Table Of Contenti
Rethinking the
Enlightenment
Rethinking the
Enlightenment
Between History, Philosophy,
and Politics
Edited by
Geoff Boucher and Henry Martyn Lloyd
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Boucher, Geoff, 1967- editor.
Title: Rethinking the Enlightenment : between history, philosophy, and politics / edited
by Geoff Boucher and Henry Martyn Lloyd.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017046705 (print) | LCCN 2017047834 (ebook) | ISBN
9781498558136 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498558129 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Enlightenment.
Classification: LCC B802 (ebook) | LCC B802 .R48 2017 (print) | DDC 940.2/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046705
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Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 What Is It to Rethink the Enlightenment? 1
Henry Martyn Lloyd
2 Contemporary Political Theory as an Anti-Enlightenment Project 39
Dennis C. Rasmussen
3 What of All the Others? On Recovering the Enlightenment 61
Matthew Sharpe
4 What Sort of Question Was Kant Answering When He Answered
the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?”? 89
James Schmidt
5 Catharine Macaulay as Critic of Hume 113
Karen Green
6 The Principled Enlightenment: Condillac, d’Alembert, and
Principle Minimalism 131
Peter R. Anstey
7 Reason and Rationality within the “Enlightenment of Sensibility,”
Or, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and French Philosophy’s First
“Linguistic Turn” 151
Henry Martyn Lloyd
8 Knowing Otherwise: An Ethics of Feeling 177
Daniel Brewer
v
vi Contents
9 Emotional Enlightenment: Kant on Love and the Beautiful 199
Marguerite La Caze
10 A Road Not Taken: Critical Theory after Dialectic of
Enlightenment 221
Geoff Boucher
11 The Enlightenment: A Signifier of “Western Values”? 247
Genevieve Lloyd
Index 265
About the Editors and Contributors 269
Acknowledgments
The genesis of this collection was a December 2015 conference organized
by Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe at Deakin University, Melbourne,
Australia. We would like to thank the conference keynote speakers—Peter
Anstey, Karen Green, Marguerite La Caze, Genevieve Lloyd, and Dennis
Rasmussen—as well as the participants who made the event such a success.
The conference was organized with the support of Deakin University’s
European Philosophy and the History of Ideas Research Network, and the
Alfred Deakin Institute of Citizenship and Globalization.
Thank you also to those who responded so warmly to our invitation to
contribute papers and who were such a pleasure to work with: Daniel Brewer
and James Schmidt.
We would particularly like to acknowledge the work of Matthew Sharpe
who, beyond doing so much to facilitate the 2015 conference, did a great deal
to assist us in the preparation of this volume.
Thank you to Cameron Bishop from Deakin University’s School of Com-
munication and Creative Arts for the cover image “Enlightened Supplement”
(Photograph, projection, and sump oil), which is a quotation of Jean-Baptiste
Pigalle’s “Voltaire Nude” (1776).
Geoff Boucher and Henry Martyn Lloyd
Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia.
August 2017
vii
Chapter 1
What Is It to Rethink the
Enlightenment?
Henry Martyn Lloyd
Introductions to books on the Enlightenment exhibit a remarkable uniformity.1
All attest to the importance of the Enlightenment as the cornerstone, crucible,
or laboratory of Western modernity: the Enlightenment “stands at the thresh-
old of the modern age”;2 understanding it is essential if we are to make sense
of ourselves and of our modern condition; its importance for modern Western
intellectual and political cultures is perhaps rivaled only by the rise of Chris-
tianity.3 Indeed, given colonialism and the continued post-colonial domi-
nance of Western modernity in the current global political and economic
order, the Enlightenment is an event of unparalleled global significance. The
Enlightenment is omnipresent; for better or worse, it is always with us even
as we try to escape it; “we are all children of the Enlightenment even when
we attack it.”4
These introductions locate the Enlightenment temporally in something
like the long eighteenth century. Or, moving quickly toward a thematic
definition, they note that the Enlightenment began and ended in revolu-
tion: it began somewhere in the middle of the seventeenth century with the
early-modern Scientific Revolution and ended with the French Revolution.
That is, the Enlightenment began in an epistemological and methodologi-
cal transformation within natural philosophy and morphed into a social and
political transformation. The combined and related effect of these revolu-
tions radically transformed Europe and produced Western modernity. It is
highly likely that these introductions will mention Kant’s famous essay “An
Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” In doing this they will
imply that the Kantian “synthesis” is the ne plus ultra of the Enlightenment.
If Kant is not used in this way then it is likely that the French philosophes
and the Encyclopédie will be used instead: the article “Philosophe” from the
Encyclopédie has been marked as the conceptual starting point of Enlighten-
ment studies.5 A pithy quote is likely—perhaps this one from Kant:
1
