The Enlightenment

Any contribution by John Robertson to the immense literature on the Enlightenment is apt to be well written, to the point and useful, and this little book is no exception. It should make a splendid teaching tool, but, more than that, it will assist many a reader in getting a grip on why one of the most important episodes in human history has, as he puts it, ‘been the subject of so much disagreement’ (p. 1) among historians, philosophers and just about everybody else. His aim is not only to introduce the reader to what the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was as a trans-Atlantic Western intellectual, cultural and social phenomenon, but also why it has been so vastly contested both at the time and ever since. On the latter point, it is odd that Robertson says that the attacks on the Enlightenment by the philosophes’ fiercest critics, the French anti-philosophes, began in the 1760s (p. 9) when it is abundantly evident that these attacks began rather with the anti-philosophes’ massive assault on the Encyclopaedia (helping to get it banned by the French Crown) in the 1750s. There are also other oddities. Robertson thinks the achievements of two Neapolitan enlighteners, Pietro Giannone (1676–1748) and Giambattista Vico (1678–1744), were ‘intellectually much more impressive’ than the seven-volume Religious Ceremonies of the World (1723–37), by the writer-publisher Jean-Frédéric Bernard and the engraver Bernard Picart, which he describes as ‘not hostile to religion’. Actually, this was the world’s very first comprehensive encyclopaedia of religion, a major landmark which has long been unjustly ignored and which represented a devastating attack on religious authority. At the time, it could only have been published in Holland. Its detailed account of doctrines and rituals, and illustrations of these, placed Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, Confucianism and African religions, as well as the cults of Native Americans, all on the same level—engineering an astounding change in perspective and a broad scholarly scepticism regarding all confessional allegiance

Art · Art history · Encyclopedia · Enlightenment · Literature · Political science · Subject (documents · Subject matter · Theology · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought