In the scholarship of the past fifty years, the Enlightenment has changed shape, becoming larger, broader, less cohesive, and multicentric. In what became classic works written in the 1960s, the intellectual historian Peter Gay focused primarily on French thinkers and their ideas, especially their opposition to the church and championing of science, subtitling his massive studies "The Rise of Modern Paganism" and "The Science of Freedom."
Gay included a few Scots, such as David Hume, and a few Germans, such as Kant and Leibniz, but otherwise everyone was French, male, and mostly upper-class. In the 1980s social and cultural historians, including Margaret Jacob and Robert Darnton, began to examine the ideas of Freemasons, religious free thinkers, publishers, lawyers, and others who were not members of the elite. They broadened the notion of "an Enlightenment thinker" socially, and also began to focus on the institutions and practices of the Enlightenment rather than simply on ideas alone.
Groups discussing and advocating for enlightened ideas were found in many cities of northern Europe, not simply Paris, so the Enlightenment expanded geographically as well. In the 1990s, the British historian Roy Porter, known especially for his work in the history of medicine, continued to challenge a Paris-centered view, arguing that British people - including
A few women - were pivotal in creating and disseminating Enlightenment ideas. Other scholars also examined the Enlightenment in various national contexts, finding an Enlightenment in Scotland, Spain, Naples, Rome, Poland, Russia, and across the Atlantic in the British, French, and Spanish colonies. Here people did not simply read and discuss French ideas, but gave them different emphases. And women were not simply occasional participants in Enlightenment debates, argued Dena Goodman and others, but central to their shaping.
Many of these historians studying an Enlightenment that was socially and geographically diverse continued to view the Enlightenment as a liberating movement that led directly to the revolutions of the later eighteenth century, including the American and Haitian as well as French. Documents that emerged from these revolutions, including the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, were written in the language of "natural rights" that was developed by Locke and expanded by Enlightenment thinkers.
Other scholars began to emphasize the more negative legacies of the Enlightenment. The German intellectual historian Reinhart Kosseleck and others saw it as an authoritarian movement whose motto - "dare to know" - led science and the state to be elevated above
All else, a quality found in twentieth-century fascism. Most Enlightenment thinkers, asserted scholars of colonialism such as Peter Hulme, did not contemplate extending natural rights or civil liberties to anyone other than white male property owners, and viewed Europeans as more rational and productive than non-Europeans, thus providing support for colonial inequities. Women may have talked about Enlightenment ideas, argue Steven Kale and others, but these were elite women only and their conversations had little influence on political events.
In the 2000s, the intellectual historian Jonathan Israel developed an argument in which both points of view could be accepted. He asserted that there was a sharp split between what he terms "radical" thinkers such as Spinoza and Diderot and "moderates" such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hume, and Rousseau. The former, argues Israel, supported freedom
Of opinion and equal rights - ideas that were the origin of modern democracy - and the latter continued to support hierarchical social and political structures. There also weren't separate national Enlightenments, according to Israel; rather thinkers throughout Europe interacted constantly. This transnational Enlightenment also became increasingly global in the 2000s. Enlightenment ideas did not simply flow east to west across the Atlantic, argue several scholars, but west to east. Historians of the Caribbean such as Laurent Dubois have analyzed the ways in which debates about slavery and universal rights going on in the islands of the French Caribbean shaped political discussions in Europe, and postcolonial historians trace lines of influence in all directions. Israel and Dubois have affirmed the focus on ideas that was at the core of Gay's study, but the Enlightenment today has a very different shape than it did half a century ago.
Though rulers and church leaders were still important shapers of culture, the institutions of the “public sphere” - learned societies, salons, clubs, literary journals, and newspapers - helped create what we now call “public opinion,” a force that became more powerful as the eighteenth century progressed. Public opinion was shaped by the tastes of elites, but also by those of more ordinary people, and increasingly determined which artistic and literary genres and styles would be judged praiseworthy, and which political ideas and plans should be accepted or rejected. Many artists, writers, and composers continued to get commissions from aristocratic patrons, but others depended on selling their work to a middle-class public through galleries, art shops, book stores, or subscriptions. Middle-class urban households often had more disposable income in the eighteenth century than they had had in the sixteenth, and the consumer goods they purchased included books, engravings, paintings, musical instruments, and music to play on them.
The men and women who gathered in societies, academies, clubs, and salons embraced science as well as other interests. Like Pope - who was a favorite of discussion groups in London - they saw new developments in science as a proper basis for all knowledge and something that all educated people should understand. They regularly purchased popularizations of scientific works, which sought to explain both the basis and the impact of new ways of understanding the world.
World History
