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DOI: 10.1177/0047244107086798

2008 38: 5Journal of European StudiesTim Mehigan and Helene De Burgh

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

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Journal of European Studies

Aufklrung, freemasonry, the publicsphere and the question of Enlightenment

TIM MEHIGANUniversity of Otago, New Zealandwith

HELENE DE BURGHMonash University, Australia

That the Enlightenment was a movement reaching across at least three

European countries (France, Germany and Britain) in the eighteenthcentury, with a similar platform in all three (social improvement on thebasis of unassisted reason), is the current orthodoxy. Yet this view canonly be accepted with qualifications. It is the intention of this essay to

focus attention on these qualifications. A first objection lies with the factthat no platform of Enlightenment was articulated in any country inthe eighteenth century apart from Germany. In the debate aboutEnlightenment initiated in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1783,Kants insistence that Aufklrung must stay within political limits isconsidered characteristic not only of the German discussion, but indeedof all broadly Enlightenment thought from the beginning. In consideringKosellecks argument about the Enlightenment, which analysed this sameconservatism, a second objection is apparent: the impulse to stay withinthe confines of the absolutist state suggests that eighteenth-centuryEnlightenment, politically speaking, was decidedly other than that whichhas subsequently been found within it.

Keywords: eighteenth-century publishing, masonry, politicalphilosophy

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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6 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 38(1)

I

The revival of interest in the Enlightenment in English-speakingcountries after the Second World War seems to have been inspired

by Horkheimer and Adornos major study in German, publishedunder the title of Dialektik der Aufklrung in 1947,1 and an Englishtranslation of Ernst Cassirers 1932 study of the Enlightenment, whichappeared in 1951.2Peter Gays two-volume study, published in 1966and 1969, represented a third important work on the Enlighten-ment in the post-war period. Gays study was influential because itfocused attention on the Enlightenment at a time when the rebuildingof Europe after the war was in full swing. The Enlightenment, to

which German thinkers had been key contributors, offered a way ofimagining a common stock of European ideas and a common cul-tural heritage after the ravages and the dissension of war. Despitecontrasting intentions Cassirer and Gay affirmed the value of theheritage of the Enlightenment, whereas Horkheimer and Adorno(1999) questioned it these three major studies advanced a broadlysynthetic view of the Enlightenment: that is, they contended that theterm Enlightenment usefully described the conceptual thrust of theentire eighteenth century.3At the core of this in the end, politically

conceived notion of Enlightenment was what Kramnick has calledunassisted human reason. It is reason, not faith or tradition, that wasto 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 orthodoxyabout the eighteenth century, but it has also led to a widening of theconcept of Enlightenment still further in several directions. Hunter, forexample, 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 theexistence of both a dominant, philosophically oriented Enlightenment,that of university metaphysics, and a rival Enlightenment, a sub-species of what later developed into Kantian philosophy advocated

by Pufendorf and Thomasius in the late seventeenth century thatwas premised upon a separation of moral theology from politicsand law.4 Ilie, for his part, has examined the Christian Enlighten-ment in eighteenth-century Spain, one of many alleged off-shoots ofEnlightenment found in eighteenth-century Europe (1995: 1). UsingGoyas etching Capricho 43 as a starting point, Ilie examines aspectsof the retreat from Reason led by the arts in the eighteenth century a view assuming the widespread character of a movement againstwhich such a retreat can be contrasted.



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MEHIGAN WITH DE BURGH: THE QUESTION OF ENLIGHTENMENT 7

In this article we put forward a different view about Enlighten-ment. We challenge the accepted view that the Enlightenment was a

single movement spanning an entire century in three major Europeancountries (Britain, France and Germany). We argue instead that aconsciousprojectof Enlightenment (which is to say, Aufklrung) didnot emerge until 1780, was confined in the first instance to Germany,where it was widely debated among leading intellectuals, especiallyfrom 1783 onward, and is best understood as a specifically Germanattempt to cast the terms of a social debate. We argue that what is nowcalled the historical movement of Enlightenment appears to have beencanonized in the mid to late nineteenth century in German, English

and French historiography. At this timeAufklrungwas translated backinto English as the Age of Enlightenment and, adapting formula-tions of dAlembert, into French as le Sicle des Lumires. Under theheading of Enlightenment separately occurring movements in thoughtwere put together. In doing so, differences between Aufklrungandthe broader rationalist tradition of long historical significance in allthree countries have been obscured.

