Berghahn Books

Introduction: Postmodernism and the French Enlightenment

Author(s): Daniel Gordon
Source: Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 25, No. 2, Postmodernism and
the French Enlightenment (Summer 1999), pp. 177-182
Published by: Berghahn Books
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41299141
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 Introduction:

Postmodernism and the

French Enlightenment

Daniel Gordon

"A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but
rather by touching both at once."
- Pascal

Postmodernist thinkers and Enlightenment scholars ought to be in clo

communication, but in reality they have little to do with each other.
the one hand, we find postmodernist academics whose knowledge of t
Enlightenment is limited to a series of derogatory cliches: the
Enlightenment glorified "instrumental" reason; the Enlightenment set out
to eliminate cultural diversity; the Enlightenment naively idealized history
as infinite progress. The bias is acute because "Enlightenment" is to
postmodernism what "Old Regime" was to the French Revolution. The
Enlightenment, that is to say, symbolizes the modem that postmodernism
revolts against. It is the other of postmodernism: not only that which
preceded postmodernism but that in opposition to which postmodernism
defines itself as a discovery and a new beginning.
On the other hand, the Enlightenment has often attracted scholars
who regard it with admiration as a new and fortunate beginning. This
admiration reached a high point in the period from the early 1930s to the

Daniel Gordon is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts.

©1999 HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS/REFLEXIONS HISTORIQUES, Vol. 25, No. 2

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 1 78 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques

early 1 970s, and particularly among liberal intellectuals of German Jewish

origin for whom the Enlightenment symbolized the alternative to racism
and totalitarianism. For Viktor Klemperer, a professor of Romance
languages in Dresden and a Jew who managed to survive the entire Nazi
period in Germany, images of the French Enlightenment sustained the
will to live in dark times.1 Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of the
Enlightenment , first published in 1932 and still the most thoughtful book
on the subject, took shape as an act of resistance against the cult of the
state and an effort to salvage the aesthetic and moral integrity of
European culture.2 The work of Peter Gay, who came to the United States
as a young refugee from Hitler, represents one of the last great
expressions of this effort to set up the Enlightenment as the positive face
of modernity.3 While postmodernism is critical of modernity in toto, these
figures presented eighteenth-century thought as a redeeming path into
the future.
Since the wide appeal of postmodernism began in the 1 970s, when the
great wave of pro-Enlightenment scholarship was coming to an end, the
two conceptions of the Enlightenment, critical and ideal, did not directly
confront each other. The lack of direct contact between theory and
erudition continues to this day, for in recent years the best scholarly work
on eighteenth-century France has been not about the Enlightenment but
about the origins of the French Revolution. This shift from the study of the
Enlightenment as an intellectual effervescence in its own right to the
study of ideas as a cause of revolutionary politics has powerfully changed
the nature of the scholarly discourse. In the works of Robert Darnton,
Keith Baker, Sarah Maza, Dale Van Kley, and other leading specialists, one
can detect a broadening of the range of sources consulted but also a
thinning out of the intellectual history of the period. By streamlining
eighteenth-century culture to the point where it can be viewed in relation
to a specific outcome, the Revolution, scholars have forged a kind of
history that does not require dwelling on the exquisite sophistication of
eighteenth-century writing. None of the books by the scholars named

1 . Viktor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzen: Tagebucher 1933-1945,
2 vols. (Berlin, 1 995). The diary is sprinkled with reflections on the French Enlightenment and
notes toward a magnum opus on the subject. Klemperer did in fact publish several works on
the Enlightenment after the war.
2. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1979; first pub. in
German, 1932). For Cassirer's critique of the modem cult of politics, see his The Myth of the
State (New Haven, 1961; first pub. in 1946).
3. In addition to Gay's numerous books on the Enlightenment, see his My German
Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (New Haven, 1998).

