36. Hirschman notes later (p. 161) that Burke argued "that existing institutions incorporated a great deal of collective wisdom and that they were, moreover, quite capable of evolving gradually." It is this "collective wisdom" that Burke sees as being jeopardized by the French Revolution.
37. For discussions, see Eckhart Hellmuth, "Aufklärung und Pressefreiheit: Zur Debatte der Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft während der Jahre 1783 und 1784, "Zeitschrift für historisches Forschung 9 (1982): 315-45, and my "The Question of Enlightenment: Kant, Mendelssohn, and the Mittwochsgesellschaft, "Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 269-91. Kant's 1786 essay "What Is Orientation in Thinking?" closes with an invocation of the jeopardy thesis in which it is suggested that irresponsibility in the use of the freedom of speech that has been granted may undermine this liberty, thus leading to an impoverishment of public reasoning.
38. For discussions, see Eckhart Hellmuth, "Aufklärung und Pressefreiheit: Zur Debatte der Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft während der Jahre 1783 und 1784, "Zeitschrift für historisches Forschung 9 (1982): 315-45, and my "The Question of Enlightenment: Kant, Mendelssohn, and the Mittwochsgesellschaft, "Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 269-91. Kant's 1786 essay "What Is Orientation in Thinking?" closes with an invocation of the jeopardy thesis in which it is suggested that irresponsibility in the use of the freedom of speech that has been granted may undermine this liberty, thus leading to an impoverishment of public reasoning.
39. Wilson, The Moral Sense, 245.
40. Hirschman, Rhetoric of Reaction, 84. It bears mentioning that such fears may not always be ill advised - a point that was recognized in criticisms of the French Revolution originating within the Enlightenment itself.
41. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932), 29.
42. Hirschman, Rhetoric of Reaction, 70. Leo Gershoy argues that the tone of Becker's book, "for all its flashes of wit, was somber not insouciant not playful but grim." "The Heavenly City of Carl Becker, "in Carl Becker's Heavenly City Revisited, ed. Raymond O. Rockwood (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1968), 196. Beatrice F. Hyslop's contribution to this same collection suggests that Becker's stance in the lectures may be explained by the experience of the depression of the 1930s: "His veiled jibes at the naïve optimism of the eighteenth century were destined to strike a responsive chord in the minds of listeners and readers worried about the whole structure of contemporary society" (p. 106), while Ralph H. Bowen sees the book as "an expression of Becker's own disillusionment, not to say despair" (p. 154).
43. Hirschman, Rhetoric of Reaction, 70. Leo Gershoy argues that the tone of Becker's book, "for all its flashes of wit, was somber not insouciant not playful but grim." "The Heavenly City of Carl Becker, "in Carl Becker's Heavenly City Revisited, ed. Raymond O. Rockwood (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1968), 196. Beatrice F. Hyslop's contribution to this same collection suggests that Becker's stance in the lectures may be explained by the experience of the depression of the 1930s: "His veiled jibes at the naïve optimism of the eighteenth century were destined to strike a responsive chord in the minds of listeners and readers worried about the whole structure of contemporary society" (p. 106), while Ralph H. Bowen sees the book as "an expression of Becker's own disillusionment, not to say despair" (p. 154).
44. Something akin to this stance may be found in Michel Foucault's various "archeologies" of the human sciences, the point of which is often to suggest that what has typically been viewed as a dramatic transformation is, on more careful scrutiny, only a continuation of the same thing. For a discussion of parallels between Foucault and Becker, see Karlis Racevskis, "A Return to The Heavenly City: Carl Becker's Paradox in a Structuralist Perspective, "Clio 8 (1979): 165-74.
45. Compare Gay's claim that "Becker was no conservative, but the conservative implications of The Heavenly City are plain" (The Party of Humanity, 209).