A historical study of word usage, while admittedly not a definitiveguide, nevertheless suggests qualifications about the reach of a gen-eral movement of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. First, theword Enlightenment does not appear to have been used in English todesignate a historical movement of social and political reform beforethe second half of the nineteenth century (Brown, 1993: 824). In France,les lumires was used to refer to thinkers who cultivated the light ofintellectual reason, notably in the writings of Fontenelle,5dAlembertand Rousseau,6but there is no evidence that it indicated a programmeof social action in France in the eighteenth century.7The first editionof the Dictionnaire de lAcadmie franaise(1694) records lumire in thesense 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 ismade. Even in the eighth edition of the dictionary, which appearedin 19325, the meaning of lumire is listed as meaning a person ofrare knowledge and transcendent merit, but again no reference toeighteenth-century thinkers occurs (Dictionnaires dautrefois, 2001).By contrast, the first use ofAufklrungas an abstract noun in Germanto indicate a conscious project appears to have occurred as early as1770;8 the term was widely used in this meaning from around 1780 and

was the focus of a debate in the journal Berlinische Monatsschriftafter1783. The first use of the word to designate a historical movementappears in the writing of the German romantic Novalis in 1799.9



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There is considerable evidence to suggest, therefore, that a discourseof Enlightenment, focused on a conscious attempt to revive certain

positions maintained in the late eighteenth century, did not gainmomentum until the middle of the nineteenth century. We can furthersurmise that this discourse emerged first in Germany. Between 1840and 1850, for example, a rush of new translations of the works ofRousseau, dAlembert, Diderot and Voltaire appeared in Germany.Possibly the first anthology of the Enlightenment was published underthe title Bibliothek der deutschen Aufklrer in 18467. Shortly afterwards,Schlossers Geschichte des 18. Jahrhundertsappeared in 1861, followed

by Wilhelm Windelbands Geschichte der neueren Philosophiein 1876. This

interest in eighteenth-century thought was repeated soon afterwardsin Britain, with the appearance of historical analyses broadly focusedon eighteenth-century thought (A. S. Farrar in 1863, J. Hunt in 18703and L. Stephen in 1876). The first explicit reference to Enlightenmentin a book title in English appears to be J. G. Hibbens Philosophy of theEnlightenment (London, 1910). About the same time two works ap-peared in Germany naming the Enlightenment in their title for thefirst time. Yet it is characteristic of the late discovery of Enlightenmentas a historical movement in the Anglophone world that there is noentry for Enlightenment in Lawrence Dawsons Dictionary of Dates,published in 1911.

If the argument that Enlightenment was not canonized as a move-ment in thought until the mid nineteenth century at the very earliestis sustained, then it is evident that the actualprojectof Enlightenmentin the eighteenth century, in which heated debate about the use ofthe actual term took place, must be understood in a more restrictedsense. In this more restricted sense, it appears particularly indebtedto a single philosopher, Immanuel Kant, whose critical philosophyunfolded in three major works published between 1781 and 1790, and

was directed at rescuing reason from sceptical detractors and securinga public ground for exercising it. The detractors that Kant opposedhad suggested that reason could not serve as the basis for social andpolitical action. Hume, in his major study Treatise of Human Nature, firstpublished in 1739, had maintained, for example, that human beingswere shackled to a false reason or none at all, and that the passionswere 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 socialand political questions. Kants critical philosophy, for this reason,

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sought a middle ground that would not only live within rationallimits, but equally importantly exercise its rights within the political

limits reserved for it.To test claims about the pan-European reach of a movement ofEnlightenment in the eighteenth century, we adduce statisticalevidence of publication activity in France, Germany and Britain.The development of a notion of a public sphere has been part ofthe attempt to divine the existence of a project of Enlightenment inEurope since the appearance of Jrgen Habermass important studyStrukturwandel der ffentlichkeit in 1962. We argue that such a publicsphere expressly provided for in Kants philosophy11 had not

developed in any meaningful sense in countries outside Germany untilthe very end of the eighteenth century, and that this would appearto provide further support for a more modest understanding of thespread of a programmatic Enlightenment.

