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European Studies

`Aufklrung', freemasonry, the public sphere and the question of

Enlightenment
Tim Mehigan and Helene De Burgh
Journal of European Studies 2008 38: 5
DOI: 10.1177/0047244107086798
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Journal of European Studies

Aufklrung, freemasonry, the public

sphere and the question of Enlightenment
TIM MEHIGAN
University of Otago, New Zealand
with
HELENE DE BURGH
Monash University, Australia

That the Enlightenment was a movement reaching across at least three

European countries (France, Germany and Britain) in the eighteenth
century, with a similar platform in all three (social improvement on the
basis of unassisted reason), is the current orthodoxy. Yet this view can
only be accepted with qualications. It is the intention of this essay to
focus attention on these qualications. A rst objection lies with the fact
that no platform of Enlightenment was articulated in any country in
the eighteenth century apart from Germany. In the debate about
Enlightenment initiated in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1783,
Kants insistence that Aufklrung must stay within political limits is
considered characteristic not only of the German discussion, but indeed
of all broadly Enlightenment thought from the beginning. In considering
Kosellecks argument about the Enlightenment, which analysed this same
conservatism, a second objection is apparent: the impulse to stay within
the connes of the absolutist state suggests that eighteenth-century
Enlightenment, politically speaking, was decidedly other than that which
has subsequently been found within it.
Keywords: eighteenth-century publishing, masonry, political
philosophy

Journal of European Studies 38(1): 525 Copyright SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore) http://jes.sagepub.com [200806] 0047-2441/10.1177/0047244107086798

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JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 38(1)

I
The revival of interest in the Enlightenment in English-speaking
countries after the Second World War seems to have been inspired
by Horkheimer and Adornos major study in German, published
under the title of Dialektik der Aufklrung in 1947,1 and an English
translation of Ernst Cassirers 1932 study of the Enlightenment, which
appeared in 1951.2 Peter Gays two-volume study, published in 1966
and 1969, represented a third important work on the Enlightenment in the post-war period. Gays study was inuential because it
focused attention on the Enlightenment at a time when the rebuilding
of Europe after the war was in full swing. The Enlightenment, to
which German thinkers had been key contributors, offered a way of
imagining a common stock of European ideas and a common cultural heritage after the ravages and the dissension of war. Despite
contrasting intentions Cassirer and Gay afrmed the value of the
heritage of the Enlightenment, whereas Horkheimer and Adorno
(1999) questioned it these three major studies advanced a broadly
synthetic view of the Enlightenment: that is, they contended that the
term Enlightenment usefully described the conceptual thrust of the
entire eighteenth century.3 At the core of this in the end, politically
conceived notion of Enlightenment was what Kramnick has called
unassisted human reason. It is reason, not faith or tradition, that was
to constitute the principal guide to human conduct (Kramnick, 1995: xi)
and lead the drive to bring about social and political development.
Nowadays, this synthetic view not only represents current orthodoxy
about the eighteenth century, but it has also led to a widening of the
concept of Enlightenment still further in several directions. Hunter, for
example, has focused on the German Enlightenment (Hunter, 2001).
He advances the view that the Enlightenment reached as far back as
Descartes and Leibniz. This broad scope allows him to postulate the
existence of both a dominant, philosophically oriented Enlightenment,
that of university metaphysics, and a rival Enlightenment, a subspecies of what later developed into Kantian philosophy advocated
by Pufendorf and Thomasius in the late seventeenth century that
was premised upon a separation of moral theology from politics
and law.4 Ilie, for his part, has examined the Christian Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Spain, one of many alleged off-shoots of
Enlightenment found in eighteenth-century Europe (1995: 1). Using
Goyas etching Capricho 43 as a starting point, Ilie examines aspects
of the retreat from Reason led by the arts in the eighteenth century
a view assuming the widespread character of a movement against
which such a retreat can be contrasted.

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MEHIGAN WITH DE BURGH: THE QUESTION OF ENLIGHTENMENT

In this article we put forward a different view about Enlightenment. We challenge the accepted view that the Enlightenment was a
single movement spanning an entire century in three major European
countries (Britain, France and Germany). We argue instead that a
conscious project of Enlightenment (which is to say, Aufklrung) did
not emerge until 1780, was conned in the rst instance to Germany,
where it was widely debated among leading intellectuals, especially
from 1783 onward, and is best understood as a specically German
attempt to cast the terms of a social debate. We argue that what is now
called the historical movement of Enlightenment appears to have been
canonized in the mid to late nineteenth century in German, English
and French historiography. At this time Aufklrung was translated back
into English as the Age of Enlightenment and, adapting formulations of dAlembert, into French as le Sicle des Lumires. Under the
heading of Enlightenment separately occurring movements in thought
were put together. In doing so, differences between Aufklrung and
the broader rationalist tradition of long historical signicance in all
three countries have been obscured.
A historical study of word usage, while admittedly not a denitive
guide, nevertheless suggests qualications about the reach of a general movement of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. First, the
word Enlightenment does not appear to have been used in English to
designate a historical movement of social and political reform before
the second half of the nineteenth century (Brown, 1993: 824). In France,
les lumires was used to refer to thinkers who cultivated the light of
intellectual reason, notably in the writings of Fontenelle,5 dAlembert
and Rousseau,6 but there is no evidence that it indicated a programme
of social action in France in the eighteenth century.7 The rst edition
of the Dictionnaire de lAcadmie franaise (1694) records lumire in the
sense of intelligence, connaissance, clart desprit; in its 1762 edition
a wider meaning appears in relation to un homme dun grand mrite,
dun grand savoir, yet no reference to a project of Enlightenment is
made. Even in the eighth edition of the dictionary, which appeared
in 19325, the meaning of lumire is listed as meaning a person of
rare knowledge and transcendent merit, but again no reference to
eighteenth-century thinkers occurs (Dictionnaires dautrefois, 2001).
By contrast, the rst use of Aufklrung as an abstract noun in German
to indicate a conscious project appears to have occurred as early as
1770;8 the term was widely used in this meaning from around 1780 and
was the focus of a debate in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift after
1783. The rst use of the word to designate a historical movement
appears in the writing of the German romantic Novalis in 1799.9

