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The Enlightenment, The Enlightenment

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The Enlightenment was less a set of ideas than it was a set of values. At its core was a critical questioning of traditional institutions, customs, and morals. Some classifications of this period also include the late seventeenth century, which is typically known as the Age of Reason or Age of Rationalism.

This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change. From this point on, thinkers and writers were held to be free to pursue the truth in whatever form, without the threat of sanction for violating established ideas. However, the Romanticism movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century had argued that the Enlightenment elevated reason to the unwarranted status of a new authority.

Intended for a largely rural and semi-literate audience these books included almanacs, retellings of medieval romances and condensed versions of popular novels, among other things. While historians, such as Roger Chartier and Robert Darnton, have argued against the Enlightenments penetration into the lower classes, the Bibliothque Bleue, at the very least, represents a desire to participate in Enlightenment sociability, whether or not this was actually achieved. Outram, 27-29 Moving up the classes, a variety of institutions of readers access to material without needing to buy anything. Libraries that lent out their material for a small price started to appear, and occasionally bookstores would offer a small lending library to their patrons. Coffee houses commonly offered books, journals and sometimes even popular novels to their customers.

See Mackie, Darnton, An Early Information Society As Darnton describes in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime , it is extremely difficult to determine what people actually read during the Enlightenment. For example, examining the catalogues of private libraries not only gives an image skewed in favour of the classes wealthy enough to afford libraries, it also ignores censured works unlikely to be publicly acknowledged. For this reason, Darnton argues that a study of publishing would be much more fruitful as to hypothesizing reading habits. In particular, see Chapter 6, Reading, Writing and Publishing All across continental Europe, but in France especially, book sellers and publishers had to negotiate censorship laws of varying strictness. The Encyclopdie , for example, narrowly escaped seizure and had to be saved by Malesherbes, the man in charge of the French censure. Indeed, many publishing companies were conveniently located outside of France as to avoid overzealous French censors. They would smuggle their clandestine merchandise both pirated copies and censured works across the border, where it would then be transported to clandestine book sellers or small-time peddlers. See Darnton, The Literary Underground , 184.

Jacobs seminal work on Enlightenment freemasonry, Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Free masonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

D'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse of l'Encyclopdie provides a history of the Enlightenment which comprises a chronological list of developments in the realm of knowledge - of which the Encyclopdie forms the pinnacle. Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Discours prliminaire de l'Encyclopdie A more philosophical example of this was the 1783 essay contest (in itself an activity typical of the Enlightenment) announced by the Berlin newspaper Berlinische Monatsschrift , which asked that very question: What is Enlightenment? Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn was among those who responded, referring to Enlightenment as a process by which man was educated in the use of reason. Outram, 1. The past tense is used deliberately as whether man would educate himself or be educated by certain exemplary figures was a common issue at the time. DAlemberts introduction to lEncyclopdie, for example, along with Immanuel Kants essay response (the independent thinkers), both support the later model.

Borrowing from Kant, he states that Enlightenment was/is the process by which the spirit achieves clarity and depth in its understanding of its own nature and destiny, and of its own fundamental character and mission. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment , translated by Fritz. C. A. Koellin and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1951), vi.

Jonathan Israel, for example, in Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670-1752 (2006), constructs an argument that is primarily intellectual in scope. Like many historians before him, he sets the Enlightenment within the context of the French Revolution to follow. Israel argues that only an intellectual interpretation can adequately explain the radical break with Old Regime society. Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670-1752 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4.

He wrote Du Contrat Social, in which Rousseau claims that citizens of a state must take part in creating a 'social contract' laying out the state's ground rules in order to found an ideal society in which they are free from arbitrary power. His rejection of reason in favor of the "Noble Savage" and his idealizing of ages past make him truly fit more into the romantic philosophical school, which was a reaction against the enlightenment.

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