What is the difference between enlightenment and modernity

The discovery was welcomed by the Italian Renaissance city-state despots who were eager to undermine the legitimacy of the papacy's temporal power. The Renaissance invented the idea of the "gentleman", later emulated by the British elite. Baldassare Castiglione wrote Book of the Courtier, liberating Europeans from their uncouth manners of publicly spitting, belching, blowing their noses on their sleeves, snatching food with their bare hands and general bawling and sulking openly with little inhibition.

According to Castiglione, a courtier should cultivate graceful manners in society and poised approaches toward his equals, converse with facility, be proficient in sports and arms, be an expert dancer with appreciation for music and poetry and be gallant to the fair sex. He should know Latin and Greek as a sign of good education and be familiar with literary trends but not too engrossed. In sum, it was a promotion of dilettantism, which as transformed into the English gentleman of the Oxbridge variety became what many identified as the mentality that contributed to the demise of the British Empire.

It was also the mentality of much of the British-trained Third World elite. This mentality left the post-colonial independent nations with a poverty of political and economic leadership after the fall of the British Empire, from India to the Middle East, from Africa to Asia. Such mentality has kept the former colonies from cultural and economic revitalization from the wounds of colonialism. Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince was Europe's first secular treatise on politics, devoid of concern for morality, legitimacy or justice, issues that rulers have since learned to manipulate to rationalize their political interests.

He described the barbaric chaos of 16th-century Italy as universal modern reality. Ironically, this perspective deprived Italy of the development of institutions, such as the nation-state, in which men can act in concert for a larger purpose. In a new age of rising national monarchies, the city-states of Italy could not compete without the protection of the spiritual and temporal power of the Church, against which Renaissance Italy itself played a central role in weakening. In , a French army crossed the Alps and Italy became the bone of contention between France and Spain.

In , a horde of undisciplined Spanish and German mercenaries sacked Rome, killing thousands in an orgy of rape and looting, imprisoned the pope and mockingly paraded cardinals facing backward on mules in the streets. Never had Rome experienced anything so horrible and degrading, not even from the barbaric Goths of the 5th century. The term "Middle Ages" also derived from Petrarch, who was comparing his own period to the Ancient or Classical world, seeing his time as a time of rebirth after a dark intermediate period, the Middle Ages.

The idea that the Middle Ages were a "middle" phase between two other large-scale periodizing concepts - Ancient and Modern - still persists. Smaller periodizing concepts such as Dark Ages occur within it. Both "Dark Ages" and "Middle Ages" still have negative connotations - the latter especially in its Latin form "medieval".

However, other terms, such as "Gothic" as in Gothic architecture, used to refer to a style typical of the High Middle Ages, have largely lost the negative connotations they initially had, only to acquire others. Critics derisively called the French Physiocrats of the French Enlightenment "economists" because they concerned themselves with materialistic issues.

The Gothic and the Baroque were both named during subsequent stylistic periods when the preceding style had become unpopular. The word "Gothic" was applied as a pejorative term to all things Northern European and, hence, barbarian, by Italian writers during the 15th and 16th centuries. The word baroque was used first in late 18th century French to depict the irregular natural pearl shape and later an architectural style perceived to be boisterously irregular and larger than life, in comparison with the highly restrained regularity of Neoclassical architecture.

Subsequently, these terms have become purely descriptive, and have largely lost negative connotations. However, the term "Baroque" as applied to art for example Peter Paul Rubens refers to a much earlier historical period than when applied to music George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach.

This reflects the difference between stylistic histories internal to an art form and the external chronological history beyond it. Gothic construction, most identifiable in popular culture by the flying buttress, is the technological response to the medieval pious aspiration toward light and height transformed into ecclesiastical architecture.

The boisterous Baroque was the awe-inspiring instrument of the Counter-reformation, sponsored by the Jesuits, defenders of the True Faith. Baroque architecture was the propaganda vehicle of the Jesuits in their counter-reformation campaign and the dramatic stage of the Inquisition. It spread quickly to all Roman Catholic countries. King Louis XIV of France later coopted the propaganda effectiveness of the Baroque and the stately legitimacy of Classicism to enshrine the stature of absolute monarchy.

Modern architecture rose from the hopes of social democratic ideals stemming from the collapse, in the aftermath of World War I, of the European monarchies and their attendant social and esthetic values as constituted in the system of court-sponsored academies.

While the cultured public welcomed the new artistic philosophy, official suppression of the Modern Movement by both Nazi Germany and the post-Lenin Soviet Union forced its migration to the United States, where it was coopted into the service of corporate capitalism after being sanitized of most of its social-democratic program, the way modernity is now being abducted to serve the current "war on terrorism".

