What is the Enlightenment, for us? Are we its heirs, its continuers, its defenders? Or should we acknowledge our distance from it, and try to imagine a different sort of connection to this now-distant past? At the present moment, the temptation to identify with the Enlightenment is almost overwhelming. In dark times, after all, few historical subjects exert more allure than one with such a promise of illumination. How inspiring, how reassuring, to think that there was once a moment when reason challenged superstition, when justice promised to overcome power, when the spirit of toleration seemed to prevail over dogmatism and persecution! How tempting it is to think that if only we could reawaken the spirit of the Enlightenment, and rekindle the torches of the philosophes, we might yet dissipate the shadows now gathering around us. If those shadows seem especially menacing, it is partly because the Enlightenment itself is currently under explicit attack, and from many different directions. On the left, progressive scholars and activists denounce it as the birthplace of modern racism and the handmaiden of “settler colonialism.” On the right, “post-liberals” and Catholic integralists call it destructive of family, community, and religion. Populists of all varieties decry the faith it promoted in education and science as elitist and evil. If these groups agree on nothing else, it is that the Western world took a disastrous wrong turn sometime in the eighteenth century. They draw a straight line from “Enlightenment” to “liberalism” to “neoliberalism,” as if thinkers who failed even to predict the Industrial Revolution somehow bear responsibility for post-industrial decay. But is some sort of “return” to the Enlightenment the answer? In recent years, many prominent intellectuals have made this case, albeit in contradictory ways. In Enlightenment Now, the psychologist Steven Pinker credited the Enlightenment with virtually all human progress since the eighteenth century, equated it with his own brand of technocratic neoliberalism, and argued that everyone would agree if only they overcame some regrettable cognitive biases. The philosopher Susan Neiman, by contrast, in Left Is Not Woke, eloquently identified the Enlightenment with the promise of progressive politics and warned about the hijacking of that politics by “woke” activists hostile to Enlightenment values. The historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn took an oddly similar position in Liberalism Against Itself, except that for him the nefarious force that has dragged the left away from its optimistic Enlightenment roots is not wokeness but a fearful “Cold War liberalism.” Historians, too, have been pressing the case for the Enlightenment’s living relevance, at sometimes inordinate length. A 984-page survey of the Enlightenment from 1680 to 1790 by Ritchie Robertson associates it with the broad cause of “human betterment.” Anthony Pagden’s monumental book on the subject describes the Enlightenment as the birthplace of tolerant cosmopolitanism. And then there is Jonathan Israel, the Stakhanovite hero of Enlightenment scholarship, who, since 2001, has produced nine books on or closely related to the subject totaling 7,886 pages. According to Israel, all the political and social values dear to liberal modernity, including human rights, social equality, sexual equality, and racial equality, were already present in a “radical Enlightenment” that emerged in the seventeenth century in the Dutch circles around Baruch Spinoza. But did the Enlightenment even exist? And is this a serious question? In a provocative new book called The Enlightenment: An Idea and its History, the British conservative historian J. C. D. Clark claims that there was no such thing. The various intellectual currents that today go by that name had no real unity or coherence, he argues. Historians and philosophers only started to claim they did long after the eighteenth century, in order to invent historical legitimation for their own progressive reform programs. He notes that the very phrase “the Enlightenment,” with the definite article, did not come into common usage in English until the twentieth century, as a Google Ngram search strikingly confirms. (The German “die Aufklärung” appeared earlier, but also had limited resonance.) It is true that mid-twentieth century liberal scholars had strong incentives to find a long and inspiring pedigree for their own beleaguered beliefs. Clark underlines, a little too insistently, the fact that Enlightenment scholarship owes a particularly strong debt to liberal Jews born in pre-war continental Europe (Ernst Cassirer, Peter Gay, Theodore Besterman, Jacob Talmon, Robert Wokler, George Mosse, and others). It is hardly surprising that these men, many of whom fled Nazism, would turn for inspiration to this earlier moment of light, and revere it for helping to emancipate their ancestors from ghettoes. Jonathan Israel, who has continued in this tradition (despite faulting his predecessors for getting almost everything wrong) has stated the core idea clearly: “Jewish emancipation became a realistic proposition from the moment Europe’s former predominantly theological view of the world began to crumble under the impact of Enlightenment ideas.” Still, the Enlightenment was not a Jewish invention, and claims like this can too easily feed the worst sort of conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the idea of the Enlightenment as a coherent movement also owes a considerable amount to two Jewish refugees of a more critical and contrarian bent: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. But in place of the Enlightenment as salvation, they gave us the Enlightenment as perdition. Their Dialectic of Enlightenment, from 1944, speculated that the horrors of the twentieth century ultimately stemmed from a deadly Western “instrumental reason” that had come to maturity in the eighteenth century. “Enlightenment,” they wrote provocatively, “is totalitarian.” Their book had enormous influence on progressive thought, and it is in part thanks to them that so many scholars today condemn the Enlightenment as a sinister-sounding “project” that bears responsibility for modern racism, imperialism, misogyny, and intolerance of all sorts. The trend has become so popular that currently the best-known adage of Immanuel Kant’s — who famously offered his own definition of Enlightenment in an essay in 1784 — is probably, “Humanity has achieved its greatest perfection in the white race,” which he later abjured, and which in any case
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