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 Introduction 1 79

above includes extended discussion of the ideas of Voltaire, Montesquieu,

Diderot or Rousseau.4 A generation of historians in the United States
(roughly speaking, those now in their 50s and 60s) has treated the
eighteenth century as a studio for filming the process by which absolutism
turned into democracy. The major thinkers of the Enlightenment play only
cameo roles, or no role at all, in these moving pictures of the rise of a
democratic public sphere, the process of desacralization that allegedly
undermined kingship, and the formation of Jacobin ideology. Historians
would rather discuss a popular pamphlet than a subtle play or a
systematic treatise, for the simpler the message, the easier it can be
inscribed in a story that must rapidly approach its denouement in 1789.
Today, in fact, there are very few historians with an intimate knowledge
of the writings of the major philosophes.
Tracing the straight genealogy of the Revolution and ignoring the
subtle turns of Enlightenment thought made sense to a generation of
scholars who were politically charged by the 1960s. Avoiding the
predicaments of Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot and focusing instead
on the stark terms of Revolutionary ideology ("virtue," "the people," and
so forth) appealed to a generation of academics that was not only
passionately political but also rigidly disciplined by the idea of progress
through academic specialization - hence embarrassed by the literary
quality of traditional intellectual history and unresponsive to the literary
and unspecialized character of Enlightenment thought itself. In search of
a determinate subject around which it could organize archival research
while deploying the new methods of statistics and cultural anthropology,
these historians found the subject they needed not in the philosophic
depths of the period but in its interests, ideologies, mentalities and
discourses - these being terms used to reduce the intellectual field to a
clear and simple structure that serves political narrative.
This approach is subject to one of the great pitfalls of historical
scholarship - teleology. It is also unclear how our intellectual life has been
enriched by historians who have set aside the French Enlightenment and
conferred so much status on the problem of Revolutionary origins. Why

4. One could claim that Damton's essay, "Readers Respond to Rousseau" in The Great
Cat Massacre (New York and London, 1 984) is an exception. But this essay deals more with
the popular impact of Rousseau's thought than with its internal structure. Damton, the most
influential American scholar of the Enlightenment, is well known for his critique of Peter Gay
and for his argument that the previous generation of scholars spent too much time studying
the "high" ideas of the Enlightenment. See The Darnton Debate: Books and Revolution in the
Eighteenth Century, ed. Haydn T. Mason (Oxford, 1998), vol. 359 of Studies on Voltaire and
the Eighteenth Century.

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180 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques

do we need increasingly detailed accounts of the ideological battles that

led to the Revolution? We are told that understanding everything about
the Revolution is of vital importance because the Revolution was the
beginning of "modern" politics. But it has reached the point where the
term "modern" is used like a ritual to give prestige to a field of research
and to avoid being precise about its reason for existing. Francois Furet
brilliantly demonstrated the subject's importance for his generation by
writing not only about the origins and course of the Revolution but also
about its legacy to the radical French Left, of which he was initially a
passionate member and later a passionate critic. American scholars, in
contrast, have dug into the problem of the origins of the Revolution, but
because the Revolution has no obvious legacy in this country, they have
not been able climb out of the ditch of academic specialization. The field
has become existentially vague: scholars working on the origins of the
Revolution have not taken steps to relate their interpretations to the
problems and passions of their readers.
Inevitably a reaction has occurred. The work of Dena Goodman seems
to mark a generational turning point, a renewed enthusiasm for the ideals
of the Enlightenment.5 Among scholars who, like Goodman, have done
their Ph.D.s since the 1980s, there is a rising interest in the nuances of
Enlightenment thought as distinct from its ideological distillations. The
stock precepts of 1960s and '70s historiography, which included the
denunciation of intellectual history as a type of "elitism," are no longer
binding upon a generation that regards "history from below" as what
older historians - members of the establishment - like to do. The prospect
of spending decades studying the French Revolution has also proved less
alluring for a generation not active in the 1960s and thus less intrigued by
the idea of revolutionary change. There is, however, a serious interest in
the permanent tensions of being a self-conscious person living in a
complicated social order.
The philosophes were the first to make such tensions the continuous
theme of their work, and the essays in this volume display a fascination
with the topic of ambivalence. Nearly till the contributors to the volume
belong to the post-60s generation described above. (The exception is
Arthur Goldhammer, a freelance writer and translator whose previous
academic career was in mathematics and whose independent spirit, one
could say, makes him part of every, or no, generation.) Here, I believe for
the first time, is a set of essays by scholars who have done patient