The entire Renaissance was supported by a political ideology that is of dubious acceptability by contemporary standards. Despotism was a boon to Italian Renaissance art and architecture. A case can be made to condemn the Italian Renaissance as a movement of courtly pretension and elitist taste prescribed by theme, content and form to the questionable needs of secular potentates and ecclesiastical mania.

The noblest social art, one can argue, is that which the contribution of multitudes create for themselves as a common gift of glory, such as the Gothic cathedrals and the temples of ancient Greece. By contrast, Vladimir Tatlin's monument for the Third International was an attempt to unite artistic expression with the new socialist ideal as the Eiffel Tower did for industrialization. The Productivist Group maintained in its polemic that material and intellectual production were of the same order.

Leftist artists devoted their energy to making propaganda for the new Soviet government by painting the surfaces of all means of transport with revolutionary images to be viewed in remote corners of the collapsing czarist empire.

Constructivism declared all-out war on bourgeois art. Alas, the revolutionary movement met its demise not from bourgeois resistance, but from internal doctrinal inquisition. Much of Constructivist esthetic creativity was subsequently coopted by bourgeois society. Modernity is socialism, but the term has been abducted by bourgeois capitalism since the end of the Cold War.

In many cases, those living through a period are unable to identify themselves as belonging to the "period" historians may later assign to them. This is partly because they are unable to predict the future, and so will not be able to tell whether they are at the beginning, middle or end of a period.

Another reason may be that their own sense of historical development may be determined by religions or ideologies that differ from those used by later historians. We may well be living in the dawning of the age of socialism, free from the false starts of the past century, and ushered in finally by the self-destructive excesses of capitalism run amok. It is important to recognize the difference between self-defined historical periods and those which are later defined by historians.

At the beginning of the 20th century there was a general belief that culture, politics and history were entering a new era - that the new century would also be a new "era" in human development. This belief in progress had been largely abandoned by the end of the century with the triumph of militant reaction crowned by a proclamation of the end of history. Yet just as the Catholic Counter-Reformation failed to arrest the spread of the Reformation, the capitalist reaction against the socialist revolutionary movement since is faced with the option of including socialist programs in the capitalist system or the replacement of capitalism by socialism.

Democracy is not the exclusive tool of the bourgeoisie. Just as the bourgeoisie used democracy and the rebellious power of the working class to pressure the aristocracy, the working class will use democracy to remove the bourgeoisie from controlling the fate of the human race. The scientific and intellectual developments of the 17th century fostered the belief in natural laws and universal order and the confidence in reason which spread to influence 18th century society in Europe.

These development were typified by the discoveries of Isaac Newton , the rationalism of Rene Descartes and Pierre Bayle , the pantheism of Baruch Spinoza that equates god with the forces and natural laws of the universe and the empiricism of Francis Bacon and John Locke A rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political and economic issues promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility.

The proponents of the Enlightenment were of one mind on certain basic attitudes, and sought to discover and act on universally valid principles governing humanity, nature and society. They attacked spiritual and scientific authority, dogmatism, intolerance, censorship and economic and social constraints.

They considered the state the proper and rational instrument of progress. In England, Lockean theories of learning by sense perception were carried forward by David Hume The philosophical view of rational man in harmony with the universe set the climate for the "laissez-faire" economics of Adam Smith and for the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham of the greatest good for the greatest number.

Historical writing gained secular detachment in the work of Edward Gibbon In Germany, the universities became centers of the Enlightenment Aufklarung.

Moses Mendelssohn set forth a doctrine of rational process; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , whom Johann Wolfgang von Goethe credited as having placed the young poet in the true path, advanced a natural religion of morality; J G Herder developed a philosophy of cultural nationalism.

The supreme importance of the individual formed the basis of the ethics of Immanuel Kant The movement received strong support of the rising bourgeoisie and vigorous opposition from the high clergy and the nobility.

The strongest claim by the West on modernity is derived from ideas and concepts generally grouped under the category of the Enlightenment. These are ideas that were developed during the half a century preceding the French Revolution, between and , known in history as the Age of Enlightenment.

It was at the time that the idea of progress gained popular acceptance in the West. It was a time when Europeans emerged from a long twilight, from which the past was considered barbaric and dark. This was the age of enlightened thinkers, known as philosophes, and enlightened despots.

The idea of the Enlightenment was drawn from earlier sources, carried over from the old philosophy of natural law, which held that right depends on a universal reason, not on local conditions or on the will or perspective of any person or group. It carried over, from the intellectual revolution of the previous century, the ideas of Bacon and Locke, Descartes and Newton, Bayle and Spinoza.

