Volume 40, Number 19 · November 18, 1993
Leave it to Chance
By P.N. Furbank
Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France
by Thomas M. Kavanagh
Johns Hopkins University Press, 271 pp., $36.50
The jacket design of Thomas Kavanagh's book depicts a naked Fortune led by the goddess Folly, amid a shower of stock certificates. Their chariot is pushed on by besotted investors and crushing others beneath its wheels. It is, in other words, a picture of the Mississippi 'bubble' of 1719–1720, the disastrous speculative scheme launched in France by the financier John Law for investment in the colonies. But the picture could perhaps, with a little adjustment, be made to represent the 'History of Ideas' led on by the false enchantress 'The Enlightenment.' Was there ever such a spreader of chaos as that unfortunate term? One is thinking especially of its 'The,' which crept in during the twentieth century (perhaps through a mistranslation of the 'Die' in 'Die Aufklärung') and which has a fatal effect, making 'The Enlightenment' a thing, a discrete event, a completed process or fully formed Weltanschauung. The phrase was no doubt coined in an effort to copy the dazzling success of Burckhardt's 'The Renaissance'; so it is important to see the basic reason why, unlike Burckhardt's phrase, it is not acceptable. Eighteenth-century writers played endless intricate games with the term 'enlightenment' (lumières, Aufklärung, etc.), games which it is very important for the historian to study. Thus he cannot afford to use this loaded term himself, as a neutral item in his professional vocabulary—any more than phrases like 'phlogiston' or 'the true church,' or 'true nobility.'
Review, 3090 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |