Q&A

Professor John Robertson ponders how the historiography of the movement has changed

How has our understanding of what constituted the Enlightenment changed?

Historians’ interest in the Enlightenment is actually quite recent, gathering pace only after the Second World War. Until then, understanding of the ‘what, when and where’ of the Enlightenment was quite simple. It was a movement of philosophers and men of letters committed to the application of reason to human affairs, and therefore hostile to established churches, in favour of toleration, and, in some cases, actively irreligious. Its period was the 18th century, with a ‘pre-Enlightenment’ in the late 17th century; it ended in the French Revolution. Its principal location was France, where the ‘philosophes’ led by Voltaire proclaimed a new age of lumières; but it had a significant outpost in Germany, where the philosopher Immanuel Kant defined Aufklärung by the motto ‘to dare to know’.

The picture now is very different. Enlightenment philosophers are recognised to have been equally interested in the power of the emotions as with the triumph of reason. Toleration is seen to have been championed by religious believers as well as sceptics. The ‘where’ of Enlightenment has expanded too, and now covers many more parts of Europe, from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, as well as Scotland, England and North America. The ‘when’ remains primarily the 18th century, but evidence for the reception of Enlightenment in Eastern Europe, Greece and Latin America is taking it into the 19th century.