Finally, we undertake an examination of freemasonry in Europein the eighteenth century to appraise Reinhard Kosellecks argu-ment about the inherently conservative nature of Enlightenment.Koselleck has argued (1988) that the conservative position aboutreason observable in the German debate in the late eighteenth century,as advocated, say, by Kant, would appear to be constitutive of theconcept of Enlightenment from the very beginning. In other words,the conservative strain in the argument about reason has clearintellectual roots and occurs, for example, in the thinking of Hobbesin the mid seventeenth century, in particular in his Leviathan. More-over, the conservative position about reason would appear to suggestthat Enlightenment was turned into something quite differenthalf a century or so later, when, as we suggest, a discourse of politicalEnlightenment was invented in the mid nineteenth century. It is tothis question of the conservative nature of the Enlightenment, and

its relation to freemasonry (also accorded significance in Kosellecksanalysis), that we first wish to turn.

II

Approaches that find compelling points of contact between free-masonry and Enlightenment12have highlighted the fact that speculativefreemasonry13 established as a result of a decision of the Grand Lodgein London in 1717 to open its doors to non-masons emerged at about

the time when rationalist doctrines were beginning to command polit-ical influence in England, Scotland, France and Germany. Accordingto these approaches, the spread of freemasonry to the European



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continent from 1725 onward appears not only part of a concertedmovement of European Enlightenment, but indeed cannot be con-

sidered inseparable from it.14

Moreover, that the aspect of secrecyattached to masonic practice is not antithetical to the Enlightenmentideal of open debate,15as might be assumed,16 is attributed to the in-creasingly political nature of the movement of Enlightenment over thecourse of the eighteenth century. The movement of Enlightenment,on this interpretation, was more and more at odds with conservativeinstitutions in the European countries in which it had taken root. Thelodges, reflecting the political ends to which the Enlightenment wasincreasingly drawn, became important for the promulgation and dis-

semination of subversive doctrines calling for the overthrow of theprevailing order of the day. Freemasonry, it has been argued, there-fore constituted the major vehicle for the launching of the 1789 FrenchRevolution.17Schmidt is one commentator who has endorsed thislink between the French Revolution and Enlightenment, conjecturingthat [the] idea that there is a connection between the Enlightenmentand the French Revolution is by now so familiar that it is difficult toimagine how troubling the relation must have seemed in the early1790s (Schmidt, 1996: 12).

This popularly Francophone view of a progressively premisedmovement of Enlightenment and the collusive role played by freem-asonry before the outbreak of the French Revolution contrasts with amore differentiated account of Enlightenment of German provenance.Already in 1937 in his ber den Proze der ZivilisationNorbert Elias hadpointed to the complete absence in Germany of anything resemblinga political party or programme before the French Revolution.18Theargument that the Enlightenment was entering its most radical polit-ical phase immediately before the Revolution, at a time coincidentwith the enforced closure of masonic lodges throughout continental

Europe, accordingly seems difficult to sustain. Although there are dis-senters to Eliass view within German scholarship, even the mostupbeat of German commentators, such as Fritz Valjavec, fail to findanything more than the existence of political tendencies19in Germany

before 1789.Kosellecks landmark study under the title of Kritik und Krise, first

published in 1959, held these progressive views of the Enlightenmentand 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 be-tween rationalist and absolutist positions in debates that had startedmore than a century before. Koselleck attached great importance to



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Hobbess discussion in Leviathan(1651) that addressed the questionof civil war in England and the related issue of the sovereignty of

the monarch. Hobbess insight, according to Koselleck, was to makereason the reason of science that was already being championed byearly Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes and Francis Bacon serve the interests of the state: To Hobbes, reason was the ending ofcivil war a line that can also be reversed in its historic meaning: theending of the religious civil wars is reason (Koselleck, 1988: 334).

The reason of the early Enlightenment, by this argument, had not onlyfound an accommodation with absolutism, it had also become com-plicit with it. From this perspective, Enlightenment could never have

promoted progressive political tendencies in any programmatic waysince it had been directed precisely at forestalling the growth of suchtendencies from the beginning. The Enlightenment, in Kosellecks

judgement, thus failed to realize itself as a political phenomenon.20On the contrary, an alliance of enlightened reason and absolutism wasurged upon the free conscience of citizens to which Hobbes appealedin fashioning arguments in support of the rule of the sovereign. Thisarea of moral conscience was increasingly widened over the courseof the eighteenth century as material gains gave rise to the hope fora better society. Yet this hope contradicted the spirit of compromisethat had been struck with the forces of absolutism. When Enlighten-ment foundered on this contradiction, absolutism foundered with it:It was from Absolutism that the Enlightenment evolved initiallyas its inner consequence, later as its dialectical counterpart andantagonist, destined to lead the Absolutist State to its demise(Koselleck, 1988: 15).

