In The Secular Enlightenment, Margaret C. Jacob offers a social history of the intellectual movement in the long 18th century that valued the pursuit of knowledge through rigorous reason and scientific evidence. Focusing on cities and ideas from throughout Europe during this time, she masterfully blends panoramic scope with vivid details. Without defining the term “secular” explicitly, Jacob associates 18th-century secularity with “human creations” in the “here and now,” as opposed to divine or eternal truths (3). In situating her analysis, Jacob invokes the proliferation of histories of this period, including the Religious Enlightenment, the Catholic Enlightenment, the Radical Enlightenment, and the Moderate Enlightenment. The Secular Enlightenment reads like a conglomeration of all of the above. While Jacob’s inclusion of personal journals and correspondence is a welcome addition to top-down histories of the period, the greatest value to this fine text is its moderation and complexity. In his magisterial A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), the philosopher Charles Taylor traces the historical development of secularization as “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace” (3). The Secular Enlightenment brilliantly accomplishes Taylor’s task in far fewer pages, with a fraction of the scholarly jargon, and with an unforgettable cast of characters along the way.
In her initial chapter, Jacob asks: “If space was now empty, what could fill it? Where were the spirits, saints, and demons in whom most Westerners still believed?” (32). Firstly, she highlights how burgeoning experimental sciences and geographical discoveries changed people’s notions of the world itself. Secondly, Jacob focuses especially on cosmopolitan European cities, which provide the localized contexts for later chapters. And within urban centers, Jacob puts a premium on voluntary associations like university fellowships, eating clubs, coffee house culture, literary salons, and the Freemasons. While this might seem like an interesting and jarring assortment, such gatherings reinforce the vast and expanding marketplace of ideas, of which religious orthodoxy is but one offering among many.
In chapters 2 and 3, entitled “Time Reinvented” and “Secular Lives,” respectively, Jacob describes the shift from Christian to “modern” time. Instead of showing the mere decline of Christian conceptions of time from the Reformation era to the Enlightenment, Jacob shows how astrology replaced prophecy, popular almanacs replaced church emphases on saints’ days, and geological time replaced the six-thousand-year history of biblical creation. Rather than academic treatises or theological tracts on the subject, however, Jacob focuses on journals like those of, for example, Constantijn Huygens, Jr. or Mary Evelyn to show how enlightened thinking about time was lived out and experienced. Where previous generations had pious anxieties about their use (or abuse) of earthly time in the face of future divine judgment, 18th century diarists fretted about commonplace productivity, punctuality, and travel schedules. In these opening chapters, Jacob also emphasizes the value of moderation, exposing the vices of radical dogmatism on the one hand and radical skepticism on the other. This theme of moderation amidst radical ideas provides a through line for the geographically specific chapters that form the bulk of the book.
Chapter 4, entitled “Paris and the Materialist Alternative: The Widow Stockdorff,” uses print networks as a primary lens for emphasizing the importance of Francophone texts to the secular Enlightenment. Jacob’s analysis focuses on the usual Enlightenment suspects of (Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) while also highlighting forbidden texts that were in high demand. The main attraction of this chapter is the list of books acquired by a certain Widow Stockdorff, a Strasbourg book merchant who acquired a variety of forbidden titles, some of which caused her to be imprisoned in the Bastille. Finishing with a brief discussion of French Freemasonry, Jacob deftly shows how varied secular options existed alongside religious belief for the radical thinkers and writers of Enlightenment France known as the philosophes.
Chapter 5 on the Scottish Enlightenment portrays moderate thinking as the rule, eschewing Scotland’s Reformation-era religious troubles. Rather than focusing on the church as the intellectual center of Scottish Enlightenment thought, Jacob highlights the Edinburgh-based Select Society, including its most illustrious and secular thinker, David Hume. Jacob also focuses on Adam Smith’s economic thought, specifically how economic and scientific endeavors could help ward off radical enthusiasm in both religious and political causes. Chapter 6 on German-speaking lands provides a contrast to the comparative political freedom found in Amsterdam, England, and Scotland in previous chapters. Prussian absolutism in Berlin and Habsburg imperial policy dictated from Vienna are the contexts for Jacob’s analysis of German Enlightenment thinking. Johan Gottfried Herder and Immanuel Kant provide moderation between Pietistic thought and accusations of atheistic Spinozistic thinking. Chapter 7 shines a light on Enlightenment ideas of government coming out of Naples and Milan. Ferdinando Galiani’s political economy, Lodovico Muratori’s treatise On Money, Gaetano Filangieri’s Science of Legislation, and works by Cesare Beccaria and Pietro Verri are at the center of this chapter. The latter pair’s ideas on the death penalty, springing from their activities within their scholarly circle, the Academy of Fists, even had an impact on revolutionaries in the new United States, including the Freemason Benjamin Franklin. In each chapter, Jacob expertly draws connections with all of the others in a remarkable web of mutual influence.
Chapter 8 and the epilogue neatly tie up the geographical survey of European secularity. Jacob shows how moderate and democratic Enlightenment ideas had the most promise where they survived the repression and revolutionary fervor of the 1790s. Throughout her narrative, Jacob comes close to defining secularity without actually doing so: “Secularity, like religiosity, entailed more than a set of doctrines or heresies; it meant being at ease in this world with little thought about any other” (67). To paraphrase Jacob’s sentiment, The Secular Enlightenment is more than a catalog of doctrines and heresies; it is an interdisciplinary delight that is simultaneously at ease with immortal philosophes, interested travelers, and ordinary journal-keepers. Debates about social ideas that started in eighteenth-century European cities are still going on today, and that’s what makes us the modern, secular descendants of the Enlightenment.
David Greder is an assistant professor of religion and philosophy at Waldorf University.
David Greder
Date Of Review:
May 31, 2023