Today’s Telegraph has two reviews of Philipp Blom’s Encyclopédie: one by “Graham Robb”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/08/29/boblo29.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/08/29/botop.html and the other by “Anthony Daniels”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/08/29/boblo229.xml (aka Theodore Dalrymple). It sounds like another volume to add to my Enlightenment pile (some of which I’ve even read). From Daniels’s review:
bq. Because censorship was still strong, though not completely inflexible, in the France of Louis XV, the authors of subversive articles in the various volumes had to adopt an indirect Aesopian approach (a most aesthetically and intellectually satisfying technique that is closed, alas, to authors who have no censorship to evade). My favourite practitioner of such subtle subversion is the Abbé Mallet, who undermined religious dogmas by discussing them in deadpan and literal-minded fashion. He meditates, for example, at great and pedantic length on the precise geographical location of Hell – was it in Terra Australis, in the sun, or in the environs of Rome? And how many species of animal Noah would have had to take aboard the Ark, how many bales of hay and straw, and how often he would have had to clean out the animals’ stalls? No dogma can long withstand the onslaught of this kind of concrete-mindedness, posing in the garb of credulous orthodoxy.
At some point soon I want to write an extended post on the Enlightenment and the common references on blogs to “the Enlightenment Project” and “the values of the Enlightenment”. Pending that, here’s a link to Robert Wokler’s essay “The Enlightenment: The Nation-State and the Primal Patricide of Modernity”:http://www.colbud.hu/main/PubArchive/DP/DP46-Wokler.pdf (PDF) which digs overs some of the questions concerning the relationship between the Enlightenment and “modernity”. (The essay also appears in a collection co-edited by Wokler and “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/ — _The Enlightenment and Modernity_).
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Scott Martens 09.02.04 at 1:24 pm
I have to admit that Wokler’s case that the nation-state killed the Enlightenment has a fair amount of appeal to me. But I should note that he’s taking a number of positions which, while not exclusively held by pomos, do tend to be identified with them or at least to kindred strains of Enlightenment-sceptical thought:
Wokler is perhaps not so far from the Enlightenment’s opponents after all. This leads me to think that he is largely trying to exculpate his favourite 18th century philosophers from any responsibility for the ills of the republican nation-state. I can appreciate this, but it is akin to exculpating the American Founding Fathers for the horrors of the Civil War. True, they were long dead when the Civil War started and would no doubt have abhorred it had they lived to see it. However, the federal structure they created, the philosophical principles they put forward, and their failure to embrace abolitionism, are very much at the root of the conflicts that followed them. In the same sense, I am not sure I can so easily sign on to letting 18th century French philosophy off the hook for the nation-state.
For example, the current proponents of various “Islamic menace” theories draw heavily on the very same 18th century philosophers who were so instrumental in undermining the power of church and king. At the core of their claims is that belief that our enlightened tolerance and human rights will undermine the gains made since the French Revolution in tolerance and human rights, if we tolerate and extend those rights to the unenlightened. While you might well convince me that Rousseau would find such a conclusion horrifying, I am not sure it would be right to say there is nothing to support it in Rousseau’s work.
Nonetheless, I am in complete agreement with Wokler’s complaints about the nation-state – that its democracy is generally little more than a fig leaf to cover the alienation of the state from those it claims to serve; that its segregation of humanity into “citizens”, who enjoy human rights, and “others” who live only at the state’s privilege is the opposite of human rights; and that these ills started in the wake of the French Revolution and continue unabated.
Chris Bertram 09.02.04 at 5:28 pm
Thanks for your thoughtful remarks Scott. Clearly there’s much to be said about the connections between 18th century thought and what followed. But I think that Wokler’s remarks here and elsewhere are very useful as a counterweight to the very simplistic assertions about Rousseau’s conception of the general will and tyranny that one finds here and there. In particular, I’m thinking of the role he assigns to Sieyes and to Sieyes’s _rejection_ of Rousseau’s views on representation in the formation of the modern nation state.
On the roots of the Enlightenment, you see a commonality between Wokler’s view and postmodernism because he sees the E as emerging from local needs and pressures rather than being, as you put it, the “liberation of some pre-existing universalist spirit in man”. But, of course, the fact that there is a local causal history to the E, doesn’t underpin any form of relativism. And I think that Wokler implicitly rejects that move when he writes about the “recognition” of the common humanity of all people (rather than say “construction”) later in the essay.
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