An analysis of French speculative freemasonry would appear to lendweight to Kosellecks argument. Masonic lodges existed in some pro-fusion in eighteenth-century France: the largest was located in Paris,

established in 1725 as the Grand Lodge of France with the approvaland backing of the Grand Lodge of London. Its first Grand Master,indeed, was Lord Derwentwater, an Englishman. Derwentwaterappointed his officers from the French nobility (Chevallier, 1974:37)..While three other lodges, Louis dArgent, Coustos-Villeroyand Bussi-Aumont,sprang up in Paris between 1727 and 1740, theGrand Lodge of France remained the dominant one (Weisberger,1993: 65). It has been estimated that, by the 1770s, there were 10,000masons 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 influenced the formation of otherlodges in France, the Anglo-centric outlook of these new lodges was



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preserved. As Weisberger points out, this body [the Grand Lodge ofFrance] received at this time administrative direction from the Grand

Lodge of London and established lodges in Paris to promote signi-ficant ideas associated with English culture (Weisberger, 1993: 65).The Anglophone influence over the lodges in France,21 moreover, isconsonant with Kosellecks premise that the right to associate freelyand to engage in debate a right on which the masonic movementdepended is traceable to an English idea about political sovereignty.This is Hobbess position that rational debate was not to be imaginedas open disputation, for this endangered the rule of law, but could bearticulated solely within the freedom of a secret interior (Koselleck,

1988: 75).Another aspect of the English model of freemasonry found par-ticular resonance among French masons. A constitution and itsattendant effects such as voting rights and an open forum typifiedthe liberal outlook of English masons.22Indeed, such confidence in aconstitutional order provided a strong defence of freemasonry in the1730s and 40s when the brotherhood came under the scrutiny of thestate. Under royal decree in 1737, Louis XV banned royal advisers andadministrators from belonging to the masonic lodges and inauguratedpolice powers to search the homes of subjects who entertained linkswith lodges (Chevallier, 1974: 1415). In similar vein, Pope ClementXII decreed in 1740 that Catholics were not to affiliate with the lodgesand that the clergy should work to suppress the order (Findel, 1869:2003). Masons answered this oppression by invoking the masonicethos, a doctrine that proclaimed as duty the need to defend the prin-ciples 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 theinnocent, to support the weak, to force men to become happy ... Yes,my brothers, that is our condition: our passions require laws, our unjustand reckless desires must be restrained. (Anon.,1764: 15)

The masons, therefore, saw their mission as working for the publicgood and promoting equality and the right of individuals to pursuetheir own conception of happiness. At other times, the defence of thecause of freemasonry was argued in terms that seem consistent withEnlightenment principles. One brother, for example, spoke of thework of the mason as consisting in the fact that:

in his presence, everything changes, all things in the universe arerenewed and reformed, order is established, the rule and measure ofthings is understood, duty is followed, reason listened to, wisdom



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comprehended; and mortals, without changing their essence, appearas new men. (Anon., 1764: 17)

The masons undoubtedly promoted liberal ideas and, as Weisbergerpoints out, attempted to maintain a civic profile. They belonged tocultural circles, engaged in progressive social debate and publishedin prominent journals such as the Journal de Paris, the Journal dessavantsand theMercure de France (Weisberger, 1993: 17). Hazard evensuggests that the Encyclopdiewas partly funded by masons and thatthey contributed articles (Hazard, 1963: 21415). The claim to be egali-tarian and civic-minded applied, at least in theory, to the internalfunctions of the lodges themselves where the masons sought to be

non-discriminatory in their recruitment policy. They stated that theywelcomed anyone, including women, into their lodges.23 Internally,the masons operated under a constitution and organized themselvesoutwardly along democratic lines. Indeed, as the Grand Lodges ofLondon (1717) and France (1725) came into being, the replicationand distribution of the Constitutions,as they were formally known,increased significantly (Knoop, 1937: 678). The growth in new lodgesalso necessitated copies of the Constitutions (Knoop, 1937: 678).Votingrights were hierarchical, yet could be acquired after the passage of