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JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 38(1)

There is considerable evidence to suggest, therefore, that a discourse

of Enlightenment, focused on a conscious attempt to revive certain
positions maintained in the late eighteenth century, did not gain
momentum until the middle of the nineteenth century. We can further
surmise that this discourse emerged rst in Germany. Between 1840
and 1850, for example, a rush of new translations of the works of
Rousseau, dAlembert, Diderot and Voltaire appeared in Germany.
Possibly the rst anthology of the Enlightenment was published under
the title Bibliothek der deutschen Aufklrer in 18467. Shortly afterwards,
Schlossers Geschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts appeared in 1861, followed
by Wilhelm Windelbands Geschichte der neueren Philosophie in 1876. This
interest in eighteenth-century thought was repeated soon afterwards
in Britain, with the appearance of historical analyses broadly focused
on eighteenth-century thought (A. S. Farrar in 1863, J. Hunt in 18703
and L. Stephen in 1876). The rst explicit reference to Enlightenment
in a book title in English appears to be J. G. Hibbens Philosophy of the
Enlightenment (London, 1910). About the same time two works appeared in Germany naming the Enlightenment in their title for the
rst time. Yet it is characteristic of the late discovery of Enlightenment
as a historical movement in the Anglophone world that there is no
entry for Enlightenment in Lawrence Dawsons Dictionary of Dates,
published in 1911.
If the argument that Enlightenment was not canonized as a movement in thought until the mid nineteenth century at the very earliest
is sustained, then it is evident that the actual project of Enlightenment
in the eighteenth century, in which heated debate about the use of
the actual term took place, must be understood in a more restricted
sense. In this more restricted sense, it appears particularly indebted
to a single philosopher, Immanuel Kant, whose critical philosophy
unfolded in three major works published between 1781 and 1790, and
was directed at rescuing reason from sceptical detractors and securing
a public ground for exercising it. The detractors that Kant opposed
had suggested that reason could not serve as the basis for social and
political action. Hume, in his major study Treatise of Human Nature, rst
published in 1739, had maintained, for example, that human beings
were shackled to a false reason or none at all, and that the passions
were a better guide for orienting behaviour in the world (Hume,
1969: 315). Kants philosophy sought to overcome such objections10
by defending a ground for reason against these sceptical positions
and an arena that of the public sphere where a more moderate,
circumscribed reason could be exercised on a range of important social
and political questions. Kants critical philosophy, for this reason,

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MEHIGAN WITH DE BURGH: THE QUESTION OF ENLIGHTENMENT

sought a middle ground that would not only live within rational
limits, but equally importantly exercise its rights within the political
limits reserved for it.
To test claims about the pan-European reach of a movement of
Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, we adduce statistical
evidence of publication activity in France, Germany and Britain.
The development of a notion of a public sphere has been part of
the attempt to divine the existence of a project of Enlightenment in
Europe since the appearance of Jrgen Habermass important study
Strukturwandel der ffentlichkeit in 1962. We argue that such a public
sphere expressly provided for in Kants philosophy11 had not
developed in any meaningful sense in countries outside Germany until
the very end of the eighteenth century, and that this would appear
to provide further support for a more modest understanding of the
spread of a programmatic Enlightenment.
Finally, we undertake an examination of freemasonry in Europe
in the eighteenth century to appraise Reinhard Kosellecks argument about the inherently conservative nature of Enlightenment.
Koselleck has argued (1988) that the conservative position about
reason observable in the German debate in the late eighteenth century,
as advocated, say, by Kant, would appear to be constitutive of the
concept of Enlightenment from the very beginning. In other words,
the conservative strain in the argument about reason has clear
intellectual roots and occurs, for example, in the thinking of Hobbes
in the mid seventeenth century, in particular in his Leviathan. Moreover, the conservative position about reason would appear to suggest
that Enlightenment was turned into something quite different
half a century or so later, when, as we suggest, a discourse of political
Enlightenment was invented in the mid nineteenth century. It is to
this question of the conservative nature of the Enlightenment, and
its relation to freemasonry (also accorded signicance in Kosellecks
analysis), that we rst wish to turn.
II
Approaches that nd compelling points of contact between freemasonry and Enlightenment12 have highlighted the fact that speculative
freemasonry13 established as a result of a decision of the Grand Lodge
in London in 1717 to open its doors to non-masons emerged at about
the time when rationalist doctrines were beginning to command political inuence in England, Scotland, France and Germany. According
to these approaches, the spread of freemasonry to the European

