This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Ockham’s eponymous razor is still as incisive as it was when first wielded by the English friar and scholastic philosopher six centuries ago. William of Ockham (1287–1347) was a pioneer of the theory of knowledge and the great proponent of nominalism, arguing that universal concepts were merely names, not realities.

No historian wields Ockham’s razor more effectively than J.C.D. Clark. Clark upholds the Peterhouse High Tory view: the inextinguishable influence of Christianity on “public doctrine” is denigrated or ignored by a secularised scholarly establishment. Hence the latter deserves to be dispatched without mercy. If Cowling was the Sweeney Todd of the historical profession, Clark has raised the dissection of progressive priggishness to an art form.

In his last book, Clark demonstrated that Tom Paine, hero of progressive causes on both sides of the Atlantic, was no such thing. By casting doubt on Paine’s authorship of several radical texts and also by relocating him in an earlier tradition — “a retro-deist, not a proto-socialist” — Clark reduced his revolutionary role in America and France to historical rather than mythical proportions. Shorn of his “presentist” glorification by academic recruiting sergeants, Paine emerges as a less serviceable but more plausible man of his time.

Now, in The Enlightenment: An Idea and its History, Clark has performed the same anatomy of an historiographical myth, but on a vaster scale. He deploys an armoury of erudition, using sources running the gamut of 18th century Western civilisation, to argue that the Enlightenment itself is overdue for the Ockham treatment.

The gravamen of Clark’s charge is that the way we have come to think of the Enlightenment, as a Europe-wide intellectual movement or even as a “project”, is utterly anachronistic — so much so, in fact, that an entire academic industry has been built upon the anachronism. An orthodoxy oblivious of its own ahistorical nature, the field of Enlightenment studies routinely anthropomorphises and even attributes agency to “The Enlightenment”.

Here’s a random example, not quoted by Clark but from a standard reference book. In The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment (1990), the article on the Scottish Enlightenment by John R.R. Christie states:

If we regard the Enlightenment as a crucial epoch in the formation of modern intellectual consciousness, committed to the connected ends of secular scientific understanding, material progress and political liberation, then the Scottish Enlightenment can be seen as exemplary not in any simple endorsement of these ends, but in its ultimate questioning of their possibility.

Not only is it an anachronistic view of the 18th century to assume that the entire European intelligentsia was “committed” to these “ends”, but it is even more so to write as if their Scottish branch were capable either of collective “endorsement” or “ultimate questioning” of them.

As Ockham might have said, “the Enlightenment” — an abstract noun that did not enter normal English usage until two centuries after the epoch it denotes — did none of these things. It was, rather, a collection of numerous highly idiosyncratic individuals, few of whom supposed that they were engaged in a Continental campaign to subvert the Church, hereditary monarchy or traditional forms of life. Samuel Johnson’s devotions were far more typical of the age than Hume’s scepticism or Voltaire’s écrasez l’infâme.

Does this mean that “the Enlightenment” is useless as an explanatory device? Not at all. Like the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or the Reformation, it belongs to the common currency of historical discourse. But we must never forget the distinction between history and historiography, let alone expect the latter to bear the weight of the former. Clark’s thesis might be summed up as: the Enlightenment was not a movement, but a metaphor.

What follows from this thesis is that a wholly heterogeneous period, in which contemporaneous but highly disparate societies and even more wildly disparate individuals flourished, has been homogenised by historians to reflect their views and instrumentalised by politicians to serve their ends.

In the case of Scotland, Clark cites Nicola Sturgeon, the now disgraced but once omnipotent First Minister, who sought to aggrandise her own cause of independence from the UK by suggesting that it would lead to a second Scottish Enlightenment. Scotland, she declared in 2019, was “the country that led the world in the Enlightenment”.

Yet the term “Scottish Enlightenment” had only spread from the 1970s. As Clark demonstrates, its proliferation took place alongside the rise of Scottish nationalism, especially in the wake of devolution in 1999. Thereafter it rapidly became “a prominent trope in nationalist discourse”.

One of the most important findings of Clark’s close reading of “the idea and its history” is to show that die Aufklärung, the German noun usually translated as “Enlightenment”, has been used in something like the present sense for much longer than its English or French equivalents.

This was not yet the case in 1784, when Immanuel Kant published his essay on the question “What is Enlightenment?” Clark argues convincingly that Kant did not think he was defining an historical period, nor was there any agreement at the time about what Aufklärung actually meant.

Kant himself declared, in words that only became famous long afterwards, “Enlightenment is the departure of the human being from its self-incurred minority.” But, Clark adds, his definition of “minority … owed nothing to ideas of parental, political, religious or social oppression”. Nor was he arguing for “the public use” of reason for anyone except his fellow professors: “What Kant was requesting, then, was only liberty for a “scholar” (like himself) to speculate; the public at large had to “obey”.

Half a century later, long after le siècle des lumières, this highly restricted understanding of Enlightenment had evolved into something more like our own, at least in Germany. Clark cites the example of Johann Erdmann, the Hegelian historian of philosophy, who in 1866 saw secularism, or “the unsettling first of specifically Christian beliefs and then of religious convictions in general”, as the key principle of Enlightenment.

I believe that I may have discovered a significant passage that predates this one by quarter of a century, in The History of Kantian Philosophy by another Hegelian, Karl Rosenkranz.

This work was published in 1840 as part of Rosenkranz’s edition of Kant’s works. “Such a [popular philosophy] is however always, as in the time of Socrates or Cicero, a philosophy of enlightenment,” he writes, “for what is essential to such an epoch is that the spirit of a people becomes conscious of itself as a thinking being and, in opposition to historical and other authorities, invests thought with the power of decision.”

Through the murk of metaphysical jargon, one can discern here a conception of the Enlightenment that anticipates the one constructed by academics in recent decades. One searches in vain for such anticipations elsewhere at that date.

So the answer to the question posed by Clark — “was the Enlightenment invented in Germany?” — is a qualified “yes”. But he makes the argument much more suggestive by showing how, for the Anglophone world, the modern answer to Kant’s question, “What is enlightenment?”, was only supplied by Ernst Cassirer, one of the early 20th century Neo-Kantian philosophers and, after 1933, a distinguished émigré to the USA. It is Clark’s brilliant insight that the Enlightenment as we now know it emerged as a counterweight to the catastrophe that befell Germany, largely as a product of the diaspora that transformed Anglo-American intellectual life in so many different ways.

An attractive figure, though no longer widely known outside the academy, Cassirer was productive in many philosophical fields, from epistemology to aesthetics. His elegant edition of Kant’s works was published by his cousin Bruno (another luminary of the Berlin cultural scene, like several other members of the family).

Most relevant here was Cassirer’s 1932 book Die Philosophie der Aufklärung. As Clark explains, this apotheosis of the Enlightenment was a response to the irruption of irrationalism in Weimar Germany, symbolised by Cassirer’s notorious encounter with Martin Heidegger at Davos in 1929. The two philosophers had clashed over the interpretation of Kant: whilst Cassirer defended a rationalist reading rooted in the texts, Heidegger claimed that “every interpretation must use violence”. It began with violence to the word; it ended in the death camps.

Cassirer may have lost the battle of ideas in Weimar Germany, but he won the war for the Enlightenment — albeit posthumously. He died in 1945, but in its 1950 English translation his book changed the subject forever. Cassirer had mobilised the Enlightenment against the Nazis, turning it into their antithesis. A noble ambition, certainly; history it was not.

Now, three quarters of a century later, it is time to re-examine the vast polemical superstructure that has been erected on such flimsy foundations. For beginning that process of deconstruction, we owe Jonathan Clark a profound debt.