a certain amount of time. Lodge administration changed hands andthe 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, constitution-ally ruled and hierarchical, the French masons illustrate many of thecontradictions that accompany the attempt to divine a socially andpolitically progressive movement of Enlightenment in France in theeighteenth 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 1770sand 1780s when the Grand Orient lodge in Paris erected a NationalAssembly with adjudicating sub-committees and charity distributorsto administer the workings of the order as an institution (Jacob, 1991:17). Indeed, as Jacob concludes in her discussion on the real functionof the masonic constitution: it is quite simply wrong to state that thephilosophical society known as Freemasonry ever intended to prac-tice, or actually practiced, direct democracy in the lodges of WesternEurope (1991: 17). Jacob goes on to point out that elections took placeto confer representatives, or lodge officers, who became vital to thesocial and constitutional life of the lodges (1991: 17), such that theycould 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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symbolize an openness to new members (Hills, 1932: 15), yet thiswas hardly the case in practice. As Stanley Hills reflects, only from

suitable material can real Free Masons be formed, and just as seedcannot grow on stony ground, so the unsuitable candidate can nevergain 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 gentryor nobility, professional men and scholars, men connected withthe building industry, and members of trades other than those as-sociated with the building industry (1937: 623). Thus, although theyargued strongly for inclusion, the masons remained exclusive.25They

recognized wealth, status and elevated professional position over thecommon applicant. This sense of masonic exclusivity was augmentedby a deep interest in antiquity and lineage.26As Knoop comments, thisinterest in masonic heritage grew steadily in the eighteenth century andemerged as a source of inspiration among new members, promotinga sense of ancestry, hierarchy and elitism. It also lent French free-masonry a religious appearance confirmed by statements, such asthose of the French mason Chevalier Ramsay, who said: we seek toform in the course of time a spiritual nation (Van Veen, 1977: 2758).The spiritual nation the French masons sought in the end, however, wasoverwhelmingly secular in nature, and it was directed at cultivatinga moral purpose, a projection of self at a remove from the dictates ofabsolute monarchy. For this reason, freemasonry could not express adirect political purpose, but, as Koselleck concludes, it did entail anindirect political presence (1988: 83), for morality is the presumptivesovereign (1988: 85).

Freemasonry, therefore, cannot be enlisted without contradictionin the service of a politically progressive idea of Enlightenment. Onthe contrary, despite an outward commitment to progressive ideals

such as universal equality and free association, the freemasons of theeighteenth century are characterized by an attachment to hierarchicalvalues and a spirit of exclusivity. Moreover, the arcane rituals of free-masonry appear to uphold the conservative disposition that Koselleckfinds 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 Enlighten-ment in the eighteenth century. According to an influential view,27apublic sphere fostered primarily through the medium of print, but



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also through debating and reading societies,28clubs, academies andlibraries,29had emerged in several European countries by the middle

of the eighteenth century.30

This was a sphere in which books on arange of secular topics were written and published, and where a pre-dominantly bourgeois class of merchants, academics, public officialsand educated women had arisen to read them.31By the last quarter ofthe eighteenth century the growth of the public sphere appeared toconnect with an earlier notion of a republic of letters a communityof scholars and writers who sought to realize a new progressivestate within the state.32By 1784 the notion of the public sphere wasalready sufficiently developed to sustain a debate in a German journal,

the Berlinische Monatsschrift, about its own self-constitution. This isthe debate that inaugurated the use of the word Aufklrung in themeaning of Enlightenment and attempted to define the conditionsthat would hold for informed public debate.

Yet this story of the emergence of an increasingly strident publicsphere must be weighed against the testimony of quantitative researchsuggesting that the public sphere in the eighteenth century did notemerge in all European countries with anything like the celerity hith-erto supposed. Statistics detailing the average annual output of newand reprinted works in English indicate, for example, that there wasless publishing activity in London in the 1760s than in the decade171019, and only marginally more activity in the 1770s than at thestart of the century. A significant upsurge in the number of publishedworks did not occur until the 1790s.33This trend is broadly followedin Edinburgh and Dublin, although publishing activity starts from alower base in those cities (Munck, 2000: 92).