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10

JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 38(1)

continent from 1725 onward appears not only part of a concerted

movement of European Enlightenment, but indeed cannot be considered inseparable from it.14 Moreover, that the aspect of secrecy
attached to masonic practice is not antithetical to the Enlightenment
ideal of open debate,15 as might be assumed,16 is attributed to the increasingly political nature of the movement of Enlightenment over the
course of the eighteenth century. The movement of Enlightenment,
on this interpretation, was more and more at odds with conservative
institutions in the European countries in which it had taken root. The
lodges, reecting the political ends to which the Enlightenment was
increasingly drawn, became important for the promulgation and dissemination of subversive doctrines calling for the overthrow of the
prevailing order of the day. Freemasonry, it has been argued, therefore constituted the major vehicle for the launching of the 1789 French
Revolution.17 Schmidt is one commentator who has endorsed this
link between the French Revolution and Enlightenment, conjecturing
that [the] idea that there is a connection between the Enlightenment
and the French Revolution is by now so familiar that it is difcult to
imagine how troubling the relation must have seemed in the early
1790s (Schmidt, 1996: 12).
This popularly Francophone view of a progressively premised
movement of Enlightenment and the collusive role played by freemasonry before the outbreak of the French Revolution contrasts with a
more differentiated account of Enlightenment of German provenance.
Already in 1937 in his ber den Proze der Zivilisation Norbert Elias had
pointed to the complete absence in Germany of anything resembling
a political party or programme before the French Revolution.18 The
argument that the Enlightenment was entering its most radical political phase immediately before the Revolution, at a time coincident
with the enforced closure of masonic lodges throughout continental
Europe, accordingly seems difcult to sustain. Although there are dissenters to Eliass view within German scholarship, even the most
upbeat of German commentators, such as Fritz Valjavec, fail to nd
anything more than the existence of political tendencies19 in Germany
before 1789.
Kosellecks landmark study under the title of Kritik und Krise, rst
published in 1959, held these progressive views of the Enlightenment
and freemasonry up to question. In a highly nuanced discussion,
Koselleck suggested that the process of Enlightenment in Europe in
the eighteenth century took root in a type of strategic compromise between rationalist and absolutist positions in debates that had started
more than a century before. Koselleck attached great importance to

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MEHIGAN WITH DE BURGH: THE QUESTION OF ENLIGHTENMENT

11

Hobbess discussion in Leviathan (1651) that addressed the question

of civil war in England and the related issue of the sovereignty of
the monarch. Hobbess insight, according to Koselleck, was to make
reason the reason of science that was already being championed by
early Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes and Francis Bacon
serve the interests of the state: To Hobbes, reason was the ending of
civil war a line that can also be reversed in its historic meaning: the
ending of the religious civil wars is reason (Koselleck, 1988: 334).
The reason of the early Enlightenment, by this argument, had not only
found an accommodation with absolutism, it had also become complicit with it. From this perspective, Enlightenment could never have
promoted progressive political tendencies in any programmatic way
since it had been directed precisely at forestalling the growth of such
tendencies from the beginning. The Enlightenment, in Kosellecks
judgement, thus failed to realize itself as a political phenomenon.20
On the contrary, an alliance of enlightened reason and absolutism was
urged upon the free conscience of citizens to which Hobbes appealed
in fashioning arguments in support of the rule of the sovereign. This
area of moral conscience was increasingly widened over the course
of the eighteenth century as material gains gave rise to the hope for
a better society. Yet this hope contradicted the spirit of compromise
that had been struck with the forces of absolutism. When Enlightenment foundered on this contradiction, absolutism foundered with it:
It was from Absolutism that the Enlightenment evolved initially
as its inner consequence, later as its dialectical counterpart and
antagonist, destined to lead the Absolutist State to its demise
(Koselleck, 1988: 15).
An analysis of French speculative freemasonry would appear to lend
weight to Kosellecks argument. Masonic lodges existed in some profusion in eighteenth-century France: the largest was located in Paris,
established in 1725 as the Grand Lodge of France with the approval
and backing of the Grand Lodge of London. Its rst Grand Master,
indeed, was Lord Derwentwater, an Englishman. Derwentwater
appointed his ofcers from the French nobility (Chevallier, 1974:
37)..While three other lodges, Louis dArgent, Coustos-Villeroy
and Bussi-Aumont, sprang up in Paris between 1727 and 1740, the
Grand Lodge of France remained the dominant one (Weisberger,
1993: 65). It has been estimated that, by the 1770s, there were 10,000
masons in Paris (Diringer, 1980: 27), and as many as 10 per cent of all
eighteenth-century French authors were masons (Roche, 1964: 88).
While the Grand Lodge of France inuenced the formation of other
lodges in France, the Anglo-centric outlook of these new lodges was

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JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 38(1)

preserved. As Weisberger points out, this body [the Grand Lodge of

France] received at this time administrative direction from the Grand
Lodge of London and established lodges in Paris to promote signicant ideas associated with English culture (Weisberger, 1993: 65).
The Anglophone inuence over the lodges in France,21 moreover, is
consonant with Kosellecks premise that the right to associate freely
and to engage in debate a right on which the masonic movement
depended is traceable to an English idea about political sovereignty.
This is Hobbess position that rational debate was not to be imagined
as open disputation, for this endangered the rule of law, but could be
articulated solely within the freedom of a secret interior (Koselleck,
1988: 75).
Another aspect of the English model of freemasonry found particular resonance among French masons. A constitution and its
attendant effects such as voting rights and an open forum typied
the liberal outlook of English masons.22 Indeed, such condence in a
constitutional order provided a strong defence of freemasonry in the
1730s and 40s when the brotherhood came under the scrutiny of the
state. Under royal decree in 1737, Louis XV banned royal advisers and
administrators from belonging to the masonic lodges and inaugurated
police powers to search the homes of subjects who entertained links
with lodges (Chevallier, 1974: 1415). In similar vein, Pope Clement
XII decreed in 1740 that Catholics were not to afliate with the lodges
and that the clergy should work to suppress the order (Findel, 1869:
2003). Masons answered this oppression by invoking the masonic
ethos, a doctrine that proclaimed as duty the need to defend the principles of civil society:
The sacred Laws of the Masons; it is for you that this work is reserved;
it is up to you to eliminate crime, to strike the criminal, defend the
innocent, to support the weak, to force men to become happy ... Yes,
my brothers, that is our condition: our passions require laws, our unjust
and reckless desires must be restrained. (Anon., 1764: 15)

The masons, therefore, saw their mission as working for the public
good and promoting equality and the right of individuals to pursue
their own conception of happiness. At other times, the defence of the
cause of freemasonry was argued in terms that seem consistent with
Enlightenment principles. One brother, for example, spoke of the
work of the mason as consisting in the fact that:
in his presence, everything changes, all things in the universe are
renewed and reformed, order is established, the rule and measure of
things is understood, duty is followed, reason listened to, wisdom

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MEHIGAN WITH DE BURGH: THE QUESTION OF ENLIGHTENMENT

13

comprehended; and mortals, without changing their essence, appear

as new men. (Anon., 1764: 17)

The masons undoubtedly promoted liberal ideas and, as Weisberger

points out, attempted to maintain a civic prole. They belonged to
cultural circles, engaged in progressive social debate and published
in prominent journals such as the Journal de Paris, the Journal des
savants and the Mercure de France (Weisberger, 1993: 17). Hazard even
suggests that the Encyclopdie was partly funded by masons and that
they contributed articles (Hazard, 1963: 21415). The claim to be egalitarian and civic-minded applied, at least in theory, to the internal
functions of the lodges themselves where the masons sought to be
non-discriminatory in their recruitment policy. They stated that they
welcomed anyone, including women, into their lodges.23 Internally,
the masons operated under a constitution and organized themselves
outwardly along democratic lines. Indeed, as the Grand Lodges of
London (1717) and France (1725) came into being, the replication
and distribution of the Constitutions, as they were formally known,
increased signicantly (Knoop, 1937: 678). The growth in new lodges
also necessitated copies of the Constitutions (Knoop, 1937: 678). Voting
rights were hierarchical, yet could be acquired after the passage of
a certain amount of time. Lodge administration changed hands and
the Grand Master was beholden to an administration.24
Overall, however, French freemasonry took root in ambiguous soil.
At once civic and secretive, mass-oriented and elitist, constitutionally ruled and hierarchical, the French masons illustrate many of the
contradictions that accompany the attempt to divine a socially and
politically progressive movement of Enlightenment in France in the
eighteenth century. The idea of a masonic constitution, for example,
gave way to internal elitism and the domination of those with
money and power. This hierarchy was demonstrated in the 1770s
and 1780s when the Grand Orient lodge in Paris erected a National
Assembly with adjudicating sub-committees and charity distributors
to administer the workings of the order as an institution (Jacob, 1991:
17). Indeed, as Jacob concludes in her discussion on the real function
of the masonic constitution: it is quite simply wrong to state that the
philosophical society known as Freemasonry ever intended to practice, or actually practiced, direct democracy in the lodges of Western
Europe (1991: 17). Jacob goes on to point out that elections took place
to confer representatives, or lodge ofcers, who became vital to the
social and constitutional life of the lodges (1991: 17), such that they
could become almost authoritarian in their governance (1991: 17).
The phrase Knock and it shall be opened unto you was meant to

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JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 38(1)