It was antagonistic and skeptical toward tradition, confident in the powers of science and places faith firmly in the regularity of nature.

It most serious shortcoming was the assumption that European values derived from European experience were universal truth and that such truth gave license to world dominance: the rest of the world, to escape domination and exploitation, must adopt Western ways of militarism and exploitation. The modernization of Japan was a perfect example of this trend.

The philosophes of the Enlightenment were mostly popularizers, in an age when the great books were not read by the public. They reworded the ideas of past civilizations in ways that held the interest of the growing reading public.

These philosophes were primarily men of letters, exemplified by Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire , who made fortunes and gained fame with his writings. They differed from intellectuals of the past who were mostly proteges of aristocratic or royal patrons or clerics in the Church. The emergence of a literate middle class made such freelancers possible.

Naturally, as most writers who enjoy popularity write what their audiences like to hear, what economist John Galbraith calls "conventional wisdom", the Enlightenment authors mostly wrote to enhance the political and economic interests of the bourgeoisie. Most of the works produced during this period focused on the catalogue and organization of information, made entertaining with wit and lightness.

This was the age of the salon literati, of clever one-upmanship and satire, full of innuendos and sly digs, particularly insider jokes understood only by the enlightened few. Voltaire attacked European society by making fun not of the French, but by stereotyping the Persians, the Iroquois and the Chinese. Frederick the Great of Prussia was regarded as an eminent philosophe through his friendship with Voltaire, whose style he emulated, as was Catherine the Great of Russia While Maria Teresa of Austria was not a philosophe on account of her piety, her son Joseph, brother of the ill-fated Marie-Antoinette of France , worked hard to become one, as a patron of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

In England, Bishop Warburton tried to become one by claiming that the Church of England as a social institution was exactly what pure reason would have invented. Edward Gibbon , whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire summarized the millennium following the birth of Christ as "the triumph of barbarism and religion", much as the centuries after the Renaissance are summarized today as the triumph of capitalistic democracy over socialist revolutions as a religious truth.

Gibbon was counted as a philosophe for his secular outlook. Dr Samuel Johnson was not considered a philosophe. He was fascinated by the supernatural, adhered to the established church, deflated pretentious authors, even declared Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau "bad men" who should be sent to the plantations in America. The Enlightenment was in essence French, a product of sophisticated Parisian salons run by the likes of Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, lubricated by the liberal flow of French champagne.

Denis Diderot was not only a card-carrying philosophe, his Encyclopedie was described as a "reasoned dictionary" written by a distinguished list of other philosophes who went on to enjoy the awesome rank of Encyclopedists.

Another group of philosophes was the Physiocrats, whom critics derisively called "economists" who concerned themselves with fiscal and monetary reform, with measures to increase the national wealth of France. The three giants of the philosophes were Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau. Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu , a landed aristocrat, was a defender of his class interest. Among his associates was the Count of Boulainvilliers , who held that French nobility was descended from a superior Germanic race, a view that contributed to the emergence of racism in the West.

In his The Spirit of Laws , Montesquieu developed two principal ideas. One was that forms of government varied according to climate and circumstances, for example that despotism was suited more to large empires in hot climates and that democracy only would work in small city-states.

Thus democracy is inconsistent with the idea of empire. The other idea was the separation and balance of powers. In France, he believed that power should be divided between the king and a number of "intermediate bodies" - parliaments, provincial estates, organized nobility, chartered towns, and even the church.

It was natural for Montesquieu, a judge in parliament, a provincial and a landed nobleman, and reasonable for him to recognize the position of the bourgeoisie of the towns, but as for the Church he observed that while he took no stock in its teachings, he thought is useful as an offset to undue centralization of government.

Montesquieu admired the unwritten English constitution as he understood it, not for its democratic qualities but in believing that England carried over, more successfully than any other European country, the feudal liberties of the Middle Ages. To Montesquieu, government should be a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, a term representing the interests of the bourgeoisie, not the general population and definitely not workers and peasants. The ideas of Montesquieu were well known to the drafters of the US constitution, who, because the United States at that time had no history of social institutions besides slavery, distorted the meaning of democracy and the separation of powers as defined by Montesquieu to create a political structure peculiarly suited only to US conditions.

Those who now claim that the US version of democracy is a heritage of the Enlightenment universally suited for all humankind have been highly selective in their understanding of history.

Strictly speaking, the modern world arrived in the 18th and 19th centuries with the transfer of power from the aristocracy and the absolutist kings Louis XIV in France and James I in England to the upper middle classes - the elite bourgeoisie.

