James Schmidt

For over a century, the Oxford English Dictionary has defined Enlightenment as “shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for tradition and authority.” But this definition misreads two passages from Stirling's Secret of Hegel (1865) and misrepresents how “enlightenment,” “illumination,” and “Aufklärung” were employed in the wake of the French Revolution. An examination of British critiques of the Revolution and early translations of texts by Kant, Mendelssohn, and Hegel shows that, prior to the close of the nineteenth century, “enlightenment” designated a process, not a period, and had few negative connotations.

The eighteenth‐century controversy among Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and Immanuel Kant undermines the tendency to equate liberalism with the Enlightenment. While the defender of the Enlightenment, Mendelssohn, championed defended such traditional liberal values as religious toleration, his arguments were often illiberal. In contrast, many of the views of his anti‐ Establishment opponent, Jacobi, are remarkably liberal. Kant's essays from the mid‐i78os advanced a liberal conception of politics but a view of Enlightenment that was quite distant from those of both Mendelssohn and Jacobi.