symbolize an openness to new members (Hills, 1932: 15), yet this

was hardly the case in practice. As Stanley Hills reects, only from
suitable material can real Free Masons be formed, and just as seed
cannot grow on stony ground, so the unsuitable candidate can never
gain real and lasting advantages from membership of our Order
(1932: 16). Douglas Knoop further illuminates the kinds of men who
became masons, identifying four distinctive categories: landed gentry
or nobility, professional men and scholars, men connected with
the building industry, and members of trades other than those associated with the building industry (1937: 623). Thus, although they
argued strongly for inclusion, the masons remained exclusive.25 They
recognized wealth, status and elevated professional position over the
common applicant. This sense of masonic exclusivity was augmented
by a deep interest in antiquity and lineage.26 As Knoop comments, this
interest in masonic heritage grew steadily in the eighteenth century and
emerged as a source of inspiration among new members, promoting
a sense of ancestry, hierarchy and elitism. It also lent French freemasonry a religious appearance conrmed by statements, such as
those of the French mason Chevalier Ramsay, who said: we seek to
form in the course of time a spiritual nation (Van Veen, 1977: 2758).
The spiritual nation the French masons sought in the end, however, was
overwhelmingly secular in nature, and it was directed at cultivating
a moral purpose, a projection of self at a remove from the dictates of
absolute monarchy. For this reason, freemasonry could not express a
direct political purpose, but, as Koselleck concludes, it did entail an
indirect political presence (1988: 83), for morality is the presumptive
sovereign (1988: 85).
Freemasonry, therefore, cannot be enlisted without contradiction
in the service of a politically progressive idea of Enlightenment. On
the contrary, despite an outward commitment to progressive ideals
such as universal equality and free association, the freemasons of the
eighteenth century are characterized by an attachment to hierarchical
values and a spirit of exclusivity. Moreover, the arcane rituals of freemasonry appear to uphold the conservative disposition that Koselleck
nds typical of the sentiment of Enlightenment in general.
III
Statistical research on the public sphere throws light on the related
question of the geographical reach of the movement of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. According to an inuential view,27 a
public sphere fostered primarily through the medium of print, but

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15

also through debating and reading societies,28 clubs, academies and

libraries,29 had emerged in several European countries by the middle
of the eighteenth century.30 This was a sphere in which books on a
range of secular topics were written and published, and where a predominantly bourgeois class of merchants, academics, public ofcials
and educated women had arisen to read them.31 By the last quarter of
the eighteenth century the growth of the public sphere appeared to
connect with an earlier notion of a republic of letters a community
of scholars and writers who sought to realize a new progressive
state within the state.32 By 1784 the notion of the public sphere was
already sufciently developed to sustain a debate in a German journal,
the Berlinische Monatsschrift, about its own self-constitution. This is
the debate that inaugurated the use of the word Aufklrung in the
meaning of Enlightenment and attempted to dene the conditions
that would hold for informed public debate.
Yet this story of the emergence of an increasingly strident public
sphere must be weighed against the testimony of quantitative research
suggesting that the public sphere in the eighteenth century did not
emerge in all European countries with anything like the celerity hitherto supposed. Statistics detailing the average annual output of new
and reprinted works in English indicate, for example, that there was
less publishing activity in London in the 1760s than in the decade
171019, and only marginally more activity in the 1770s than at the
start of the century. A signicant upsurge in the number of published
works did not occur until the 1790s.33 This trend is broadly followed
in Edinburgh and Dublin, although publishing activity starts from a
lower base in those cities (Munck, 2000: 92).
In the case of France, a complicated story of publishing and reading
activity emerges. As Darnton reports, the rst French daily newspaper,
Le Journal de Paris, did not appear until 1777 more than a hundred
years after the rst German daily had appeared in Leipzig in 1660
(Darnton, 2003: 34). Against this (which might be read as an indication
of relatively low literacy in France before 1789) he has discovered that
writers had emerged in considerable profusion in France during the
second half of the eighteenth century. Of nearly 3000 people Darnton
identied as writers on the eve of the French Revolution, roughly 500
made up Grub Street, a motley collection of authors scribbling in
garrets and dodging lettres de cachet (Darnton, 1998: 257). The conceit
of Grub Street34 was invoked by Darnton to account for discrepancies
between an allegedly High Enlightenment that coursed through the
salons of the privileged in the early to mid eighteenth century, and
the irreverent outpourings of low life writers who, locked out of the

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JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 38(1)

salons, nevertheless appear to have contributed in their scribblings to

a desacrilization of the Old Regime by the outbreak of the Revolution
(Darnton, 1971). The discrepancy between an allegedly high and low
Enlightenment is traceable to difculties historians have found in
asserting unambiguously progressive notions on the basis of the
literature of the Enlightenment alone.
Again, Kosellecks view stressing a strategic compromise between
the advocates of reason and the upholders of the absolutist state is
apt: most of the well-known philosophes were assigned to specic
censors and knew how to appease them (Roche, 1989: 11). Elsewhere,
as Roche reports, publishers, censors and the police worked together
to ensure an orderly ow of printed materials in which politically
circumspect ideas were released onto the market (1989: 202).35 Even
the Encyclopdie, which attracted opposition from the state in its early
years, was increasingly viewed as benign. Darnton thus registers a
change in the treatment of the Encyclopdie in the last 15 years of the
Old Regime: The persecution ... in the 1750s turned into protection
in the 1770s (Darnton, 1979: 538).
When attention is turned to the type of books that were published in
the eighteenth century, conventional views about the centrality of the
philosophical discourse presumed to be at the core of the eighteenthcentury movement of Enlightenment would also appear to be in need
of revision. Daniel Mornets investigation of the auction catalogues of
private book collections in the period 175080 in France, for example,
found just a single copy of Rousseaus Du contrat social out of more
than 20,000 titles.36 This is an exiguous gure for a work popularly
held to be one of the most programmatic texts of the Enlightenment,
even allowing for the fact of censorship. A different picture of overall
publishing activity, however, emerges in Germany, despite the
vigorous level of censorship that took place in a number of German
states.37 According to a study conducted by Albert Ward of the trade
catalogues produced for the Leipzig book fairs, whilst no appreciable
rise in trade activity occurs before 1740, a huge growth is demonstrated
over the period from 1740 to 1800, with the number of titles more
than trebling.38 It is noteworthy that while the proportion of scientic,
philosophic and historical titles remains relatively constant over the
60 years to 1800, the proportion of titles in the area of imaginative
literature increased dramatically from 10 per cent of the total market
in 1740 to 30 per cent in 1800.39 This interest in imaginative literature
at the end of the eighteenth century is the logical accompaniment to
the emergence of Romanticism. Its connection with Enlightenment,
however, is less clear.

