Reaffirming the Enlightenment

The 18th-century Enlightenment, it seems, is now back in fashion among scholars on both sides of the Adantic. During the 1980s and for much of the 1990s it lay behind the front lines of scholarly activity. Good work was being done in specific areas, but those looking for an account of the Enlightenment as a whole had to refer back to Peter Gay's two-volume synthesis, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966, 1969). Despite its qualities, Gay's book seemed dated, having been dismissed by critics such as Robert Darnton for its supposed elitism and neglect of social history. By the early 1970s it was the social history of ideas that set the agenda. Even if Darnton himself never denied the existence of the Enlightenment, he and others redirected the focus of research onto what he christened the "low life of literature," on the grounds that the latter milieu did far more to foster the intellectual cli-