5. Dena Goodman, Criticism in Action (Ithaca, 1989); The Republic of Letters (Ithaca,
1994).

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 Introduction 181

research about eighteenth-centuiy thought but who are also theoretically

astute and aware of the postmodernist tradition. Up to now, the
accusations of postmodernist thinkers against the Enlightenment have
been ignored, or have been dealt with only in a most superficial
contradictoiy way, by the older generation of scholars that shifted th
historiography over to the question of Revolutionary origins and took lit
interest in the Enlightenment's own questions. Robert Darnton has taken
on the postmodernist challenge in a broadly interpretive essay calle
"George Washington's False Teeth." But as Jeremy Popkin has observed
Damton's hostility to postmodernism has little connection to his ow
scholarship, which is itself postmodernist in its effort to deconstruct th
canon and explore margined discourses. When facing postmodernism
critique of the Enlightenment, Darnton also falls back upon a view of th
period that surprisingly resembles the interpretation of Peter Gay, who
Damton otherwise repudiates in his scholarship.6
The discontinuities noted by Popkin, I would add, are symptomatic o
an unconfronted contradiction in the older generation of French
historians: a contradiction between its own scholarly agenda, which
hostile toward any form of cultural or intellectual history that shows
veneration for the object studied, and its discomfort with postmodernis
philosophies that take this spirit of negativity to its most radica
conclusions.
The contributors to this volume, in contrast, face the postmodernist
challenge to Western culture head on, both theoretically and empirically.
At some point in his or her essay, each author has identified how a
leading postmodernist author has characterized a specific theme in
Enlightenment thought (some examples are the sense of time in the
Enlightenment, the attitude toward European colonies in the
Enlightenment, conceptions of economic self-interest and the market in
the Enlightenment). The author then dwells on the theme in question and
compares the postmodernist account to his or her own scholarly account
of how the theme really operated in Enlightenment thought.
In the area combining scholarship and theory arises interpretation,
provocative and unorthodox. Unorthodox - because the point of this
volume is not to reject skepticism, concern for difference, and everything
else that conservative critics of postmodernism repudiate. The authors

6. Robert Darnton, "George Washington's False Teeth, " New York Review of Books, 27
March 1 997, pp. 34-38. Jeremy Popkin, "Robert Damton's Alternative (to the) Enlightenment"
in The Damton Debate , pp. 105-128.

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182 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques

establish the limits of postmodemism's vision of the past, but they do not
uncritically worship the Enlightenment. Most have themselves been
affected by the postmodernist sensibility. But unlike so many practitioners
of "cultural studies," they have not been affected only by postmodernism.
They are open to the idea that past thinkers can supply as much insight
as contemporary ones. They believe the dilemmas experienced in the
Enlightenment were as profound as those experienced by Foucault,
Lyotard and de Man. Sometimes, in fact, the dilemmas were the
same - but there is no doubt about who dramatized them more acutely
and with greater literary flair!
The Enlightenment, then, has not been superseded. It is perhaps not
sufficient, but it is not obsolete either. While not providing solutions to all
our problems, it does provide an introduction to sophistication and clarity,
without which nothing can be solved. The essays in this volume, which
cover a wide range of topics, reveal a common spirit. The authors
sympathize with the honest anxieties of contemporary criticism, but they
dispense with its classic condescension toward the past. Instead of
polarizing twentieth-century thought and the Enlightenment, they have
bridged a chasm that never ought to have opened up in the first place.

The idea for a volume on postmodernism and the Enlightenment

came from Stuart L. Campbell. I am grateful to him for proposing it and
for his insightful suggestions and corrections along the way. Keith Michael
Baker and I debated some of the points in this Introduction, and I believe
it has improved in the wake of his criticism. For both the Introduction and
commentary at the end, I received suggestions from numerous
participants in the French Culture workshop at Stanford University,
organized by Mary Louise Roberts and Aron Rodrigue. Particular thanks
to the organizers and to Karen Offen and Daniel Rosenberg for their useful
suggestions.

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