Book Review: American Enlightenments
Oct. 8th, 2016 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI really enjoyed the beginning of Caroline Winterer’s American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason, which talks about intellectual correspondence networks in the 18th century; I was particularly intrigued by its brief discussion of women’s correspondence networks, which I would have loved to read more about, but that is in the end not the topic of the book.
Unfortunately, once the book moved on from correspondence networks to its actual topic - the varied meanings of enlightenment in the eighteenth century - it became far less germane to my interests, especially as it doesn’t really take two hundred pages to prove that “enlightenment” was a fuzzy concept that was deployed in complicated and conflicting ways as people struggled to define their own visions of the future upward path to happiness as the path of enlightenment.
I have read enough history books that I’ve just sort of started taking the fuzziness of important historical concepts as a given. Indeed, most large abstract ideas seem ultimately to be sort of fuzzy and subject to conflicting definitions. (How precisely do you define fascism? Or communism, for that matter? What is truth, or justice, or love?) So I didn’t really need an entire book about it.
Also, given that the book promises as part of its summary to prove that “a national mythology of a unitary, patriotic era of enlightenment in America was created during the Cold War to act as a shield against the threat of totalitarianism,” the book really needed at least one chapter that focused on the Cold War era. American Enlightenments spends a lot of time showing that the supposedly unitary era was in fact - like all eras - riven with conflict, but it devotes no time at all to showing when the idea of the unitary patriotic era gained force. Could it have been the Cold War? Sure. But the book doesn’t do anything to prove it.
Unfortunately, once the book moved on from correspondence networks to its actual topic - the varied meanings of enlightenment in the eighteenth century - it became far less germane to my interests, especially as it doesn’t really take two hundred pages to prove that “enlightenment” was a fuzzy concept that was deployed in complicated and conflicting ways as people struggled to define their own visions of the future upward path to happiness as the path of enlightenment.
I have read enough history books that I’ve just sort of started taking the fuzziness of important historical concepts as a given. Indeed, most large abstract ideas seem ultimately to be sort of fuzzy and subject to conflicting definitions. (How precisely do you define fascism? Or communism, for that matter? What is truth, or justice, or love?) So I didn’t really need an entire book about it.
Also, given that the book promises as part of its summary to prove that “a national mythology of a unitary, patriotic era of enlightenment in America was created during the Cold War to act as a shield against the threat of totalitarianism,” the book really needed at least one chapter that focused on the Cold War era. American Enlightenments spends a lot of time showing that the supposedly unitary era was in fact - like all eras - riven with conflict, but it devotes no time at all to showing when the idea of the unitary patriotic era gained force. Could it have been the Cold War? Sure. But the book doesn’t do anything to prove it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-10-11 01:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-11 12:15 pm (UTC)