46. Georg W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 328-55.
47. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 359. For a discussion of this passage, see my "Cabbage Heads and Gulps of Water: Hegel on the Terror, "Political Theory 26 (1998): 4-32.
48. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 359. For a discussion of this passage, see my "Cabbage Heads and Gulps of Water: Hegel on the Terror, "Political Theory 26 (1998): 4-32.
49. Hirschman, Rhetoric of Reaction, 140.
50. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3. For a critique of Horkheimer and Adorno's rhetoric employing Hirschman's typology, see Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities, 126-31.
51. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3. For a critique of Horkheimer and Adorno's rhetoric employing Hirschman's typology, see Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities, 126-31.
52. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xiii (translation modified).
53. Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17, Briefwechsel 1941-1948, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996), 446.
54. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 269.
55. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 195-97, and Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 200-209.
56. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 195-97, and Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 200-209.
57. Hirschman, Rhetoric of Reaction, 12.
58. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 313.
59. I draw here, once again, on Pocock's interpretation. Much the same point can be made about the example of the perversity thesis that Hirschman offers from Adam Müller (Rhetoric of Reaction, 14).
60. Likewise, Ophuls suggests that the explanation for the "tragedy of Enlightenment politics" is to be found in its tendency to "devour the capital upon which civilization is founded" (Requiem for Modern Politics, 266). The "worthy aspiration" of the Enlightenment to liberate humanity from arbitrary power was "pursued with hubris and without balance or wisdom, producing … perverse and self-destructive consequences" (pp. 279-80). See also his use of Burke to explain how "Hobbesian politics creates what it fears" (p. 231).
61. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 357.
62. Ibid., 358.
63. Ophuls sometimes explains the perverse results of the Enlightenment project by arguing that it failed to alter prevailing dispositions. Thus, he suggests that "the Enlightenment's purported cure for the ills of civilization is only a more virulent form of the disease" (Requiem for Modern Politics, 174), which "only aggravated" the "essential psychopathology" of civilization (p. 267).
64. For the discussion of the virtues of Aristotelian pluralism, see Lang, Act and Idea, 199.
65. For something approximating this argument, see Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946), which concludes by suggesting that the triumph of fascism might best be understood as a result of the failure of enlightened rationality to have adequately understood how to eradicate myth. In the face of this failure, Cassirer calls for further enlightenment.
66. Lang, Act and Idea, 189.
67. Ibid., 186.
68. Ibid., 194-95.
69. Ibid., 191.
70. For discussions of Kant's ethics that are sensitive to the anthropological and historical dimensions of his thought, see Allen W. Wood, "Unsociable Sociability: The Anthropological Basis of Kantian Ethics, "Philosophical Topics 19 (1991): 325-51, and G. Felicitas Munzel, Kant's Conception of Moral Character: The "Critical" Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
71. For discussions of Kant's ethics that are sensitive to the anthropological and historical dimensions of his thought, see Allen W. Wood, "Unsociable Sociability: The Anthropological Basis of Kantian Ethics, "Philosophical Topics 19 (1991): 325-51, and G. Felicitas Munzel, Kant's Conception of Moral Character: The "Critical" Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
72. Lang, Act and Idea, 189.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid., 196.
75. Ibid., 197-98.
76. Hirschman, Rhetoric of Reaction, 149-50.
77. Ibid., 162-63.
78. The task of explaining how the Enlightenment was to be saved from itself was to be the task of the projected sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book tentatively titled The Rescue of Enlightenment. For a discussion, see my "Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, "Social Research 65 (1998): 807-38.
79. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xiii.
80. Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 48. For a discussion, see James Schmidt and Thomas E. Wartenberg, "Foucault's Enlightenment: Critique, Revolution, and the Fashioning of the Self, "in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault-Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 283-314.
81. Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 48. For a discussion, see James Schmidt and Thomas E. Wartenberg, "Foucault's Enlightenment: Critique, Revolution, and the Fashioning of the Self, "in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault-Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 283-314.