In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas

The history of the Enlightenment has always been a lofty affair-a tendency that will not be regretted by anyone who has scaled its peaks with Cassirer, sucked in delicious lungfuls of pure reason, and surveyed the topography of eighteenth-century thought laid out neatly at his feet. But the time has come for a more down-to-earth look at the Enlightenment, because while intellectual historians have mapped out the view from the top, social historians have been burrowing deep into the substrata of eighteenth-century societies. And, as the distance between the two disciplines increases, the climates of opinion multiply and thicken and the Enlightenment occasionally disappears in clouds of vaporous generalizations. The need to locate it more precisely in a social context has produced some important new work in a genre that is coming to be called the "social history of ideas." Peter Gay, who has sponsored the term,' has attempted to satisfy the need with the second volume of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York, 1969). A half year after the appearance of Gay's book, another secondvolume work came out in France: Livre et societ (Paris, 1970), the sequel to a pioneering collection of essays on sociointellectual history produced by a group at the VIP Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. These two volume 2's make fascinating reading together, because they show two different historiographical traditions converging on the same problem. Gay descends from Cassirer, the VIP Section group from the "Annales" school and from Daniel Mornet's experiments with quantitative history. Curiously, the two traditions seem to ignore each other. In a bibliography that totals 261 pages in both volumes, and that covers an enormous range of European history, Gay never mentions Livre et societ. He makes only a few, irreverent references to Mornet and does not seem to have assimilated much "Annales" history. The second volume of Livre et societe' (the first appeared a year before Gay's first volume) does not refer either to Gay or Cassirer. In fact, Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment was not translated into French until 1966 and has not made much impression on French study of the Enlightenment since its original publication in German in 1932, a year before the appearance of Mornet's Les origines intellectuelles de la Re'volution fran(aise and fourteen years before Paul Hazard's La pensee europeenne au 18' siecle. So here is an opportunity to compare the methods and results of two attempts, expressing two separate historiographical currents, to solve one of the knottiest problems in early modern history: the problem of situating the Enlightenment within the actualities of eighteenth-century society.