Authority of all kinds — monarchical and ecclesiastical as well as noble privilege — was challenged. These changes were accelerated and converted to action in France by the Revolution, which swept away within a few years what it called the Old Regime, the old social and political order and the privileges of nobles and clergy.

In the French first adopted a form of constitutional monarchy on the British model, guided and restricted by a legislative assembly representative of a wider, though by no means completely inclusive, constituency. Respect for noble birth was replaced by respect for men of property regardless of their lineage. The relatively moderate reforms of the early years of the Revolution then gave way to more violent upheavals, as resentment stirred against the new aristocracy of the rich.

The monarchy was replaced by a republic see Figure 15 , which in turn, under pressure of war and civil war, soon fell under the sway of a ruthless dictatorship. When the violence had abated and political power was once more restored to a property-owning elite, there was scope for a large new meritocracy with equal citizenship and equal treatment before the law.

While under the Old Regime no one had been admitted to the French court since unless he could trace his noble ancestry back to the fourteenth century, Napoleon's declared maxim was la carriere ouverte aux talents careers open to talent. His claim that every foot-soldier carried in his knapsack the baton of a marshal of France was not literally true; nevertheless his marshals and administrators included men of humble origin brought to positions of authority by the needs of the Revolution and the Napoleonic empire, and even raised to Napoleon's imperial nobility.

These were spectacular changes on an unprecedented scale. When Napoleon rose to power, the changes were seen as gleaming signs of France's modernity, a model to be imposed on the rest of Europe. The painting by the French artist Antoine-Jean Gros — , Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken of Jaffa , shows Napoleon as compassionate hero when he had in fact just authorised a number of violent atrocities during the Egyptian campaign. From the first, he suppressed freedom of expression and the press, reintroduced slavery in the French colonies, and came to be seen by many as another brand of tyrant.

But it was some years before Europe lost faith in the positive, modernising energy he seemed to represent, and after his fall he was missed as a vigorous, inspiring and enlightened alternative to the reactionary restored Bourbon monarchy. Spain, attached to its Catholic and social traditions, resisted his modernity as it fought his invading armies, and Napoleon's imperial ambition to complete his domination over the whole of Europe stimulated national self-consciousness as a counteracting force in Spain, Russia and Germany.

Another modernising force in the period covered by the course was the growing pace of industrialisation, as the methods of cottage outworkers were gradually replaced by mass factory production of goods. As people moved increasingly to work in towns, old social communities and values were under threat, and it was in such a climate that Evangelical Christianity began to thrive.

Evangelicals defined a new kind of faith in response to growing concerns about the ability of traditional Anglicanism to meet the needs of a swiftly changing society. Together with the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, they turned their backs on the growing pursuit of material prosperity that came with industrialisation in order to define more exacting or rewarding routes to salvation. Reacting against what he saw as a detrimental decline in faith, Wilberforce proposed an alternative, spiritually inspired modernity in the form of a religion that built on personal experience while rejecting superstition.

The modernising forces of the Enlightenment could, then, take the form of regeneration rather than the violent break with tradition produced by the Revolution. The modernity of the Enlightenment also had aesthetic consequences. And yet such impulses towards modernity did not remain unchallenged. The Enlightenment's own respect for nature stimulated lively debate among thinkers such as William Wordsworth, Uvedale Price and William Gilpin about the extent to which art and artifice should alter the natural appearance of the landscape.

The scene was set for a man versus nature dialectic that would lie at the heart of Romantic concerns. Summary point: the Enlightenment was characterised by an impulse towards modernity in matters of government, politics, religion and aesthetics. There were those, however, who questioned the rapid momentum and effects of change.

Making the decision to study can be a big step, which is why you'll want a trusted University. In a century when so many errors have been courageously unmasked, it would be shameful to conceal important truths from humanity. It was begun with erudition, continued with belles-lettres, and completed with philosophy.

The Enlightenment and modernity, as concepts and programs of research, followed similar trajectories in the post-World War ii period. Rather than advancing a humane program of inalienable rights, scientific rationality and democracy, postmodernists unveiled the emergence of sinister control mechanisms in modern institutions such as schools, prisons and the military.

Beyond the moral indictment of Enlightenment and modernity, it became clear that the teleology imbedded in both concepts had a way of obscuring rather than illuminating the pre-modern European past and the histories of non-European peoples. Beyond Eurocentrism, the Enlightenment and modernity have also been cast as a catastrophe for women. The measure of civilization foresaw a process of feminization, which could spill over into effeminacy, if certain limits were exceeded.

Resulting at least partially from these multicultural and feminist critiques, there followed a period of pluralization for the concepts of Enlightenment and modernity, as scholars from around the world began to understand and use these concepts in diverse ways. The immediate origins of this special issue lie in the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference held in Edinburgh in But our journal lacks a systematic analysis of modernity as the progeny of Enlightenment.