In the case of France, a complicated story of publishing and readingactivity emerges. As Darnton reports, the first French daily newspaper,Le Journal de Paris, did not appear until 1777 more than a hundred

years after the first German daily had appeared in Leipzig in 1660(Darnton, 2003: 34). Against this (which might be read as an indicationof relatively low literacy in France before 1789) he has discovered thatwriters had emerged in considerable profusion in France during thesecond half of the eighteenth century. Of nearly 3000 people Darntonidentified as writers on the eve of the French Revolution, roughly 500made up Grub Street, a motley collection of authors scribbling ingarrets and dodging lettres de cachet (Darnton, 1998: 257). The conceitof Grub Street34was invoked by Darnton to account for discrepancies

between an allegedly High Enlightenment that coursed through thesalons of the privileged in the early to mid eighteenth century, andthe irreverent outpourings of low life writers who, locked out of the



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salons, nevertheless appear to have contributed in their scribblings toa desacrilization of the Old Regime by the outbreak of the Revolution

(Darnton, 1971). The discrepancy between an allegedly high and lowEnlightenment is traceable to difficulties historians have found inasserting unambiguously progressive notions on the basis of theliterature of the Enlightenment alone.

Again, Kosellecks view stressing a strategic compromise betweenthe advocates of reason and the upholders of the absolutist state isapt: most of the well-known philosophes were assigned to specificcensors and knew how to appease them (Roche, 1989: 11). Elsewhere,as Roche reports, publishers, censors and the police worked together

to ensure an orderly flow of printed materials in which politicallycircumspect ideas were released onto the market (1989: 202).35Eventhe Encyclopdie, which attracted opposition from the state in its earlyyears, was increasingly viewed as benign. Darnton thus registers achange in the treatment of the Encyclopdiein the last 15 years of theOld Regime: The persecution ... in the 1750s turned into protectionin the 1770s (Darnton, 1979: 538).

When attention is turned to the type of books that were published inthe eighteenth century, conventional views about the centrality of thephilosophical discourse presumed to be at the core of the eighteenth-century movement of Enlightenment would also appear to be in needof revision. Daniel Mornets investigation of the auction catalogues ofprivate book collections in the period 175080 in France, for example,found just a single copy of Rousseaus Du contrat socialout of morethan 20,000 titles.36This is an exiguous figure for a work popularlyheld to be one of the most programmatic texts of the Enlightenment,even allowing for the fact of censorship. A different picture of overallpublishing activity, however, emerges in Germany, despite thevigorous level of censorship that took place in a number of German

states.37According to a study conducted by Albert Ward of the tradecatalogues produced for the Leipzig book fairs, whilst no appreciablerise in trade activity occurs before 1740, a huge growth is demonstratedover the period from 1740 to 1800, with the number of titles morethan trebling.38It is noteworthy that while the proportion of scientific,philosophic and historical titles remains relatively constant over the60 years to 1800, the proportion of titles in the area of imaginativeliterature increased dramatically from 10 per cent of the total marketin 1740 to 30 per cent in 1800.39This interest in imaginative literature

at the end of the eighteenth century is the logical accompaniment tothe emergence of Romanticism. Its connection with Enlightenment,however, is less clear.



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We are left, therefore, with conflicting views about the natureand extent of Enlightenment in the major countries in which it is

thought to have occurred, namely France, Britain and Germany. IfEnlightenment is understood in terms of the emergence of a publicsphere shaped overwhelmingly by the medium of print, no movementof Enlightenment would appear to have occurred outside German-speaking Europe before the 1780s at the earliest. This would appearto contradict the popular view that a movement of Enlightenmentoccurs across the entire eighteenth century and may even have startedwell before this.40 Certainly there is no statistical evidence of majorstructural change in publishing activity outside Germany before the

late eighteenth century. It can be fairly assumed that, for the samereason, a significant growth in the number of readers did not occurbefore the 1780s. Within Germany, by contrast, there is an upswing ofpublishing activity from about the middle of the eighteenth century some 25 to 30 years before a similar level of activity is registered inEngland, Scotland, Ireland and France. As Wards research shows, alively reading public had certainly emerged in Germany by the lastdecades of the eighteenth century, and this public was especially drawnto works of the imagination (Ward, 1974: 5991). On the testimony ofthese facts, therefore, it was only in Germany that a springboard fora social movement of Enlightenment based on the urgings of a newlyliterate public could have been laid before the outbreak of the FrenchRevolution. This is a conclusion that agrees with evidence about thetype and frequency of the use ofAufklrung/Enlightenment outlinedin the first part of this essay.

