Volume 44, Number 5 · March 27, 1997
George Washington's False Teeth
By Robert Darnton
We live in an age of inflation: inflated money, inflated grades, inflated letters of recommendation, inflated reputations, and inflated ideas. The general puffery has affected our understanding of the movement at the beginning of modern political culture, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, because it, too, has been blown up to such a size that it would not be recognized by the men who first created it. Having been floated at first with a few bons mots in some Parisian salons, it became a campaign to crush l'infâme, a march of progress, a spirit of the age, a secular faith, a world-view to be defended or combatted or transcended, and the source of everything good, bad, and modern, including liberalism, capitalism, imperialism, male chauvinism, world federalism, UNESCO humanism, and the Family of Man. Whoever has a bone to pick or a cause to defend begins with the Enlightenment.
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