Session Abstract

There used to be a time when historians knew exactly what the Enlightenment was. An intellectual and cultural movement that took shape in eighteenth-century France, the Enlightenment was responsible for the creation of modern Western culture – a culture that valued religious tolerance, rejected the stratified society of the Old Regime, and believed in liberal politics as the best way to realize these ideals. It had been responsible for the American and French Revolutions which had ended the Old Regime. But its real culmination, some believed, came much later, with the progressive politics of the 1960s (which was, not incidentally, the period when the view described above took shape). The Enlightenment was, in other words, incredibly important, not just to historians, but to everyone who cared about such things as secularism, equality, and liberal democracy.

This view of the Enlightenment has lost much currency in recent historiography, even though it is still used as a straw man in onslaughts from the postcolonial left and conservative right. Historians of the eighteenth century have started to question the existence of a unified Enlightenment movement. A Franco-centric view of the Enlightenment has been undermined by the discovery of many different national Enlightenments elsewhere in Europe and in the Americas. Even the relationship between the Enlightenment and key developments such as secularism and liberalism is now under dispute. But while a new consensus is forming on what the Enlightenment was not, less agreement exists on what view of the Enlightenment should take its place. Recent work on the “radical Enlightenment” has enlivened the debate, but it has raised as many questions amongst specialists as it has provided answers.

“New Enlightenments” aims to contribute to this debate about the character of the Enlightenment and the direction of Enlightenment studies by showcasing some of the most innovative recent work on the Enlightenment. In doing so, we aim to present a new and different vision of the Enlightenment, one that emphasizes the diversity and multiplicity of enlightened politics, religiosity, and culture. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, “New Enlightenments” aims to offer a more historical and a less presentist reading of the Enlightenment. If the Enlightenment signaled the birth of modernity, as the different contributors to this panel argue, it was a modernity that transformed and reconstructed legacies from the past, rather than initiating a radical rupture with what came before. This session will be of interest to a broad audience, including those who work within the fields of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world, eighteenth-century studies, postcolonial studies, and intellectual history.