IV

In sum, it is especially in Germany that doubts about the existence ofapoliticalprogramme of Enlightenment are evident. As Elias shows,there is scant evidence of political activity in Germany before theRevolution and therefore, we may conclude, little reason to supposethat Enlightenment was building towards political upheaval in theperiod leading up to it. Even in pre-Revolutionary France, Kosellecksidea that Enlighteners and the state had entered into an arrangementthat choked off the impulse towards political emancipation must

be given credence. Why else would philosophessuch as Voltaire andDiderot have preferred to consort, as Darnton reports, with the very

archaic and eroded segments of the social structure they soughtto reform? (Darnton, 1979: 527). Darnton labels this behaviour ofthe philosophesof Enlightenment paradoxical. Yet such behaviour



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would appear less paradoxical if the conventional understanding ofEnlightenment was overturned. This would entail the view that new

ideas associated with an imagery of light did not amount to a plat-form of progressive political reform, as has been widely maintained.On the contrary, as we have argued, manyphilosophesappear to havestruck a compromise with the Old Regime in ways that sought topreserve their status and social position.41 Moreover, that no con-certed and conscious movement of Enlightenment can be said tohave occurred before 1783, would appear to resolve difficulties thatalmost all commentators have encountered in uniting the disparatestrands of Enlightenment in Europe in the eighteenth century. Put

simply, there was no unified project of Enlightenment in Europe in theeighteenth century. What exists as the first stirrings of a programmeof social action can be found in the German debate that was initiated

by the German journal Berlinische Monatsschriftin late 1783. Yet evenhere no unanimity of outlook or purpose was established.42 Thiswas partly due to the embryonic nature of the debate, and partly,following Koselleck, to the politically compromised nature of theconcept of Aufklrungfrom the beginning. The result is clear: thosewho wished to promote a programme of social improvement from aposition outside the sphere of direct political action were faced withan invidious choice either collude with the state and remain withinit, or retreat from the state in secret association and remain outsideit. The latter strategy was adopted by the freemasons, the former, atleast in Germany, by Aufklrer. That neither strategy constituted aneffective political statement is underscored by Koselleck:

These men, who determined their countrys cultural physiognomyor 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 therewas nothing at all for them to decide all were subjects. (Koselleck,1988: 66)

Analysing what he calls a strategy of the philosophes to enlightenfrom above, Darnton would appear to have reached broadly similarconclusions:

This strategy led them to concentrate on the conquest of salons andacademies, journals and theaters, Masonic lodges and key cafs, wherethey 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 wepropose is that we see in such behaviour not a movement topromote a common platform of change, but, on the contrary, a strategyof individuals acting above all in their own interest.



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4. Hunter has uncovered the importance of the thinking of Pufendorf andThomasius for modern civil philosophy. Might not the defining feature of

Pufendorfs and Thomasiuss philosophy different in almost every regardfrom the (Kantian) philosophical enlightenment (Hunter, 2001: 7) maketheir philosophy seem more to accord with rationalist, and less withEnlightenment, values?

5. Fontenelle advocates a more philosophically oriented poetry in his essay Surla posie, expressing the hope that une lumire not confined to the region ofphilosophy might finally come to embrace tout lempire des lettres. Elsewherein the same essay he speaks approvingly of an increased focus on the virtuesof reason in his own age: il parat bien avr que le genre humain, du moinsen 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 first volume of Diderots Encyclopdie(of which hewas also a principal editor) (Cassirer, 1951: 4).

8. Schneiders purports to find a use of the nominalized term in the meaningof Aufklrung des Verstandes as far back as 1691 (Schneiders, 2001: 47).Winfried Mller, however, does not find popular use of the word Aufklrunguntil around the middle of the eighteenth century at the earliest. The use ofthe verbal form aufklren, he argues, starts in the 1720s (Mller, 2002: 1).

9. Novalis uses Aufklrung to designate a historical movement in his essay DieChristenheit oder Europa(Novalis, 1981: 5356). However, the German etymo-logical dictionary of Hermann Paul dates the use ofAufklrungin the senseof a historical movement from the 1840s (Paul, 1992: 65).

10. As Kant said in the preface to the Prolegomena: Ich gestehe frei: die Erinnerungdes David Hume war eben dasjenige, was mir vor vielen Jahren zuerst dendogmatischen Schlummer unterbrach und meinen Untersuchungen auf demFelde 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 reinenVernunft(17817), as Gardner points out: the place of intersubjectivity inKants account of empirical reality should be noted. That Kantian empiricalreality is essentially public follows from his account of it as having necessaryapriori grounds: whatever judgements have objective validity must havevalidity for all subjects, and vice versa (Gardner, 1999: 280).

12. As Weisberger argues, freemasonry is frequently linked to the notion ofEnlightenment (1993: 3).

13. Whereas masonic practice (Werkmaurerei) was tied to the actual practice ofthe craft, speculative freemasonry highlighted the symbolic code of moralitythat was believed to underlie it (Reinalter, 2000: 1112).

14. This is also Weisbergers view: Masonic rites embodied cardinal Enlighten-ment doctrines and served as an effective vehicle for their transmittance(1993: 9).

15. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger is one of many who see no contradiction betweenesoteric practice and progressive Enlightenment (2000: 129).



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16. For Reinhard Koselleck, however, the sense of mystery attaching to free-masonry flatly ... contradict[s] the spirit of the Enlightenment (1988: 70).

17. Weisberger, paraphrasing Barruel and Cochin (1993: 3).18. Bis 1789 findet man in Deutschland mit ganz vereinzelten Ausnahmenkeine Idee einer konkreten, politischen Aktion, nichts, was an eine politischeParteienbildung oder an ein politisches Parteiprogramm erinnern knnte(Elias, 1969: 20).

19. Valjavec uses Mannheims term politische Strmungen to characterize thesetendencies. See Valjavec (1978: 5).

20. Koselleck characterizes the political aspirations of the Enlightenment as unableto be fulfilled. Of the emergence of groups with a social reformist aspirationhe observes: The tension between their socially increasing weight, on the onehand, and the impossibility of lending political expression to that weight, onthe other this tension determined the historical situation in which the newsociety constituted itself (1988: 66).

21. The influence of English traders in the establishment of the early lodges inBordeaux and Marseilles is discussed in Roche (1998: 1712).

22. As Margaret Jacob suggests: the lodges on the Continent were replicasof 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 anational legislative assembly where voting was by individual and not byestate or locality (1991: 5).

23. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that women were accepted into thelodges until after the 1750s (Jacob, 1991: 12041).

24. Stanley Hills comments on the election process for the Grand Master and hisobligation to the Wardens or the administering committee. While the GrandMaster was entitled to nominate his successor and incoming Wardens, henonetheless functioned within a constitutional and administrative frame-work (Hills, 1932: 45).

25. One might argue that the inclusion of artisans and craftsmen lent a moreegalitarian view to the elitist ways of nobility, landed gentry and profes-sionals. However, these artisans and craftsmen represented the humble originsof the masonic order, dating back into the fourteenth century and beyond,when the order was tantamount to an artisans guild. These categories ofmembers in the eighteenth century when masonry had become speculativesymbolized 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 einpolitisches Bewutsein, das gegen die absolute Herrschaft den Begriff unddie Forderung genereller und abstracter Gesetze artikuliert, und schlielichauch sich selbst, nmlich ffentliche Meinung, als die einzig legitime Quelledieser Gesetze zu behaupten lernt.



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28. Albert Ward notes, however, that the earliest known reading society inGermany 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 Jahrhundertmitteein 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 toread in the last quarter of the century (Ward, 1974: 5960).

32. Uwe Japp traces the Gelehrtenrepublik in Germany to the inspiration of theGerman writer Klopstock in the middle 1770s (Japp, 1990: 26384).

33. As Ward indicates, no significant rise in book publication in Britain occurs

before 1756. In the decade from 1792 to 1802, however, nearly four times asmany 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 sameorthodoxy 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 mid-

dle part of the eighteenth century, in Austria, Bavaria and Prussia (Ward,1974: 99101).38. See Wards table of figures (1974: 1645).39. These are the figures 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 whichcould not be resolved in practice and prepared the way for the Terror andfor dictatorship (1988: 2).

42. In establishing their new journal, the editors Friedrich Gedike and JohannErich 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 hisManifest 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 Mehiganis 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: [email protected]]

Helene de Burghis a Research Fellow at Monash University.Addressfor correspondence: Department of Marketing, Monash University,Building S, Caufield East, Victoria 3145, Australia [email: helene.

[email protected]]

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