Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 127, Nummer 2, 2014

In the special section EVERYTHING IS ENLIGHTENED three authors present new developments in the Enlightenment research. In this short introduction we determine the boundaries within which the more than thirty books that are discussed by these authors can be placed, en we observe that historians of the Enlightenment have in recent years explored the limits of what can still be considered Enlightened.

The many forms of sociability that flourished during the eighteenth century have long been viewed as vehicles of the Enlightenment. Not only were societies, clubs, and lodges permeated by a spirit of egalitarianism, secularism, and religious tolerance, they were also essential factors in the dissemination of knowledge and new ideas. Additionally, sociability has been associated with the rise of the public sphere and civil society, as various societies provided important platforms for the new bourgeois public to discuss and address the issues of the day. However, recent research has challenged these views. Historians are increasingly finding that many societies were permeable to a variety of worldviews and practices, not all of which can be meaningfully associated with the Enlightenment. New insights also suggest the importance of local restrictions and social conventions influencing many societies, further complicating the traditional understanding of the progressive, enlightened nature of sociability during this period. At the same time, sociability remains an important object of research in its own right, as well as an indispensible window onto an ever increasing variety of historical phenomena. This article explores the ways in which recent research has transformed our understanding of sociability and its place in the Enlightenment.

In this article several new publications on the critics of the Enlightenment are reviewed. These works build partly on the legacy of Isaiah Berlin’s concept of the Counter-Enlightenment, but they also emphasise the problematic nature of his essentialistic and timeless interpretation of the Counter-Enlightenment tradition. The authors argue that the so-called enemies of the Enlightenment should in fact be examined as part of the Enlightenment itself, and that the Enlightenment cannot be understood without studying its self-proclaimed enemies.

Since the publication of Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, scholarly interest in the classical presence in Enlightenment culture has waned. Over the past decade, however, this topic has returned to center stage. This review article discusses the ways in which recent research has contributed to the rediscovery of the classical past in the Enlightenment. It starts with an evaluation of the current reinterpretation of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, continues with an overview of recent scholarship on the various intellectual and institutional environments in which knowledge of the classical past was acquired and transmitted, and ends with a discussion of the crucial role of the ancient world in eighteenth-century historiography and political thought. In its conclusion the article draws attention to the many ways in which recent scholarship on the eighteenth-century reception of the classics has broken new ground. It also argues that the ‘classical turn in Enlightenment studies’ is still unjustifiably neglected in general interpretations of the Enlightenment.

This article re-evaluates Paul Wittek's famous gaza thesis, which until the 1980s was the dominant explanation of the Ottoman state and remains influential. It situates Wittek within the intellectual genealogy of Ottoman Studies, which exhibits two major lines: the Ottomans were either barbarians without an understanding of state-building, or fanatical Muslims who were engaged in continuous holy war. Since Wittek, many scholars have believed that holy war was central to the Ottoman state and ideology. Wittek wrongly interpreted the concept gaza as equivalent to the western term ‘holy war’, seeing the terms gaza, jihad, and holy war as synonyms. In fact each of these concepts has a different semantic and historical context. Although the gaza ideology was relevant to Ottoman expansion and dynastic legitimacy, it was not the all-defining ideological motif.

After World War I the technocratic movement Technocracy Inc. was established in the United States. Supporters of this movement were utopian engineers who wanted to eradicate waste in American industry, and increasingly considered their methods applicable to the economy and society at large. Technocratic ideas also gained ground in the Netherlands in the interwar period. The purpose of this article is to examine the emergence and development of technocratic thought in the United States and the Netherlands in this period, and to analyze their different patterns of development.

This article adopts a new perspective on the interaction between political parties and Dutch television in election campaigns from the 1960s onwards. Rather than exploring the ‘real’ impact of television on the nature and content of political campaigning, it presents a case study of televised debates in order to explore changing perceptions among parties and press regarding the so-called mediatization of politics. It shows that televised debates were at first perceived as a means to bridge the gap between politics and people. In the 1970s and early 1980s, when parties tried to control the set-up of these debates, they met with increasing criticism and were perceived as having hardly any influence on the outcome of the elections. Although the staging of the debates remained the same, midway through the 1980s perceptions of the impact of television dramatically changed. In response to the surprising outcome of the 1986 general election a discourse of mediatization and Americanization became dominant. This in turn resulted in a re-evaluation of the relationship between politics and the media in which the latter were now said to hold the upper hand.