In The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History, J. C. D. Clark aims to show that while metaphors of “light” and “enlightenment” were common throughout the eighteenth century, the concept of “the Enlightenment” was absent, with the term formulated mainly in the twentieth century. In his own words, the “book’s aim … is not to announce that ‘the Enlightenment’ was this or ‘the Enlightenment’ was that but to trace the historical trajectory of some of the different variants of ‘the Enlightenment’” (2).

In historicizing the concept of “the Enlightenment,” Clark attacks the reification—as he often describes it—of “the Enlightenment.” In rejecting the reification of “the Enlightenment,” Clark also rejects the use of “the Enlightenment” as “a magic formula invoked to release mankind from its ancient and present ills” (14). Clark challenges modern “civil religions” that use Enlightenment concepts to advance particular stances in public policy and morality and to discredit alternative views. To that end, Clark leads readers to view “the Enlightenment” as a tendency rather than as a unified movement—a tendency toward the questioning of social, religious, intellectual, and political assumptions and practices.

There is room for disagreement on whether the absence of a concept denotes the absence of a thing. At points, Clark’s argument hinges on the invention of the term itself as opposed to the historically demonstrable veins of thought that cohere under what we understand as “the Enlightenment.” As he writes, “it was a term hardly used in the English-speaking world before the mid-twentieth century.” From that, he goes on to say that “since the term lacked an eighteenth-century referent, it could be … made to mean whatever later writers wished” (2). But is that a problem? Intellectual historians often name concepts to organize and explain past phenomena. If intellectual history were limited exclusively to topics used by the subjects in question, it would lack the insight that the retrospective work of history offers.

Clark seems to recognize this objection when examining whether there is sufficient evidence that specific historical phenomena can be grouped under the single label of “the Enlightenment.” But here, Clark doesn’t fully answer the question. He hedges, allowing that there were indeed lowercase-e enlightenment figures, such as Voltaire, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, who generally tended to question social, religious, intellectual, and political assumptions and practices. Simultaneously, he contends, “the rhetoric which came to celebrate a unitary Enlightenment in western Europe and North America was overstated.” In other words, while there are indeed “individual people, their ideas, and their contexts” that may espouse some lowercase-e enlightenment ideas, the “values and practices within and between … [their] societies over time displayed some commonalities, but more differences” (1, 4).

Though not his primary focus, Clark comments on religion throughout, and when he does, he complicates the typical understanding of how “the Enlightenment” interacted with religion. For instance, in part 1 of the book, which debunks the labeling of so-called “Enlightenment” figures, Clark spends a chapter on Locke, which he titles “John Locke: Natural Rights and Religion.” In historicizing Locke, Clark notes that Locke’s views on religious liberty were not nearly as tolerant as typically understood. As an example, Clark offers a work by Locke entitled “Reasons for tolerateing Papists equally with others,” wherein Locke contended against the arguments for religious toleration. Clark also asserts that Locke’s famous “Essay Concerning Toleration” argued against toleration for Catholics or Protestant sectaries. On these bases and others, Clark concludes that Locke “like most of his contemporaries, advocated [religious] toleration only for those of whom he approved” (147). For Clark, it turns out Locke fails to be the paradigmatic example of “Enlightenment” virtue he is often made out to be.

In part 2 of the book, Clark discusses natural rights. He argues that natural rights did not define “the Enlightenment,” asserting that Condorcet and Price, as representative of atheism and theism, respectively, did not regard “the fundamentally contrasting premises of their confidence in improvement as unimportant” (263). In other words, even where reformers shared optimism about human progress, the radically different theological foundations underwriting that optimism prevent those ideas from being coherently subsumed under a single, unified phenomenon called “the Enlightenment.”

Finally, in part 3 of the book, Clark investigates how the idea of “the Enlightenment” functioned within recent conflicts over the identity myths, or civil religions, of the United States, France, Germany, and Scotland. Here he examines the concept of religious equality, granting that this movement toward religious pluralism “from the nineteenth century into the twentieth … came closer to conceptualizing ‘the Enlightenment’ than any movement that had preceded it in anglophone culture” (388–89). Interestingly, then, it seems that in Clark’s view religious equality—or, framed differently, religious liberty—constitutes the strongest basis for conceptualizing “the Enlightenment,” insofar as it reflects a later-developing convergence of values, most notably seen in “the rise to practical prominence in the nineteenth [century] of various synoptic programmes of social engineering” (393).

Ultimately, then, Clark complicates the conventional picture of “the Enlightenment” by rejecting it as a coherent, reified historical actor. And as it relates to religious identity and religious liberty, Clark challenges that “the Enlightenment” was uniformly secular or progressively tolerant, articulating the often deep disagreements that structured debates over reform, rights, and toleration. What later came to be celebrated as “Enlightenment” values emerged unevenly and retrospectively and were shaped as much by nineteenth- and twentieth-century concerns as by eighteenth-century realities. In this way, Clark’s account cautions against using “the Enlightenment” as a simplifying origin myth, urging historians to attend to the diversity and contingency of the ideas it is meant to name.

Logan Tantibanchachai
Research Associate
Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy