The Enlightenment we want

Why do we care about the Enlightenment, what it was, whether there was such a thing, who was or was not part of it, whether it ended or not? Do we care about the Renaissance, what it was, where it was, who was or was not part of it, whether it ended or not? What, if anything, do we gain from this kind of questioning? What is achieved by corralling authors, artists, musicians or public figures under a label? And more generally, what is the merit of periodization? To be sure, once a period is delineated, named, and taught as such in schools, it invites reflection and, given the critical nature of our intellectual and academic culture, questioning, especially if it and the ideas associated with it are taken for granted. Likewise, the membership of a group which thinks of itself as an entity and gives itself a name, or accepts a given one, will call for probing as to who truly belonged to it and who did not. Questions of this kind stimulate scholarship. It makes for a community of thought and divisions within it. Periodization and labels feed discontinuity theses and these in turn nourish continuity arguments. Epochs lend themselves to temporal divisions: early, middle, late Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modern, Postmodern. Categorizations, one might think, are unlikely to cause much, if any, harm, and they do spur academic enquiry and popular debates. Yet, the disputes that arise from some of them might indicate otherwise, and of all the arguments that are to be had about the nature and borders of the various temporal or intellectual categories, those relating to the Enlightenment are probably the most contentious. The principal reason for this is its disputed link to the present, to ‘modernity’. The origins of what is good or bad about modernity has been, and continues to be, laid at the feet of the Enlightenment. The identity of the Enlightenment matters because it is thought, though not by all, to have engendered us. We are either the embodiment of its false dreams or of its anticipated nightmares. Of course, if it were not for modernity and its discontents, we would not have these two latest books by Richard Whatmore and Jonathan Clark, and that would be regrettable.