The Enlightenment. An Idea and Its History
J. C. D. Clark, Oxford University Press, 2024
Any book by Jonathan Clark is an event for those interested in the history of ideas, for Clark is that most unusual of English historians, an intellectual. The type is found more widely on the continent, but in England academics are often uneasy with concepts, and many of our public historians go in for simplification, and seem only to understand what they see in the mirror.
Clark (1951-) started as an empirical political historian. A Cambridge graduate, his first book, The Dynamics of Change: the Crisis of the 1750s and English Party Systems (1982), was a brilliant, highly-detailed account of the breakdown of the political system in 1754-7, and was linked to his wider argument that specific crises determine historical developments rather than any broad ‘progressivist’ teleology.
This argument was taken forward with his analysis of the great political crisis between 1827-32 which caused the downfall of an English (Anglican) church-state of considerable vitality, a view advanced in English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (1985, 2nd edn, 2000), a work that is the prelude to this new book on The Enlightenment. In the following year, Clark anatomized the historical profession in Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1986), castigating those he classified as ‘Old Hat’, ‘Old Guard’ and ‘Class of ’68’, and arguing that all had downplayed the role of religion in early modern England.
In The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (1993), Clark extended the range of his interests to explain the American Revolution. In his subsequent books Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion, and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (1994), his 2001 edition of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and his Thomas Paine: Britain, America, and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution (2018) he extended his distinctive, anti-whig view of the period to tackle established interpretations of major cultural and intellectual figures. His study of Paine is a twin with The Enlightenment as it profitably raises abstract, rather than biographical, points about the ‘Age of Revolutions,’ notably concerning the relationship between the American and French Revolutions, the nature of those two episodes at the end of the eighteenth century, and the absence of the revolution that Paine sought – but which never occurred – in his native country.
This remarkable body of work is of the greatest importance and has attracted much controversy because of its revisionist character, intellectual ambition, and sheer historiographical vim. Clark specialized in pointing to the lack of intellectual clothes on the imperial academics of the 1970s and 1980s who propounded the then unquestionable orthodoxy of modernism: that early modern Britain was on a then unique path towards a liberal, democratic future.
This rested on a particular interpretation of English, then British, economic (and, in consequence, said the modernists), social, political and intellectual history from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth. It also rested on a pre-dating of ‘modernity’ to join the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to what came later.
Having been unable to establish himself in Cambridge, Clark was a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford before holding a major chair in Kansas, succeeding there the seventeenth century specialist, J.P. Kenyon. Clark, probably the most important intellectual historian of his period, was never appointed to a chair in an English university, though he applied for several, nor to a fellowship of the British Academy. I have always been struck by the vitriolic opposition expressed by colleagues who have never read a word of his work, which is an apt comment on the dislike of ability and indeed, of radicalism of ‘the wrong sort’ in British historical circles. This, and the lack of research funds that might otherwise have flowed in his direction, have meant that Jonathan Clark has never had much chance to supervise the work of British postgraduates. The whole profession, as well as a generation of students and readers of history, has been impoverished by that. He is hardly the first dissident historian, who has dared to think differently, to have suffered in this way; nor, as things stand, will be the last. The assumption of uncomplicated merit prevailing in a united historical profession without factionalism is just that, an assumption.
This is relevant for an appreciation of Clark’s new book, which is an attack on the ‘civic religion’ that uses Enlightenment concepts to advance particular stances in public policy and morality, and to discredit alternative views. Clark considers the only very late conceptualization, and therefore use, of Enlightenment ideas in England, Scotland, France, Germany and America, examining the period from 1650 to the present. In doing so, he demonstrates that a term, and an intellectual movement – ‘the Enlightenment’ – widely treated as an acknowledged reality has been, in practice, a concept employed for polemical purposes and in a rhetorical fashion. Moreover, Clark argues that what were to be claimed as Enlightenment ideas were far more marginal in the eighteenth century than was subsequently to be argued by nineteenth and twentieth century reformers.
This view links well with Clark’s earlier argument in English Society for the continuing strength of religious faith in the eighteenth century. It also reinforces his idea of the ecclesiastical, political, intellectual, legal and cultural significance of a Church-state at that time. As such, ‘modernity’ in the shape of Enlightened ideas is postdated by Clark to the nineteenth century, or even later. For decades historians have been trying to ‘locate’ the eighteenth century and Clark has played a key role in these debates: this new book is a further contribution to his distinctive and important view.
As an account of what historians discuss as ‘the Enlightenment’, Clark’s new book is necessarily incomplete. He is not trying to cover the West as a whole, nor adding to the discussion on the problematic question of Enlightened Despotism – and the ‘despots’ played highly significant roles in forcing through new relationships between governments and established Churches across continental Europe. Indeed, it is no criticism of Clark to note that he appears unfamiliar with much of the scholarly literature about relevant individuals, institutions, and policies in eighteenth century Europe, including Marc Raeff’s discussion of the goals and practices of what he termed the ‘well-ordered police state’ in this period. It is unclear quite how far the shift from what may be termed a Baroque sensibility to an Enlightened one transformed social attitudes in this period. Nevertheless, there were changes in governmental aspirations in the eighteenth century, not least in support for mass and elite education, as a consequence of a more general belief in individual and societal ‘improvability’. Instead, this is a book about thought, its content, context, and classification, then and subsequently. This is a central theme in the work of the Cambridge school of the history of political thought – at its height when Clark was educated there – and Clark weighs in powerfully against the ahistoricism that has been so prevalent not only among political and literary scholars, but also in the work of historians of political thought, despite their pretensions to the contrary. More generally, Clark explains that his purpose is to historicise explanatory concepts that have been put to anachronistic polemical uses in recent decades.
Clark’s book, with its skillful rereading of intellectual trends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, raises the question of where now we should place whatever we mean by ‘the Enlightenment’, for the absence of a term does not mean that it is ahistorical to consider the phenomenon. Frequent reiteration, as Clark shows, does not make terms any easier to define. He argues that it is ahistorical to consider a notion formulated later, as it could not be explained or understood at the time by supposedly ‘enlightened’ contemporaries. His is a view about the illegitimacy of historians putting words into the mouths of the dead. His key methodological argument favours trying to understand what contemporaries meant in their terms, not ours.
Reading Clark leads to the view that it is best to treat the Enlightenment as a tendency rather than a movement – a tendency toward the questioning of social, religious, intellectual and political assumptions and practices. We have generally described this in terms of the application of ‘reason’ to beliefs and institutions of this era: Clark argues that a priori assumptions and methods also played a major role in the enlightened thought of this era.
Furthermore, and underlining Clark’s interest in continuity, the importance of earlier thinkers for eighteenth-century thought is readily apparent. If some writers, especially in France, Scotland and Naples, defined their concepts in reaction to the past, most did not. Furthermore, those who stressed change often used the ideas of the past in their arguments. Separately, whatever the ‘cult of reason’, this was also a period in which interest was displayed in a wide range of activities, phenomena and beliefs, from freemasonry and rosicrucianism to vampirism and mesmerism, that cannot be easily reconciled with secular and rational accounts of the period.
Clark’s method is impressive, his text wide-ranging, his conclusions of general intellectual significance for the study of ideas in all periods. This is an important work by a scholar at the height of his powers.
Jeremy Black’s relevant books include Eighteenth-Century Europe and Eighteenth-Century Britain.
