Can the enlightenment provide a canon for modernity?

The Enlightenment represents the turning point towards modernity. As a historical era, it runs, roughly, from the middle decades of the seventeenth century to the French Revolution of 1789. That is history. But the Enlightenment has somehow refused to be safely consigned to ‘history’ in the same way as the Crusades, the Roman Empire or the world of ancient China. It is somehow ‘too close’ to us and too much part of ‘who we are’. Precisely because the Enlightenment is so close to us and so much part of what it means to be modern, it seems difficult to conceive of a history education that would not include the Enlightenment as history and philosophical legacy. Even when the Enlightenment is not presented in its own right, ideas derived from it inform historical narratives of scientific progress, economic development, and the rise of tolerance and democracy. Beyond that, it affects the way ancient and medieval history are presented by teachers and ingested by students and pupils. Despite all caveats about the perils of anachronism and the virtues of historicism, those older periods easily take on the hue of the ‘pre-Enlightenment’. Likewise, the history of the extra-European world is frequently engulfed by the voracious categories of the ‘pre-modern’ and the ‘traditional’. Consequently, the Enlightenment’s influence on the framing and writing of history is not limited to Europe or ‘the West’.

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