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17

We are left, therefore, with conicting views about the nature

and extent of Enlightenment in the major countries in which it is
thought to have occurred, namely France, Britain and Germany. If
Enlightenment is understood in terms of the emergence of a public
sphere shaped overwhelmingly by the medium of print, no movement
of Enlightenment would appear to have occurred outside Germanspeaking Europe before the 1780s at the earliest. This would appear
to contradict the popular view that a movement of Enlightenment
occurs across the entire eighteenth century and may even have started
well before this.40 Certainly there is no statistical evidence of major
structural change in publishing activity outside Germany before the
late eighteenth century. It can be fairly assumed that, for the same
reason, a signicant growth in the number of readers did not occur
before the 1780s. Within Germany, by contrast, there is an upswing of
publishing activity from about the middle of the eighteenth century
some 25 to 30 years before a similar level of activity is registered in
England, Scotland, Ireland and France. As Wards research shows, a
lively reading public had certainly emerged in Germany by the last
decades of the eighteenth century, and this public was especially drawn
to works of the imagination (Ward, 1974: 5991). On the testimony of
these facts, therefore, it was only in Germany that a springboard for
a social movement of Enlightenment based on the urgings of a newly
literate public could have been laid before the outbreak of the French
Revolution. This is a conclusion that agrees with evidence about the
type and frequency of the use of Aufklrung/Enlightenment outlined
in the rst part of this essay.
IV
In sum, it is especially in Germany that doubts about the existence of
a political programme of Enlightenment are evident. As Elias shows,
there is scant evidence of political activity in Germany before the
Revolution and therefore, we may conclude, little reason to suppose
that Enlightenment was building towards political upheaval in the
period leading up to it. Even in pre-Revolutionary France, Kosellecks
idea that Enlighteners and the state had entered into an arrangement
that choked off the impulse towards political emancipation must
be given credence. Why else would philosophes such as Voltaire and
Diderot have preferred to consort, as Darnton reports, with the very
archaic and eroded segments of the social structure they sought
to reform? (Darnton, 1979: 527). Darnton labels this behaviour of
the philosophes of Enlightenment paradoxical. Yet such behaviour

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JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 38(1)

would appear less paradoxical if the conventional understanding of

Enlightenment was overturned. This would entail the view that new
ideas associated with an imagery of light did not amount to a platform of progressive political reform, as has been widely maintained.
On the contrary, as we have argued, many philosophes appear to have
struck a compromise with the Old Regime in ways that sought to
preserve their status and social position.41 Moreover, that no concerted and conscious movement of Enlightenment can be said to
have occurred before 1783, would appear to resolve difculties that
almost all commentators have encountered in uniting the disparate
strands of Enlightenment in Europe in the eighteenth century. Put
simply, there was no unied project of Enlightenment in Europe in the
eighteenth century. What exists as the rst stirrings of a programme
of social action can be found in the German debate that was initiated
by the German journal Berlinische Monatsschrift in late 1783. Yet even
here no unanimity of outlook or purpose was established.42 This
was partly due to the embryonic nature of the debate, and partly,
following Koselleck, to the politically compromised nature of the
concept of Aufklrung from the beginning. The result is clear: those
who wished to promote a programme of social improvement from a
position outside the sphere of direct political action were faced with
an invidious choice either collude with the state and remain within
it, or retreat from the state in secret association and remain outside
it. The latter strategy was adopted by the freemasons, the former, at
least in Germany, by Aufklrer. That neither strategy constituted an
effective political statement is underscored by Koselleck:
These men, who determined their countrys cultural physiognomy
or bore the burdens of the State, were not allowed to decide its fate,
for it was intrinsic to the system, to the Absolutist order, that there
was nothing at all for them to decide all were subjects. (Koselleck,
1988: 66)

Analysing what he calls a strategy of the philosophes to enlighten

from above, Darnton would appear to have reached broadly similar
conclusions:
This strategy led them to concentrate on the conquest of salons and
academies, journals and theaters, Masonic lodges and key cafs, where
they could win the rich and powerful to their cause and even gain access,
by back doors and boudoirs, to the throne. (Darnton, 2003: 5)

What we propose is that we see in such behaviour not a movement to

promote a common platform of change, but, on the contrary, a strategy
of individuals acting above all in their own interest.

