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The Enlightenment has been seen as the intellectual honey pot from which the origins of the modern world were to be sought. As Dorinda Outram has noted in her The Enlightenment (1995), philosophers and political commentators have interpreted the Enlightenment in ‘the hope of defining the meaning and future of the modern world. The Enlightenment is probably unique ... in its attracting such interest and in the extent to which such philosophical interpretations have influenced the thinking of professional historians.’1 For decades, the connection between the Enlightenment and modernity has been viewed as unproblematic. In his review of European Enlightenment studies Per una storia illuministica (1973), for example, Furio Diaz uncritically noted that the years c. 1955–70 had been ones in which hope for economic, political and cultural reform and improvement had been dominant. It was ‘natural’, therefore, that historians searched in history for ‘times and processes’ which reflected their own objectives of progress – and they found them in the philosophes.2 As the discussions in this book have illustrated, attempting to understand, define or justify the present through an examination of the past is an activity fraught with danger. Boucher has gone as far as stating that ‘[t]o impose present historical modes of enquiry upon past texts is, by definition, an anachronism’,3 and it is difficult to deny the essence of his assessment. Given that we write historical accounts primarily by subjecting historical texts to our own intellectual analysis, objective historical accounts are more of an ideal than a possibility. Historical accounts are, therefore, by definition, interpretations: to write history we must interpret texts. So, in the

The ‘public sphere’ and the hidden life of ideas