The Enlightenment: Who, When and Where?

The great reward in looking for or studying the Enlightenment, for both teachers and students, is that it continues to unsettle assumptions and forces us, as Kant urged so long ago, to think differently. Perhaps the best means of allowing students to taste the complexity of this intellectual effervescence is to utilize simple questions to uncover its intricacies. The Enlightenment unsettles historians by asking constantly, that highly irritating question, ‘how do you know what you know’? The point here is not to seek to reconstruct a ‘real’ Enlightenment. Indeed, such an individual self-contained movement probably never existed. The number of participants, the diversity of ideas and the transnational (perhaps oceanic) context involved makes this intellectual climate incommensurable. The object of the exercise is to ask better questions in order to know a little more and, if all goes well, think in more sophisticated ways about the eighteenth century. This chapter will show that seemingly simple questions can help students develop interesting ways of reflecting and learning about the Enlightenment. The following questions will be explored:

1. Who was the Enlightenment?

2. When was the Enlightenment?

3. Where was the Enlightenment?