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Our analysis therefore suggests two conclusions. First, that a process

of gradual social improvement in the eighteenth century, based on a
general rationalist foundation, must be distinguished from a conscious
project of Enlightenment. A broad shift in mentality in the eighteenth
century undoubtedly occurs, and, perhaps for want of a better term, it
has been called the Enlightenment. This gradual shift in thought was
marked by a new focus on what has been called unassisted human
reason. Secular rationality increasingly legitimated the drive to establish the social, political and economic dimensions of the modern state,
and its rst expression was industrialization, not the French Revolution,
as Marx had already suggested in the mid nineteenth century.43 Second,
the conation of process with programme, which began to occur
in the mid to late nineteenth century and has continued unabated since
then, has not only promoted a general confusion about Enlightenment,
it has also distorted the political nature of the original Enlightenment.
Enshrined in the notion of Aufklrung, a conservative programme of
Enlightenment began to be debated in the German journal Berlinische
Monatsschrift in late 1783. Its signicance lies in the fact that it marked
the emergence of a conscious project of social reform in Germany for
the rst time. At the same time it remained mindful of its duty to stay
within the connes of absolutist rule, as Kants distinction between the
public and private use of reason indicated in the most authoritative
contribution to that debate. Kants invocation, following a statement
of the Prussian monarch Frederick the Great, to argue as much as
you want about whatever you want; but obey,44 provides the best
statement about its political purpose, and, for precisely this reason,
the best statement about its limitations.
Notes
1. Horkheimer and Adornos Dialektik der Aufklrung (1947) was rst published
in English in 1972.
2. Cassirer taught at Yale and Columbia between 1941 and 1945. His inuence on
the debate about the Enlightenment in the United States has been profound.
Among the scholars who acknowledge his inuence and example are American
cultural historian Robert Darnton, and two important American philosophers:
Arthur Pap and Susanne Langer.
3. Gays view that the narrow Enlightenment of the philosophes was embedded
in a wider, more comprehensive atmosphere, the atmosphere of the eighteenth
century may be considered representative. He states that the eighteenth
century may be called, without distortion, the Age of the Enlightenment
(1966: x). For more recent evidence of this view see Till (1993: 1) and Porter
(2000: 11); also Stollberg-Rilinger (2000: 11).

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4. Hunter has uncovered the importance of the thinking of Pufendorf and

Thomasius for modern civil philosophy. Might not the dening feature of
Pufendorfs and Thomasiuss philosophy different in almost every regard
from the (Kantian) philosophical enlightenment (Hunter, 2001: 7) make
their philosophy seem more to accord with rationalist, and less with
Enlightenment, values?
5. Fontenelle advocates a more philosophically oriented poetry in his essay Sur
la posie, expressing the hope that une lumire not conned to the region of
philosophy might nally come to embrace tout lempire des lettres. Elsewhere
in the same essay he speaks approvingly of an increased focus on the virtues
of reason in his own age: il parat bien avr que le genre humain, du moins
en Europe, a fait quelques pas vers la raison (Fontenelle, 1968: 48, 50).
6. See Rey-Debove and Rey (1993: 1310).
7. DAlembert had referred to the light of reason ... illuminating the world in
the introduction to the rst volume of Diderots Encyclopdie (of which he
was also a principal editor) (Cassirer, 1951: 4).
8. Schneiders purports to nd a use of the nominalized term in the meaning
of Aufklrung des Verstandes as far back as 1691 (Schneiders, 2001: 47).
Winfried Mller, however, does not nd popular use of the word Aufklrung
until around the middle of the eighteenth century at the earliest. The use of
the verbal form aufklren, he argues, starts in the 1720s (Mller, 2002: 1).
9. Novalis uses Aufklrung to designate a historical movement in his essay Die
Christenheit oder Europa (Novalis, 1981: 5356). However, the German etymological dictionary of Hermann Paul dates the use of Aufklrung in the sense
of a historical movement from the 1840s (Paul, 1992: 65).
10. As Kant said in the preface to the Prolegomena: Ich gestehe frei: die Erinnerung
des David Hume war eben dasjenige, was mir vor vielen Jahren zuerst den
dogmatischen Schlummer unterbrach und meinen Untersuchungen auf dem
Felde der spekulativen Philosophie eine andere Richtung gab (Kant, 1968:
260). Also cited in Ernest C. Mossners Introduction (Hume, 1969: 25).
11. A public dimension is provided for in the very thrust of Kants Kritik der reinen
Vernunft (17817), as Gardner points out: the place of intersubjectivity in
Kants account of empirical reality should be noted. That Kantian empirical
reality is essentially public follows from his account of it as having necessary
apriori grounds: whatever judgements have objective validity must have
validity for all subjects, and vice versa (Gardner, 1999: 280).
12. As Weisberger argues, freemasonry is frequently linked to the notion of
Enlightenment (1993: 3).
13. Whereas masonic practice (Werkmaurerei) was tied to the actual practice of
the craft, speculative freemasonry highlighted the symbolic code of morality
that was believed to underlie it (Reinalter, 2000: 1112).
14. This is also Weisbergers view: Masonic rites embodied cardinal Enlightenment doctrines and served as an effective vehicle for their transmittance
(1993: 9).
15. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger is one of many who see no contradiction between
esoteric practice and progressive Enlightenment (2000: 129).