John Robertson graciously accepted my request to elaborate on the themes he presented in Edinburgh in a special issue on the Enlightenment and modernity. We are grateful that Antoine Lilti and Margaret Jacob, distinguished scholars of the Enlightenment, also agreed to contribute.

As editor, I asked them to take any approach they wished on this admittedly very broad theme and the result is three stimulating articles that, in their convergences and disagreements, are all thought-provoking.

To a greater degree than Robertson, Antoine Lilti takes modernity to be a practical — albeit multilayered, multidimensional and contested — historical reality. And he sees the Enlightenment not as the programme of modernity but instead as an intellectual movement that made a double move.

First, Enlightenment holds out the promise that each individual has the capacity to use her or his own reason and that, through increased knowledge, individual persons or a people can become emancipated from oppressive traditions and superstition. Second, Enlightenment is a self-reflexive move which enables critical appraisal of the political and socio-cultural transformations associated with modernity, such as the growth of globalized commerce, the rise of an autonomous public sphere, or the waning of traditional hierarchies.

Every individual should have the right to decide for her or himself what is reasonable given the current state of knowledge, but how can we ensure that correct knowledge will win the day? He suggests that it is precisely this inherent and thus unavoidable tension in the thought of such major thinkers as Voltaire, Condorcet and Kant that makes it worthwhile to continue to study Enlightenment texts.

Rather than trying to find in Enlightenment a set of ethical or epistemological principles to which we should all adhere — beyond, that is, a commitment to the autonomous use of reason in search of human betterment — our engagement with Enlightenment thinkers can be most productive when we are attuned to the interplay of socio-cultural changes that they lived through and their reflections on the contradictions wrought by those changes.

In a more polemical piece, Margaret Jacob presents a trenchant case for seeing the Enlightenment and modernity as our contemporary condition and as our greatest hope for navigating the treacherous waters we now find ourselves in, whether political rising authoritarianism or environmental Covid and climate change. Jacob takes modernity to be the historically grounded belief in political and scientific progress — the uneven yet persistent rise of representative governmental institutions and the mathematization of the sciences that allowed for ever more accurate predictions and explanations of natural phenomena.

Between roughly and , the European discoveries of New World peoples and the revolution in the understanding of matter and motion stretched the theories embedded in the classical and Christian traditions to a breaking point that came to a head in the early Enlightenment, exemplified by the anonymously authored radical tract Theophrastus redivivus of the s.

Jacob connects the rapid pace of scientific and technological advancement of the early modern period, particularly in the Anglo-Dutch world, to novel liberal political and economic ideas and institutions. She shows that the Enlightenment and the First Industrial Revolution, long separated in the historiography, must now be brought together because it is clear that the applied mechanics of the industrial innovators grew out of an enlightened scientific education, particularly in Great Britain.

Jacob is certainly aware that the Enlightenment and modernity have not meant a sanguine story of steady moral and material progress since the seventeenth century. But she argues that the global challenge that Covid presents to us, as we look to modern science and technology for accurate knowledge of the virus and a vaccine, demonstrates that we ignore the modernity wrought by Enlightenment at our own peril. Dan Edelstein has demonstrated that the Enlightenment can perhaps best be understood as a narrative of the progress of society that emerged out of the well-known quarrel of the ancients and the moderns.

Yes, some of the values defended by the philosophes, their patrons, and their readers are values that we still hold dear today. But their modernity was very different from ours. While Lilti and Jacob are certainly attuned to the pitfalls of defining the Enlightenment through the prism of modernity, they accept, more readily than Robertson and Edelstein, modernity as a deeper transformation in the socio-cultural fabric of western European societies that intensified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Perhaps one of the most significant gains of the scholarship that resulted from the pluralization of the Enlightenment is that we cannot ignore the social conditions and cultural practices in which Enlightenment ideas were enmeshed. The differences between these articles demonstrate the fruitfulness of dialogues between intellectual, social, and cultural histories of Enlightenment and the productive tensions these bring to the fore.

However, after reading these articles, it also becomes apparent that the terms of the debate on Enlightenment and modernity must be clearly laid out for an effective discussion to be possible.

Modernity is variously defined as the progressive elements we have inherited from the Enlightenment or as the oppressive tendencies one can easily find issuing from the same intellectual movement. We disagree on what we have inherited, and who has inherited it. But if we are clear on these elements, for example by defining modernity as reflection on processes of state formation, population growth, urbanization, and increasing literacy and access to news media, then constructive debate becomes more likely.

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