What did the Enlightenment leave behind? There are, in principle, as many answers to this question as there are ways to define the Enlightenment, along with Lumières and Aufklärung and several other eighteenth-century cognates. Questions of legacy, which have received renewed attention in recent years, lead us to consider not only what the Enlightenment was but where it happened and when it ended, such that we now face the afterlife of a movement as something distinct from the movement itself. We might also inquire about those who study these legacies, either as detached observers of the eighteenth century or active heirs of its intellectual output. In this way, we are perhaps better served by the French or German constructions – “l’héritage des lumières” and “das Erbe der Aufklärung” – both of which carry clearer connotations of an active “inheritor”, in héritier and Erbe.
Through the twentieth century, the study of the Enlightenment was the province of dialectical thinking. Dialektik der Aufklärung was not only the name of the seminal work by Horkheimer and Adorno but also the original title of Reinhart Koselleck’s doctoral thesis, eventually revised under a title all its own: Kritik und Krise, published in 1959. Beneath the apparent coincidence was a Hegelian current almost as old as the Enlightenment itself. Through its grand narratives, dialectic brought the afterlife of the eighteenth century into a philosophical frame, unitary but encompassing of internal contradictions. There is a compelling case for continuing to use the singular ‘Enlightenment’, but we might now prefer to study this complex afterlife as plural ‘legacies’ (héritages, Erbschaften). More recently, these legacies have been dominated by a reckoning with Eurocentric prejudice, as Enlightenment figures are reappraised according to their commitments, explicit or otherwise, to the worldviews of empire and colonialism.
These public-facing debates have coincided with renewed interest in the legacy question throughout specialised literatures. On one recent and provocative reading, the Enlightenment as we know it is in fact little more than a constructed legacy, foisted upon the eighteenth century and given shape by the normative commitments of historians. Others have traced Enlightenment legacies back to definite eighteenth-century sources, highlighting conscious innovations in the languages of rights and morality. Others still take the Enlightenment primarily as a frame of analysis for the ambivalences of modern life, one that would hold eighteenth-century thought to the very scepticism it unleashed. Whatever else might set them apart, these approaches, among many others, reveal how questions of legacy have become integral to the task of framing the Enlightenment itself.
The Voltaire Foundation is launching a new project that engages these very questions, tracking down unknown or underappreciated legacies of the Enlightenment. How was Enlightenment thought received historically, and where did it inspire new intellectual and political currents? How do we study worldwide legacies, either as discrete versions of the Enlightenment or more focused interactions with European sources? Our first two contributions draw illuminating conclusions about legacies in Korea and the Arab World. Minchul Kim reveals how the development of Confucian theory interacted with the Korean reception of key sources from the European Enlightenment. ‘Setting the scene’ for a new project on the Arab Enlightenment, Noreen Hassan develops a framework of concepts and sources, including a compendium of Voltaire’s works translated into Arabic. Forthcoming work on this project will explore political legacies of the Enlightenment, focusing on concepts of constitutionalism and parliamentarism.
Are there legacies of the Enlightenment that merit further study? Contact us below to contribute to our new project.
This research project is supported by the United Grand Lodge of England in recognition of the strong connection between Freemasonry and Enlightenment values.