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16. For Reinhard Koselleck, however, the sense of mystery attaching to freemasonry atly ... contradict[s] the spirit of the Enlightenment (1988: 70).
17. Weisberger, paraphrasing Barruel and Cochin (1993: 3).
18. Bis 1789 ndet man in Deutschland mit ganz vereinzelten Ausnahmen
keine Idee einer konkreten, politischen Aktion, nichts, was an eine politische
Parteienbildung oder an ein politisches Parteiprogramm erinnern knnte
(Elias, 1969: 20).
19. Valjavec uses Mannheims term politische Strmungen to characterize these
tendencies. See Valjavec (1978: 5).
20. Koselleck characterizes the political aspirations of the Enlightenment as unable
to be fullled. Of the emergence of groups with a social reformist aspiration
he observes: The tension between their socially increasing weight, on the one
hand, and the impossibility of lending political expression to that weight, on
the other this tension determined the historical situation in which the new
society constituted itself (1988: 66).
21. The inuence of English traders in the establishment of the early lodges in
Bordeaux and Marseilles is discussed in Roche (1998: 1712).
22. As Margaret Jacob suggests: the lodges on the Continent were replicas
of British Lodges and brought with them forms of governance and social
behaviour developed within the distinctive political culture of that island.
Men had voted at meetings for centuries and on either side of the Channel.
Only in Britain did they do so within a constitutional structure and at a
national legislative assembly where voting was by individual and not by
estate or locality (1991: 5).
23. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that women were accepted into the
lodges until after the 1750s (Jacob, 1991: 12041).
24. Stanley Hills comments on the election process for the Grand Master and his
obligation to the Wardens or the administering committee. While the Grand
Master was entitled to nominate his successor and incoming Wardens, he
nonetheless functioned within a constitutional and administrative framework (Hills, 1932: 45).
25. One might argue that the inclusion of artisans and craftsmen lent a more
egalitarian view to the elitist ways of nobility, landed gentry and professionals. However, these artisans and craftsmen represented the humble origins
of the masonic order, dating back into the fourteenth century and beyond,
when the order was tantamount to an artisans guild. These categories of
members in the eighteenth century when masonry had become speculative
symbolized the last link to the operative masonry of the Middle Ages.
26. As Randle Holmes in Britain commented (quoted in Knoop, 1937: 64):
I cannot but honor the Fellowship of the Masons because of its antiquity,
and the more as being a member of that society called Free-Masons.
27. See Habermas (1990: 119): In der brgerlichen ffentlichkeit entfaltet sich ein
politisches Bewutsein, das gegen die absolute Herrschaft den Begriff und
die Forderung genereller und abstracter Gesetze artikuliert, und schlielich
auch sich selbst, nmlich ffentliche Meinung, als die einzig legitime Quelle
dieser Gesetze zu behaupten lernt.

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28. Albert Ward notes, however, that the earliest known reading society in
Germany was not founded until 1779 (Ward, 1974: 105).
29. For an overview, see Munck (2000: 1417).
30. See Habermas (1990: 347): Schon fr den Liberalismus der Jahrhundertmitte
ein Problem, kommt ffentliche Meinung im letzten Viertel des 19.
Jahrhunderts vollends als eine problematische Gre zu Bewutsein.
31. Ward, who has examined reading habits in German-speaking countries in
the eighteenth century, sees a spectacular growth in the ability of people to
read in the last quarter of the century (Ward, 1974: 5960).
32. Uwe Japp traces the Gelehrtenrepublik in Germany to the inspiration of the
German writer Klopstock in the middle 1770s (Japp, 1990: 26384).
33. As Ward indicates, no signicant rise in book publication in Britain occurs
before 1756. In the decade from 1792 to 1802, however, nearly four times as
many books were produced annually than in the period from 1666 to 1756
(Ward, 1974: 62).
34. Darnton called Grub Street a symbolic landscape as well as a social milieu
(1998: 264).
35. As Roche argues: The policing system was intended to defend the same
orthodoxy as was preventive censorship: church, king and morality
(1989: 22).
36. See discussion in Munck (2000: 96).
37. Albert Ward has found high levels of censorship, particularly from the middle part of the eighteenth century, in Austria, Bavaria and Prussia (Ward,
1974: 99101).
38. See Wards table of gures (1974: 1645).
39. These are the gures taken from the Leipzig book fair at Easter (Ward,
1974: 47).
40. This is the view, for example, of Kramnick (1995: ixx).
41. Koselleck avers: The Enlightenment succumbed to a Utopian image which,
while deceptively propelling it, helped to produce the contradictions which
could not be resolved in practice and prepared the way for the Terror and
for dictatorship (1988: 2).
42. In establishing their new journal, the editors Friedrich Gedike and Johann
Erich Biester speak of a plan to cultivate die hchste Mannigfaltigkeit,
insoweit diese mit angenehmer Belehrung und ntzlicher Unterhaltung
bestehen kann (Gedike et al., 1986: 5).
43. See his Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, co-authored with Friedrich Engels
(1969 [1848]).
44. rsoniert, soviel ihr wollt und worber ihr wollt; nur gehorcht! (Kant,
1980: 17).

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Tim Mehigan is Professor of Languages at the University of Otago.

Address for correspondence: Department of Languages and Cultures,
PO Box 56, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand
[email: tim.mehigan@stonebow.otago.ac.nz]
Helene de Burgh is a Research Fellow at Monash University. Address
for correspondence: Department of Marketing, Monash University,
Building S, Caueld East, Victoria 3145, Australia [email: helene.
deburgh@buseco.monash.edu.au]

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