The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob Anna Tomaszewska The Secular Enlightenment. By Margaret C. Jacob. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2019. Pp. xi, 339. $29.95. ISBN 9780691161327.) The author of the seminal Radical Enlightenment (1981) has proposed another category encapsulating intellectual, social, and political metamorphoses spurred by [End Page 214] the "Age of Enlightenment." In eight chapters that take the reader through Western European and trans-Atlantic spaces and times spanning from the late seventeenth century until the 1790s, Margaret Jacob pictures the emergence of "the secular world" in which human life would increasingly center on the here and now without "a necessary reference to a transcendent order" (pp. 1–2). For Jacob, secularization does not imply a complete repudiation of religion, but redefining its meaning as a cultural practice, an approach traceable to The Religious Ceremonies and Customs (1723–43) by Jean Frederick Bernard and Bernard Picart. The secular Enlightenment turned toward science under Newton's auspices, witnessed budding sensitivity to social injustice and inequalities, criticized the alliance between church and state, and brought the development of the university culture. Clandestine literature and new forms of sociability, practiced in masonic lodges, city clubs, and cafés, created a global space of shared ideas and ideals: equality, cosmopolitanism, universal brotherhood. Inventions, such as that of the pendulum clock, prompted changes in the perception of time dedicated more and more to this-worldly activities. The secular ways became manifest in the lives of countless travelers, publishers, industrialists, academics, scientists, and poets—both minor figures, some of them female, and the leading protagonists of the epoch. France prepared the ground for the outbreak of its 1789 revolution: the deism, materialism, and atheism of the philosophes provided a setting in which the absolute monarchy and priestly privilege could be challenged. The Scottish enlighteners favored pragmatic topics: taxes, commerce, and how to counteract poverty, which would set the background for the development of capitalism and the conception of historical progress. Germany staged the advocacy of secular ethics and politics, the publication of subversive writings attacking organized religion, conflicts between rationalist philosophers and state authorities, and finally the resurgence of Spinozism that constituted the naturalist underpinnings for "a universal humanism" (p. 197). The Italians, overcoming tensions between the Catholic Church and the enlightened values, contributed to political economy with theories of money and trade, and to political theory by laying the foundations for a constitutional republic that would later serve as a model for the Americans. The way was also paved for abolishing torture, slavery, and eventually death penalty. Social and political unrest accompanied the demise of the Enlightenment, which set in motion the "creation of the democratic citizen," necessitating a "personal transformation … often transgressive of customs and mores" (p. 236), particularly those related to family life. The Enlightenment, which persisted in the writings of the Romantics, brought along "the secular" that "had become all pervasive" (p. 264). Jacob's fascinatingly many-layered and multifaceted account of the Enlightenment unfolds the extent to which its ideas have shaped our times, yet occasionally her usage of '"enlightened" slips from merely descriptive into normative. Jacob does not side with the proponents of the "religious Enlightenment"—the claim that religious controversies could have triggered the secularizing impulse (Jeffrey D. Burson) or that the "Age of Reason" made possible new forms of belief (David Sorkin). Her allegiance stays with those who, like Peter Gay, link the Enlightenment with the [End Page 215] secular. However, although Jacob's account expresses attachment to the secular values which have come to be associated with liberal democratic culture that some believe to prevail nowadays, it also perpetuates the view of those critics of the Enlightenment who would see in it a movement of dissent from Christianity. Anna Tomaszewska Jagellonian University in Krakow Copyright © 2022 The Catholic University of America Press