Republic of Letters - Historiographical Debates - Intellectual Transparency and Laicizations

Intellectual Transparency and Laicizations

Goodman's approach has found favor with the medical historian Thomas Broman. Building on Habermas, Broman argues that the Enlightenment was a movement of intellectual transparency and laicization. While members of the Republic of Letters lived hermetically sealed from the outside world, talking only to one another, their enlightened successors deliberately placed their ideas before the bar of a nascent public opinion. Broman essentially sees The Republic of Letters as located in the cabinet and the Enlightenment in the market-place.

For most Anglo-American historians, the classic Enlightenment is a forward-looking movement. To these historians, the Republic of Letters are an outdated construction of the 17th century. But in John Pocock's eyes there are two Enlightenments: one, associated with the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is erudite, serious, and scholarly grounded in the Republic of Letters; the other, the trivial Enlightenment of the Parisian philosophes. The first is a product of a peculiarly English/British and Protestant liberal political and theological tradition and points to the future; the second lacks the anchor of socio-historical analysis and leads unintentionally to Revolutionary mayhem.

In the 1930s, the French historian Paul Hazard homed in on the age of Pierre Bayle and argued that the cumulative effect of the many different and mordant strands of intellectual curiosity in the last quarter of the 17th century created a European cultural crisis, whose negative harvest the philosophes were to reap. The Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment were insolubly interconnected. Both were movements of criticism.

According to Peter Gay, building on Ernst Cassirer's much earlier study of the intellectual progenitors of Kant, the Enlightenment was the creation of a small group of thinkers, his family of philosophes or ‘party of humanity’, whose coherent anti-Christian, ameliorist, and individualistic programme of reform developed from very specific cultural roots. The Enlightenment was not the offspring of the Republic of Letters, let alone the culmination of three centuries of anti-Augustinian critique, but rather the result of the singular marriage of Lucretius and Newton. When a handful of French freethinkers in the second quarter of the 18th century encountered the methodology and achievements of Newtonian science, experimental philosophy and unbelief were mixed together in an explosive cocktail, which gave its imbibers the means to develop a new science of man. Since Gay's work was published, his interpretation of the Enlightenment has become an orthodoxy in the Anglo-Saxon world.